Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

A postscript on what the mob was really telling me.

I have been insulted many times across fifty years of living. Then I published a book, This Country Hates Our Men (Boys)  and received, by my own rough count, ten thousand times the insults I had gathered in five decades of ordinary existence. It got bad enough that I advised my daughter to mute my name and the book’s title across every one of her social media platforms.
Publishing that book was never simply the act of putting ideas on a page. It was stepping onto a cultural tripwire. For fifty years, my existence had been met with the ordinary friction of human life,. disagreement, dislike, the occasional cutting remark. Within weeks of the book’s release, that friction multiplied ten-thousand-fold.

What follows is not an apology, and it is not a defence. It is an analysis. Because I have come to believe the fury directed at that book is the ultimate validation of its contents. The insults levelled at my character were rarely intellectual critiques. They were emotional spasms. When a text disrupts a deeply held societal narrative, the collective ego experiences it as an existential threat. Unable to dismantle the data, the mob attempts to dismantle the author instead. The insults were never really about me. They were diagnostic symptoms of a culture wrestling with its own unaddressed wounds.

It is not virtue until the virtue is tested with insults, and it costs you something.
— an elder, to me

This book cost me my anonymity, my peace, and at times my family’s digital safety. But truth that which costs nothing.  changes nothing. To withstand a networked cascade of hostility without reciprocating the malice is precisely the point where conviction matures into character.

To those reading these pages in secret, because the cultural climate makes it unsafe to hold this book in the light: I see you. The wrath I endured only proves how necessary this conversation is. Do not let the volume of the noise convince you that the noise is right. Light does not bargain with darkness. It simply shines.

Why We Insult
Insults come from deep hurt and pain that has metastasised into hate speech, into verbal violence. Rarely do people insult you unless they already feel hurt themselves. An insult is a deliberate psychological weapon, designed to lower the target’s social status while elevating the perpetrator’s sense of power. When I published the book, I stepped into a highly polarised cultural space, and the exponential surge in hostility that followed is a well-documented digital phenomenon known as a networked harassment cascade.

Empirical work in social psychology contradicts the idea that insults are random meanness. They serve specific evolutionary and social functions. Humans have a fundamental need for what researchers call positive distinctiveness. When a person feels structurally insecure or lower in status, insulting someone else forces a downward comparison, a temporary, artificial boost to a threatened self-esteem, achieved at someone else’s expense.

Social Identity Theory adds a second layer. People derive much of their self-worth from the groups they belong to, so when a book’s thesis challenges a dominant cultural narrative, certain groups experience it as a threat to their collective identity. Insulting the author becomes an in-group signal,  a way of publicly proving allegiance to the tribe by demonising the outsider who threatened it. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a  person is a person through other people, cuts both ways. The same communal wiring that builds solidarity can just as easily be turned against whoever is named the threat to it.

My elder’s observation aligns with what the clinical literature says about projection and displacement. People carrying chronic emotional vulnerability, moral injury, or a lack of agency are far more likely to externalise their inner turmoil. Unable to resolve their own unaddressed trauma, they package that distress as verbal violence and aim it at whichever public figure happens to be standing in the light.

Being Insulted
The brain does not process a severe insult as “just words.” A psycholinguistic study published in Frontiers in Communication tracked brain activity by EEG during exposure to verbal abuse, and found that insults produce an immediate spike in a brain wave linked to rapid, automatic capture of emotional attention. Researchers have described the effect as a lexical mini-slap in the face. What is more telling is that the brain’s response does not habituate,  the cognitive shock stays intense even after repeated exposure. Ten thousand insults do not get easier by the ten-thousandth.

Online, the harm compounds. Meta-analyses of digital harassment, drawing on thousands of adult victims, consistently link persistent online abuse to depression, generalised anxiety, burnout, and post-traumatic stress. Digital insults carry a scale, permanence, and anonymity that face-to-face conflict never had, and that structural difference is why the toll runs deeper than people expect it to.

What to Do, and How
Navigating hostility at scale takes structural boundaries as much as inner resolve.

Disengage from the feedback loop. Algorithms reward high-arousal, negative content,  replying to an insult hands the agitator exactly the visibility and validation they were fishing for.

Silence starves the interaction of its oxygen.
Separate validity from velocity. The sheer volume of insults,  my “ten thousand times”, is a measure of algorithmic amplification, not a measure of whether the book’s thesis is true. The mob’s size tells you about the mob, not about the argument.
De-personalise the attack. Treat each insult as a diagnostic data point about the sender, not the target. A person lashing out is wrestling with their own threats and unaddressed wounds,  that reveals more about them than it does about you.

This is the Stoic view of an insult: an external event with no intrinsic power to harm your character unless you choose to internalise it. When your convictions cost you something, peace, privacy, standing and you hold them without repaying malice with malice, virtue stops being theoretical. It becomes something you have actually demonstrated.

A Note to My Daughter
Large-scale hostility spills over to the people you love,  the platforms are efficient at finding your family and pushing the noise into their feeds too. So we made it simple: hard blocks, not soft mutes. My name, the book’s title, and their variants, muted at the keyword level everywhere she posts. Comment filtering turned on. Push notifications off, so a phone is never a place where a stranger’s cruelty ambushes her without warning.

And a house rule, plainly stated: we do not search my name, or the book, or the reviews. Home stays a place the storm doesn’t reach.
For the DMs and the well-meaning cousins who forward screenshots, I gave her two lines and told her they were enough: “I don’t track or engage with commentary about my family’s public work,  please don’t forward it to me,” and, when someone brings it up in person, “My parent writes books. I live my own life, and I’m not discussing internet drama.”

Treat the internet as a tool you manage, not a room you have to live in, and most of its power over you disappears.

The Crucible
Insults were never going to stop me from writing what needed writing. They confirmed it needed writing. A culture does not spend ten-thousand-fold its ordinary fury on an idea that doesn’t threaten something real.

Keep standing. Let them insult, an insult only works if it can knock something loose in you, and a person who has already left is hard to knock. Let the mouths run. You don’t owe anyone a flinch, and you definitely don’t owe them an explanation for the flinch you refuse to give. And here’s the part nobody says out loud: get your fuck off money. Not for the yacht, not for the flex,  for the sentence you get to say without your voice shaking. The insult that would have cost you a client, a boss, a bed to sleep in, it just bounces now.  Freedom isn’t the absence of people trying you. It’s having enough behind you that trying you is all they get to do.

=================

Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..