Negative Neutral Words

How connotation distorts reality...

There are so many words that have fallen into this pit of negativity that do not deserve to be there. You can look at many words and find that they have a very neutral meaning, but they are thought of as wholly negative by most people.

One of them, of course, is manipulation. Manipulation, if you look it up, breaks the cardinal rule of defining a word, which is, you cannot use the word itself to define that word. Not only does the first definition contain the word “manipulate” to define manipulation, but the second definition does as well. That is a crap definition regardless of your internal reaction to the word itself.

However, manipulation is not a negative thing. It isn’t a positive thing either. It is simply your interaction with the environment or people around you to get your wants and/or needs met. How you go about this, and the reasoning behind it should be what is used to judge the connotation, not the manipulation itself. I often say that all human interaction is based in manipulation, and it is, but that is often received as a terribly negative thing to say. People assign to that word all sorts of emotional reactions that have no place there.

Another word that is often considered good or bad, when in reality it is a neutral word is, tribalism. It is thought of now when people think of like-minded individuals grouping together to push their ideology onto others who aren’t interested. That’s fair to a degree, but tribalism is what has kept the human species alive for all of its existence and it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand because people tend to place all this negative connotation on it.

Tribalism is what is hardwired into people. There is no way around it. When a species evolves in one universal aspect, its very beings are contorted by it. By that I mean, humans are group-oriented. We tend to forget that now because today’s society is not very attuned to it. Hunter-gatherers were not anticipating living in vast cities where you could live next to people for years and never even see them, let alone learn their names.

Humans evolved to rely on one another and have roles in a community that required all the members of it to survive. They also evolved to be suspicious of newcomers, because newcomers could mean danger. They could also mean additional wealth, but just as easily they could mean sickness, war, and death. Cautionary responses to strangers were not only normal, they were required. Weirdly it seems that humans think that just because they have figured out how to build vast concrete jungles with food delivery services, this should mean that all that hardwiring just vanishes overnight. It doesn’t. Humans are still tribal, and being tribal is not a negative thing. How it presents itself can be, however.

As people grew further apart, as towns and villages came to be, groups became more spread out, and the family became the core tribe. Less people are having families presently, but that doesn’t remove those instincts for a tribe. It is often found online, or in ideologies, and because of this, tribalism has become a much more emotional self-serving thing. People are seeking to satisfy their internal need for a tribe by finding people who closely agree with them about one thing or another, and adopt those people as their ride-or-die tribe when in reality they probably don’t have a great deal in common. It is just serving that internal hardwiring that humans cannot escape.

Tribalism in and of itself is about the mental wellbeing of humans. Tribalism without a functioning tribe is emotional placation and group-think. There shouldn’t be such negativity assigned to the idea. If there weren’t people might be able to see that they are actively causing themselves emotional and physical harm by not creating their own tribes that are healthy ecosystems to exist in. You can’t ignore evolutionary wiring. If you try to, it will find a way to manifest in your life. How that happens is up to you, but the connotation of the word shouldn’t be a negative one. It should be neutral.

Selfishness. This one is a really interesting one for me. People have been weighing this idea of whether altruism is real or if it is impossible because true altruism is a selfless act. I have also had discussions with people who wonder if psychopaths are the only people capable of true altruism because we will act without gain if we see something that needs to be done. I have spoken about this in the past.

Now, let’s be clear, psychopaths are very self-interested and rarely have an inclination to do things like work in a soup kitchen or read to the elderly. However, when there is something that needs doing, it is done. I call it required action. This is still a selfish action. You create the world in which you want to live, and I prefer living in an easy world. For that to be the case I am required to put out into the world what we want out of it. Required action is a part of this.

The argument against altruism is that if you do something for someone else and you do it for the sake of feeling good, then it isn’t altruistic, but instead, it is selfish. Yes, it is selfish.

So what?

Seriously, so what? This notion that selfishness is somehow a negative thing is ridiculous. What is your intention behind your actions? Was it to take advantage of someone and come out of it as the winner and make the other person a loser? Then your motivation was toxic, and that is a negative thing. However, if your intention is to do something nice, even if the outcome is solely that it makes you feel good in doing so, you still did a nice thing.

Imagine a world where people didn’t do things because it made them feel good. They had no motivation to do anything kind for anyone else because there was no payoff, and they didn’t understand required actions. The world would suck. It really would suck. If you do something for someone because it makes you feel good, and it benefits them, that’s a net positive. Altruism, regardless of the motivation, is a positive thing. People who feel the need to dissect it and find flaws with it aren’t considering the alternative.

Applying negative or positive connotations to a word without there being a reason to do so is silly to me. Psychopathy, of course, is the one that I see this happen with most often. It is the stand-in for “bad person” so it is used by the masses incorrectly on a daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute basis, but it is just one example. There are many words that shouldn’t have the positive or negative spin on them that they do. It is how those words are thought of that is defining our world. It is also what defines people’s reactions to those words and their willingness to think about them critically.

If you see a word for what it is, not assigning negativity or positivity to it, then you are able to consider alternative points of view of how that word has meaning in your life. However, if the word automatically has a very negative connotation, many people will seek to remove that word as far as they can from who they are because they don’t want to be associated with how it is perceived and what that might mean about them as people. Manipulation is an excellent example of this. People really do not want to be seen as manipulative, but the fact is, all of us are, and are in every single interaction that we have.

Whenever I make this point I get a wave of people that take deep personal offense to this reality. They get very upset that they might be seen as manipulative because they assume that means that they are a bad person. No, they aren’t. They’re just human, like the rest of us. It is the motivation behind actions that matter. if you do something nice for someone because it makes you feel good, don’t feel guilty for that. Who the hell cares? You put something good into the world. In fact, do it more. Chase that “feel good” moment, because it doesn’t matter if you get a payoff. I think that getting an emotional payoff for doing a kindness for others is a pretty good tradeoff.

There are likely a ton of other words that have this double life as emotionally draped words that are just trying to be seen as neutral. If you guys want me to explore more of them, let me know. This was just something that has been on my mind recently because I see people’s emotional reactions to things without thinking about them in a balanced way. Also, I have seen people so unwilling to consider those words outside of the emotional response that they initially had. It’s behavior that perplexes me. It seems so much easier to see things in a neutral way and then assign negativity or positivity to the motivations, not the words themselves.