On Fear and Telling the Truth

How Psychopathic People and Ideologies Cause So Much Destruction

This video by Mike Harlow, The Truth About Karlyn Borysenko, is (as Poetry Painter says) a masterclass in how to spot a malignant narcissist. If you don’t care about drama, skip it. But it’s not just drama. It’s a very real case study in how dangerous and abusive people are able to use, threaten, bully and get away with trying to control others for so long. And it’s a lesson in not being ruled by fear. 

It is also very personal for me.

When I was a kid I had a teacher who once asked me about bruises and welts on my legs. I was a straight A student and well-liked by my teachers, and I liked this one especially. My mother was a teacher at a neighboring school and she was also well-liked. She had instilled in us that no one would ever believe us if we told about what happened in our home. But I took a chance on this teacher and despite great fear I told her about my mother. I spent all of my childhood believing that was a mistake. I didn’t hear anything about it for a while until my mother revealed, during a beating, that my teacher had called and told her I’d confided in her. She sneered at me and mocked me, telling me what a little liar I was and how even my teacher didn’t believe me. She was gleeful and large-eyed and heady about saving that bit of information, to reveal it at a time that would inflict maximum damage.

No one ever intervened in the abuse in our household. There was no one to stand up for us. My dad was a target as well and he came to me, weeping, for advice on whether to divorce or not when I was twelve. I told him yes. He never took my advice. I have not spoken to very many people about these things my whole life. I love my dad. I love my siblings. I love my mother. I have carried a lot of pain about not protecting my brother and sister. I don't want to hurt all of them more by speaking of these things of which we do not speak. I have tried to find a balance here, but I may not be successful.

When I watched Mike Harlow’s video about Karlyn a dam broke open inside of me and I sobbed for a long time. I realized sometime last year, when dealing with this person’s relentless lies and attacks and DARVO (Deny And Reverse Victim Offender), that God wanted me to learn a lesson I had not yet learned: it’s ok if no one ever believes you. Telling my teacher all of those years ago was NOT a mistake. It was the right thing to do. You can’t be afraid of people not believing you. You can’t care what people think. You have to live in truth anyway. You have to do what is right anyway. You will be ok. There is only ever you and God. And everything beyond that is a blessing, a gift, specifically because it is not guaranteed.

I do not regret trying to quietly walk away from this person once I realized what she was last fall. I would do it again. I never want to let fear, fear of what someone might do to me or what people might believe, control me. Psychopaths and psychopathic ideologies depend on us letting fear keep us quiet. They count on us letting fear win out so that we compromise ourselves again and again until we are small and defiled and weak and cowardly. I will not do this.

An acquaintance recently posed a strange ‘would you rather’ question to me: Would you rather *not* have sex with a bear but have everybody think you did, or *have* sex with a bear and have no one ever know about it?

My answer was fast and strong. Duh. I’d rather NOT have sex with a bear but have everybody think I did.

He was shocked. In sudden seriousness, like a confession, he told me he’d rather fuck the bear and have no one know. I felt a swirl of pity and disgust and sadness for him, and the sinking feeling that he was probably speaking for many, if not most people. He would rather defile himself, his sacred being, and defile another sacred creature, and try to live with himself the rest of his life, burying the awful truth deep inside like a cancerous root, than to have people *believe* awful and untrue things about him.

This fear of what other people think is poisoning us. It’s the reason good people, many of them actual liberals - not woke zombies - won’t speak up against what they now privately admit they think are the excesses of woke culture. I just spoke with one such beautiful but muted soul at a Christmas party the other night. She was the life of the party, a confident speaker who knew how to command the room, but her confidence was punctuated by stark, abrupt moments of timid self-censorship where she’d stop herself and say, ‘but I know I don’t get to have an opinion on that, because I’m not black (or trans) and I would never presume to even speak on it.’

When I pressed her on why, where does she work, what does she mean (I know what she means, but I wanted to know if she did) - she admitted no, it’s not just work, it’s everywhere. “You don’t want to be cancelled,” she said. She told me how she couldn’t make a joke I’d made online without 6 friends immediately unfriending her. I felt sorry for her the way I felt sorry for bear-fucker (but without the disgust). I just felt sad for her and for everyone trapped by that fear. I used to be in that place. I know that fear! I haven’t forgotten. I think she is on the right path and I hope she keeps going, even when it gets scary and people start to think awful and untrue things about her.

This past year and a half I have learned why monsters like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were able to destroy so many people for so long, even though “everybody knew.” They were enabled by fear and ambition. But not quite so. Fear and ambition are not bad things in and of themselves. These monsters were enabled by cowardice and greed. Greed is ambition that has become perverted by placing it as the highest priority in your life, higher even than your principles. Cowardice occurs when you allow fear to control you. When you place it at the top. Higher than the truth. Higher than doing the right thing. The people who knew about Weinstein and Epstein, and stayed quiet about them for so long, did so either out of greed for what they thought these powerful people could give them, or out of cowardice about what would happen to them, cowardice about what people would believe and do. They traded the truth, and their souls, for cheap trinkets and an illusion of safety.

On a large scale, fear is also what keeps “good Germans” and “good Christians” quiet during historical atrocities on a mass scale. Cowardice is the handmaiden to evil. It is what allows dangerous ideologies and authoritarianism and cults to flourish and to wreak great destruction on mankind, before being brought to heel. It is what is keeping the silent majority quiet about Covidian and Woke authoritarianism. We are ushering in the idea that the Government owns individuals, rather than individuals owning ourselves, and we are doing it because we have elevated the fear of what others will think of us. No one wants to be falsely thought a racist. No one wants to be falsely thought of as anti-science.

God has taught me about letting go of what other people think in many different ways, and in many times in my life. I learned it from my childhood, though not until much later. I learned it when I left woke ideology and was cast off into the basket of deplorables by my old social circles. I learned it during the psychopathic events of these recent Covidian years, when I was suddenly believed to be anti-vax or anti-science by people who should know better. And I learned it from my experience dealing with the attentions of a narcissistic sociopath, and having to be ok with anyone and maybe everyone believing her lies and thinking I am all of the things she is, or that I have done all of the things she has done to me.

When I became a Christian, one of my prayers has always been that God removes my ego. Because if you think you don’t have an ego problem then you probably have an ego problem. I pray that prayer before every podcast or any time I speak publicly. Reduce me. In a way, learning to get past the fear of what people will think of me is a way of reducing myself. I am grateful for answered prayers, even when they are answered in painful ways.

And yet, seeing someone, a friend and lovely soul, publicly support me and say yes, I believe you, I know this happened to you and it happened to me too and it’s wrong, opened those floodgates from childhood for me. And I cried for the little girl who never had anyone stand up and do that for her. We are not owed this. We do not need it. It is ok if everyone thinks all of the awful and untrue things about us. It’s ok if everyone in a mad world thinks we’ve gone mad. But it is a blessing. A gift. A kindness. To be believed.