The instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees

I asked Matthew who was involved in this campaign and what on earth was motivating it. He told me that as far as he could tell, the campaign involved almost all of the doctoral students in my program, and the reason for it was a particular sentence in an article that I had written nine years prior. He advised me to remove the article from the Internet.

I hadn't read the article in years, so I did so, just to see if I now felt that I had said anything unacceptable or untrue. Of course, I had not. Accordingly, I thanked Matthew for the information and told him I had too much integrity to remove an article that was true when I wrote it and true today. He understood but stood by his advice that I should not come to campus for the upcoming semester. Why? Because these ostracizing students, he said, were looking for opportunities to make trouble for me.

I did as he suggested, attending seminars only remotely. I did not mention the matter to any university staff until, three or four months later, my supervisor suggested that I involve myself in something in the department. I had to tell him why that would be difficult and what the consequences might be. The professor took me seriously and asked me to ask Matthew (whose identity I had not revealed) if he would share his knowledge about the campaign against me with him. That would, my professor explained, put him in a better position to take appropriate action.

Accordingly, I contacted Matthew and asked if he would meet my professor and confidentially share what he knew so that the right people could address what was going on in the right way. Matthew told me that he would think about it, but was not at that time prepared to take the risk of identifying himself, even in a confidential setting. His problem was that the only person in the student body sympathetic enough to me to not be part of the campaign was he.

So, he reasoned, if any action were to be taken at all, he would become the next departmental persona non grata. Being near to the end of his doctorate, that was not a risk he could afford to take. In short, merely telling the truth about what a group of students was doing to one of their number would put his academic career in jeopardy before it even began.

To his credit, Matthew did as he promised and thought about it: a couple of months later, he decided to do the right thing and meet my professor.

Matthew's politics are very much of the Left – and, as he and I discussed, he was entirely politically aligned with all of those who were ostracizing me. Over time, though, he had become very disturbed by how "fascistic" (his word) his left-wing peers were in their treatment of me. On the other hand, he noted that I, with whom he politically disagreed, was always very willing to discuss issues of mutual interest with him and anyone else in a spirit of mutual openness and truth-seeking.

I cannot speak for Matthew with certainty, but I suspect that part of what caused him to steel himself to speak to my professor was the dissonance he felt in knowing that the people whose politics he shared seemed to want to do harm to someone (socially and academically) simply because of a point of disagreement. And how particularly absurd in a department of philosophy, of all places!

I am only able to tell this personal story now (for the first time) because Matthew obtained his degree and secured a position a long way away in a foreign land: the osctracisers cannot harm him there.

Does what happened to me have anything really to do with the delight of millions of people in, or at least their indifference toward, multiple attempted and actual political assassinations in my adoptive country?

I think it does.

What all of these stories have in common is the psychopathological instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees.