Don’t be a Dipshit
Words have Power.
Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation?
Yet, of course, this is an everyday occurrence on social media. Social media platforms encourage this. It’s what they’re set up to do. It is entirely normal and for the most part, unremarked on.
In the 1990s, I began to write about group dynamics in occult spaces. At that time, face-to-face groups were the dominant social setting in which occultists interacted with each other – be it in magical orders, small groups, or social gatherings. I felt that some understanding of group dynamics would therefore be useful. But now the situation has changed. We interact online, on social media platforms. On some of these platforms, we are restricted, for the most part, to words.
Words have Power.
If you are willing to accept this premise, even for a moment then I feel it behooves us to accept also that how we use those words has consequences. So we have a responsibility to use words carefully when we interact with other occultists online.
Online, words are all we have. We are all authors now, sharing stories, snippets of lore, hot takes, points of contention, and arguing positions and perspectives. Agreements and arguments flash across the screen at a pace we barely imagined possible before the blossoming of the internet. We converse with strangers we know only by their handle, or how they present themselves online. It is the exchange that matters. The words.
Words have Power.
In a face-to-face conversation, we continually process and interpret a vast amount of information about another person. What they look like. Not only what they say, but the tone of the voice they use. Micro-expressions, body posture, clothing, eye contact, smell; when they afford us a space to respond, and when they talk over us. It is all done at high speed, so quickly it seems to condense out of nowhere. We make judgments about the other person very quickly. Psychologists used to tell us that it took no more than seven seconds for us to form a lasting impression of another person. Now they tell us that lasting judgments about another person – just looking at them – can be made within a 1/10th of a second.
But online – on Twitter and Facebook, for example, all we have is words. All that other stuff, which we take for granted, which is so central to our ability to get through any face-to-face contact without being punched in the face, is suddenly gone. We must rely on words. And…
Words have power.
Online, nothing is easier than to be a dipshit.
You might find the idiom unfamiliar, but we all know a dipshit when they appear. Dipshits breeze into an existing exchange and offer critical commentary, often not bothering to read what has been written so far. It’s like they’ve noticed a word, a phrase, a comment that takes their fancy and they just have to jump in and make their presence felt. They make flat, didactic statements that offer no room for debate. They make vague allusions and gnomic comments that they expect everyone else to go along with. They argue on the basis that they are right, they know, and everyone else is wrong. That their view matters more. Dipshits are everywhere.
There is a particular fantasy amongst occult dipshits that they are not just being annoying. They are being ‘tricksters’ – avatars of Coyote, Hermes, and Bugs Bunny. They are performing the sacred duty of killing sacred cows, disrupting outmoded patterns of thought; producing convoluted arguments to highlight the fundamental error in discourse. This gives them the unalienable right to breeze into a conversation or interaction and disrupt it for their fun and satisfaction. That’s after all, what “tricksters” do.
No, you’re not a trickster, you’re a dipshit.
There is an endless supply of dipshits online. I confess I do not understand the attraction for occultists (especially those who tend to think of themselves as elite individuals, more switched on to what’s really going on in the world) in presenting themselves online as a dipshit.
Anyone can be a dipshit, it’s easy. So why be another? The occultists I love to exchange thoughts and ideas with online are, by and large, generous with each other. They forgive slips on the keyboard. They patiently allow a train of thought to move to its conclusion instead of interrupting. They know that their personal opinions are not necessarily going to be 100% agreed upon by everyone else in the current flow. They give each other space to allow half-formed ideas to take shape. They may argue or criticize, but it rarely devolves into the desire to flame someone else to a crisp – unless, of course, that person is being a dipshit. In this case, more often than not, the dipshit gets ignored. These patient, generous people know that
Words have Power.
These skills – and they are valuable skills for the online occultist, do not come out of nowhere. They can be learned. You can learn them by watching other people interact online and thinking about what they are doing. But it’s easier just to dive in and learn the hard way “what works.” Or you can be a dipshit, and see where that gets you.
Dipshits tend to attract each other. It’s not uncommon – particularly on occult forums, to find dipshits like nothing better than to dogpile onto others. A “newbie” stumbles into an established community and asks a question, or makes a proposal so patently stupid, so demonstrably proof of their utter ignorance of occultism, that the only proper response is to ‘jump on them’ as it were, and utterly demolish both proposition and person.
I recall one time on a forum when someone proposed that there might be a relationship between the practice of magic and developing asthma. And was instantly dogpiled by at least half a dozen people for daring to utter such nonsense, and told to go away. Eventually, someone remembered that Aleister Crowley suffered from asthma, that other prominent occultists had asthma too, and that at least one well-known occultist had died from an asthma attack. Someone mentioned a technique for alleviating asthma, which another person on the forum was grateful for. Eventually, the mutual consensus turned from skepticism and dipshittery into an interesting conversation where people were learning from each other. Once again, demonstrating that
Words have Power.
Dipshits will often jump through amazing hoops of illogic to prove their point. When called out or questioned, they will frequently say that their words have been misinterpreted. That they didn’t say what they did. Or that they didn’t mean to imply what another person took from their statements. But online, words are all we have to go on.
Words have Power.
Throughout my published works, I have emphasized time and time again the contention that the practice of magic impacts every aspect of our existence, from our highest aspirations to our everyday lives. How we move through our world on an everyday basis. That magic, fundamentally, is about being effective and adaptive to meet the challenges we face in our lives.
If we carry this contention into our online interactions, then being effective requires that we be prepared to learn new skills and new ways of behaving with our peers. Skills that not only enhance our own effectiveness, but those we encounter in the virtual zones through which we now conduct much of our lives.
It’s quite simple. Words have Power. Don’t be a dipshit.
(With thanks to @sororfishsticks for the late-night Twitter exchange out of which this essay emerged.)
