day no. 17,084: brutalitarian

"If comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous—which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, 'l Flog the brutes!' or who tells you with innocent obscenity ‘what he would do’ with a certain man—always supposing the man’s hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful.” — G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles 

The brutalitarian is always rough with people in theory and often hiding from people in reality. Social media has only exacerbated this type of behavior by giving this type of a person a platform where they can be as rough as they like with actual people in a simulated environment without ever having to be in the same physical room as another tangible person.

"Two things to remember in life. Take care of your thoughts when you are alone, and take care of your words when you are with people." — Anonymous

Ideas have consequences, but ideas do not knock on our front door. Ideas do not come over for dinner or ask to talk to us after service. Ideas do not text us in the middle of the night or ask us to help them move this weekend. Ideas do not take our orders or leave their blinkers on in traffic. People have ideas, but they are rarely one idea incarnate. They have all kinds of ideas about all kinds of things and those ideas influence them, of course, but when you interact with the person, you are not interacting with any particular idea in isolation. The online option has changed all that, however. People are still people, but it is now possible to isolate certain ideas in them when posting or replying to them. Instead of sitting across from them and their ideas over a pot roast, we are able to roast them over the airwaves for their ideas.