[ESTP] How Do You Handle Passive Aggression?

What is your preferred method?

  • Stomp it out immediately

    Votes: 15 62.5%

  • Wait for an opportunity to confront later

    Votes: 3 12.5%

  • Cry

    Votes: 1 4.2%

  • Starve the passive aggressor of attention

    Votes: 8 33.3%
  • Total voters
    24
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Let's hear it.
 
I confront that shit directly.

I hate passive-aggression so much. I confront people directly. I would rather someone be honest with me instead of spare my feelings or bullshit me especially if it's a serious topic or if they feel aggrieved.

If I don't understand where you're coming from, tell me what I don't get so I can fix the problem or never make the same mistake again.

When you just leave it at "You don't get it," or other passive-aggressive phases like that, you leave me with no other choice but to ignore your feelings and concerns even if I don't want to.

I hate that shit so much.
 
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My position is typically one of blanket confrontation of the behaviour in every circumstance.

Now, I don't think many people really understand what the object of doing this actually is, since they mostly tend to operate within the bounds of immediate time and specific situations. They want to approach each situation individually and adopt the tactics necessary for winning 'the battle'; up to and including 'picking their fights', &c.

For me, however, the goal is more impersonal and long-term - to eliminate 'the behaviour' or 'the 'principle' entirely from whatever space it is that I exist within, and resisting every single attempt at passive-aggression builds the expectation - the certainty - that it will always be called-out. This robs passive-aggression in general of its power to avoid consequences, or at least that's the aim.

Here the ethical basis - as well as the overall strategy - is as deontological one. In Kantian terms, it's the 'categorical imperative': 'Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law'. In other words, you're operating in such a way as to attempt to shape the conventional principles through which the social fabric is structured in the long-term. As a form of power, what you're attempting to generate in doing this is what Michael Mann termed 'infrastructural power' in the context of states - the ability of 'power' to reach you, and to inculcate in you what amounts to 'the certainty of arrest' (lol).

To onlookers this might not make much sense in the short-term, but over time it builds up into a powerful effect; it builds up into something like a local, 'social law', and to me it was pivotal in ensuring success in the big battle of my last career, because over time you're able to gradually erode the spaces within which bullshit is allowed to exist by challenging it every time it appears.

I feel like, by contrast, most people are too comfortable with 'giving an inch', and end up essentially engaging in appeasement.

I'm sure there's an Oblivion-themed gif for this...


Having said that, there's some nuance to consider in this subject, and I made a video about that in response to @Ren some months ago:
 
Let them have it out.

It's transferring responsibility for their feelings onto me, and it isn't mine, responsibility that is, to stroke their feelings.

Generally, a person who deals with life passive aggressively is deep into the underlying issues, (frequently self-esteem), that formed it's base in their psyche during formative years. Another reasoning being that they can't elicit the response they want or manipulate the person to behave a certain way and the resulting P\A response from them is nothing but a fit of Ego.

Short of the tee-shirt, I'm considered a bitch because I respond to these people I don't react. I let them voice up however they need to to self-soothe; and, when they don't get the reaction from me they're looking for, it takes the steam out of them.

Far too many people do not even know that they are reacting P\A in the first place.

Bottom line, I'm responsible for what I say, not for how it makes the receiver feel. :wink:
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
My position is typically one of blanket confrontation of the behaviour in every circumstance.
Click to expand...
While I don't address the behavior in every instance, I think we have a lower tolerance for passive-aggression because we don't have Fe in our immediate function stack.

If something doesn't make sense morally or rationally our immediate reaction is to take control of the problem and mold it until it becomes a solution.
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
My position is typically one of blanket confrontation of the behaviour in every circumstance.

Now, I don't think many people really understand what the object of doing this actually is, since they mostly tend to operate within the bounds of immediate time and specific situations. They want to approach each situation individually and adopt the tactics necessary for winning 'the battle'; up to and including 'picking their fights', &c.

For me, however, the goal is more impersonal and long-term - to eliminate 'the behaviour' or 'the 'principle' entirely from whatever space it is that I exist within, and resisting every single attempt at passive-aggression builds the expectation - the certainty - that it will always be called-out. This robs passive-aggression in general of its power to avoid consequences, or at least that's the aim.

Here the ethical basis - as well as the overall strategy - is as deontological one. In Kantian terms, it's the 'categorical imperative': 'Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law'. In other words, you're operating in such a way as to attempt to shape the conventional principles through which the social fabric is structured in the long-term. As a form of power, what you're attempting to generate in doing this is what Michael Mann termed 'infrastructural power' in the context of states - the ability of 'power' to reach you, and to inculcate in you what amounts to 'the certainty of arrest' (lol).

To onlookers this might not make much sense in the short-term, but over time it builds up into a powerful effect; it builds up into something like a local, 'social law', and to me it was pivotal in ensuring success in the big battle of my last career, because over time you're able to gradually erode the spaces within which bullshit is allowed to exist by challenging it every time it appears.

I feel like, by contrast, most people are too comfortable with 'giving an inch', and end up essentially engaging in appeasement.

I'm sure there's an Oblivion-themed gif for this...


Having said that, there's some nuance to consider in this subject, and I made a video about that in response to @Ren some months ago:
Click to expand...
It was strange to me, reading a moral take on the topic. I do apply a moral "fairness expectation" to most circumstances, but when it's principally and emotion based problem, it's mostly a reaction of distaste which impels me to require reasonable behaviour:

If someone is upset, they must either express it so we can deal with it, or completely suppress it, so we can deal with other things efficiently. Compromising the integrity of interactions/communication with a chimera of emotional venting and clumsy practical/theoretical content achieves nothing emotionally, practically, or intellectually. It's simply an utter waste of time.
 
Pin said:
While I don't address the behavior in every instance, I think we have a lower tolerance for passive-aggression because we don't have Fe in our immediate function stack.

If something doesn't make sense morally or rationally our immediate reaction is to take control of the problem and mold it until it becomes a solution.
Click to expand...
I think you're right here.

I also think there's a cultural difference in how this is addressed. In 'honour cultures' - and if you're a man in a working-class milieu, you're probably existing in one - the expectation is to respond to slights because otherwise you'll become victimised. The threat of violence is always there, and as such the 'response' is prophylactic against future victimisation.

I don't think that people who haven't experienced this secondary socialisation of the constant 'threat of violence' - like women - are capable of empathising with why a robust response is all that necessary.

Of course, in these cultures, the risk is that if you allow yourself to be victimised, then you'll also expose the people under your protection to the same victimisation, be it mother, siblings, friends or whatever. The proximity of violence always tends to produce honour cultures, I think, as we see most notably in 'the hood' today.


I think it's also notable how the passive responses are being justified - that there is some ego-preserving justification like 'I don't want to give them the benefit' or 'I don't care'.
 
Sometimes Yeah said:
It was strange to me, reading a moral take on the topic. I do apply a moral "fairness expectation" to most circumstances, but when it's principally and emotion based problem, it's mostly a reaction of distaste which impels me to require reasonable behaviour:

If someone is upset, they must either express it so we can deal with it, or completely suppress it, so we can deal with other things efficiently. Compromising the integrity of interactions/communication with a chimera of emotional venting and clumsy practical/theoretical content achieves nothing emotionally, practically, or intellectually. It's simply an utter waste of time.
Click to expand...
Are you criticising my approach with an ad hominem? lol

Tell me why it doesn't work.
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
I don't think that people who haven't experienced this secondary socialisation of the constant 'threat of violence' - like women - are capable of empathising with why a robust response is all that necessary.
Click to expand...
I kind of disagree, in my experience, I think that women are more afraid of violence that they fear rocking the boat and risking confrontation.

But culture probably factors in here too.
 
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