by Don Hall

As a kid, I used to low-key bully my little sister. I call it ‘low-key’ because it was mostly teasing and never physically violent or violating (except for when we would pillow fight and her foam pillow didn’t quite have the heft and power as my goose-down one). If you can’t see the chasm between being called a fatty and a beat down while being called fat, the gradiations are likely lost on you.

My mother used to tell her that if she ignored me, I would stop because I teased her for her reaction. That’s what made it fun. Press the button, get the response, rinse and repeat. Mom was correct but my sister never took the lesson. She always fought back and I always was rewarded for the teasing and things didn’t change until I moved off to college.

I didn’t learn the lesson, either, and couldn’t help myself but to react when my buttons were pushed like Marty McFly when called a chicken. For decades, well into my late forties, I took the bait, engaged in the battle, and found that with each altercation, I’d won nothing but lost weeks of my life in the process. It seems that when confronted by a low-key bully, the best reaction is what I will refer to as performative apathy.

…

“Whoa, dude. You seriously need to check your privilege.”

“OK. [pause] Privilege checked and acknowleged.”

“What?”

“I have checked my privilege.”

“So you agree that a white guy has no buisiness holding opinions about the trauma of BIPOC people?”

“No. I don’t agree but I definitely acknowledge my privilege. I recognize my privilege and it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care about that.”

The key difference between apathy (the state of simply not giving a shit) and performative apathy (the appearance of not giving a shit to accomplish a swift exit from a circular and pointless argument with an outraged person seeking validation rather than communication) is big. In order for it to work, the practitioner must give off the impression that he does not care about this subject the other feels so strongly about.

I can backfire because a few are so hardcore with their own performative stance that they see this as an invitation to shame you into caring. Don’t fall for it. Hardline the faux apathy like a pitbull, unwilling to engage. Sometimes you have to just completely agree in the worst possible way.

“I’ll bet you’re pro-abortion.”

“Yep.”

“So you support the murder of babies?”

“Yep. Kill as many as possible. Babies are awful creatures.”

“You don’t care about the murder of babies?”

“Nope. Not a bit. You know, I hear they taste like chicken.”

Do I really believe that babies are horrible little monsters? Yeah. I do except for the ones I know. The rest? Ugh. Do I believe we should kill them? That guy will never know.

“My pronouns are zir, ze, and zey.”

“Cool.”

“What do you mean ‘cool’?”

“You do you. That’s OK, right? I mean, ‘you’ is a pronoun, right?”

“Oh. You’re a transphobe.”

“Cool.”

“What?! So you are?”

“Nah. Just don’t care much about the whole pronoun thing.”

“Listen, TERF. Children who are not allowed to transition… hey. Are you even listening?”

“Nope. Told you. Don’t care.”

“Fuck you!”

“Cool.”

Remember, you may actually care about children dealing with mental illness or a social contagion that opens them up to experiment with their identity. We all sort of do that and, given the expansion of mental illnesses, I’d say most of us are just a bit batshit ourselves. This is performative apathy. Sort of like having a signal at a party that indicates that your friend has to save you from the quasi-communist waxing on about decolonizing Israel or the MAGA follower holding court about the intricacies of the Second Amendment without ever having read it.

People have always attached themselves to causes. Social media didn’t create this but it has made the signaling for fealty more prevalent. The online version of performative apathy is simply refuse to respond. No thumbs up or down, no sharing, no commentary. To avoid these sorts of ideological bullies one must be opaque in their viewpoint because, as my mom used to tell my sister, if you ignore them, they get bored and bother someone else.