The Blackening of a Name

   They don't kill their threats like they used to. Now they just blacken their names. Run their names through mud, blood, and shit until the very sound of their names evoke disgust and revulsion in the minds of the public to where socially, economically, politically, you might as well be dead

  If disgust causes the most lethal form of hatred, getting people disgusted at the thought of a person or group, or even disgusted by their very name or label/category is a good way to sow the seeds of brutal persecution and lethal outcomes of hate.

You can't demonize, dehumanize, or "disgustify" someone without the use of the words that induce these states in the minds of an audience.

*You can't sow the seeds of hate without hate speech.*

You can't blacken a name without the black art of slander and libel. 

Speech is powerful. Words can be like bullets or like poison that poisons the psyche of a people's collective mind, and the more we fail to appreciate how powerful information can be, the more we succumb to those poisons and bullets because our ignorance and blindness to the power of words prevents us from making adequate defenses.

Words are how you generate, describe, and convey ideas, and ideas can be as powerful as rifles or even nuclear weapons, both of which started as an idea in someone's mind.

Since words convey ideas, they are how ideas spread to and infect other people's minds...and how people's names and reputations are cut down and blackened.

In a way, if you think about it, a person is an idea at their base in the minds of other people. Other people see only a fraction of a percent of the lives of the other people in their lives, if even that. 0.0000001% of the wholeness and completeness of another person's being. Even their spouse's life before they met is a mystery to them. 

We all have to rely on an "idea" of every person that we meet and know, and it is an idea shrouded in much uncertainty. Since that idea is unfixed and in need of constant adjusting, we can't be sure who anybody is really "behind the scenes." We have to trust a judgement that can never have all the facts or see the whole picture regarding pretty much anybody. 

Blackening a name, in this regard, is an effective way of eliminating a threat. Character assassination kills the name, which makes the person effectively impotent, almost castrated. Because we don't have the ability to "see the whole sphere" and perfectly analyze anything, we can't always assess people the way we would like, which opens the door for this name blackening.

The only real way to combat it is retaining an inherent value of the worth of people regardless of what they have done or may be a part of, as well as an ability to recognize the necessity of the impermanence of consequences, where bad things and mistakes aren't given an artificial and unnecessary permanence. 

An unforgiving culture, in the end, will always have repressive elements, and a self righteous society will always be led on faux virtuous witch hunts that fundamentally destabilize the integrity of justice in those cultures.

Nothing in existence is really permanent. Everything ends. Everyone dies. Punishments will end, and curses will end, no matter how permanent or how enduring a person, a culture, or a nation tries to make them. Maybe we should act in the interests of restoration and repair. These things make reality far more sustainable and far more enduring and fruitful.