A chapter that gets into a bit of cod psychology

This is where the internet comes into its own, Virginia thought. One can make use of it to promote both truth and some little, white falsehoods to encourage and also perhaps to manipulate, a little, others into hoping at least for the same things as oneself, even if hoping was all that ordinary people could do. And accordingly, this is what Virginia contented herself to do. She put aside her more diabolical practices as impracticable, for the current purposes for the most part. She felt she would know when the time had come to take them up again and they might be effective.

According to two online studies, Virginia discovered, trolling correlates positively with sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Virginia was particularly pleased with the Machiavellianism bit. ‘Of all personality measures’ (whatever they are, thought Virginia: 36”, 28”, 38”, 5’2”) sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling’.

Apparently twenty eight percent of Americans admitted to malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know. And twenty three percent admitted they had maliciously argued over an opinion with a stranger. Twenty three percent again admitted to having argued over facts and twelve percent admitted to making deliberately controversial statements.

According to the Pew Research Center “Ninety two percent of Internet users agreed the online environment allows people to be more critical of one another, compared with their offline experiences.” Apparently, this question of anonymity was one of the biggest debates surrounding online trolls. And yet Virginia always used her own name, she wouldn’t dream of ascribing her intellectual opinions to anyone else. People also tended to wonder if trolls were so outspoken because they remained anonymous and wondered if they had the right to remain so? And Anne Applebaum suggested “we may be forced to end Internet anonymity, or at least to ensure that every online persona is linked back to a real person.”

Virginia looked up the definitions of sadistic personality disorder and wondered which kind of sadist she was. For example, there was the ‘Spineless Sadist’ who was basically insecure, bogus, and cowardly. Virginia didn’t really understand the next bit of the definition, she supposed it meant there was something called venomous dominance, with which other people were familiar, but she hadn’t heard of it. It sounded as if that sort of Sadist gained power by poisoning people, which couldn’t be literally true in this day and age, but one did hear an awful lot about people creating a ‘toxic atmosphere in the workplace’ and so on. Virginia would certainly never create a toxic atmosphere in real life. She was too well brought up and polite, she was the sort to ask people what was up and offer to make a cup of tea. She would only ever be toxic by black magic or online. The definition went on “and cruelty is counterphobic; weakness counteracted by group support; public swaggering; selects powerless scapegoats.” She liked the thought of public swaggering and wondered if she’d ever gone in for it. She imagined herself dressed in finery and about a foot taller than she really was, striding down the street with her head in the air, she had certainly never gone in for it in real life. But had she swaggered politically, online, she’d hardly looked at the comments on Brexit day, she’d been too happy and too busy and she was prone to imagine the worst outcomes in elections, so was prone to think ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ when she saw others mourning what she considered to be a good result and so she had not really swaggered, publicly.

There was also something called ‘Tyrannical Sadism’. This was the personality disorder of someone who relished menacing and brutalizing others, forcing them to cower and submit; of one who was verbally cutting and scathing, accusatory and destructive; intentionally surly, abusive, inhumane and unmerciful. Hmm, this was interesting. This person was clearly a bastard where he or she existed in real life, but could one really do any of those things on line? Surely the best one could do in that line was to try to. One couldn’t really brutalize a stranger, over the internet, at least not in the comments sections or even on Twitter. It would have to be through social-media, and it would only really work if one knew the person and the victim was already frightened the sadist might find out where they lived and start brutalizing them in real life. Though Virginia knew there were suicides as a result of online bullying. Yet surely a suicide to some extent was the result of a person brutalising themselves? Virginia had had suicidal thoughts herself, she regarded them as fixations and obsessions in the same way the other fixations had been. She had planned her death in quite specific detail at the time her now married daughter had been about to start university and her youngest daughter had started at secondary school. After years of teaching the children at home she was going to have no purpose and she had felt useless and worthless and full of self-pity. With hindsight Virginia could not understand how she had become so self-obsessed. Thank God for useless politicians and the biased, infuriating news on Radio Four, thank God for the horrors of the war in Syria and dreadful matters closer to home! Without them Virginia would never have snapped out of her pathetic, selfish misery.

The British bots, Virginia decided, or people, as she was sure they were, who had accused her of being a Russian bot whenever she refused to believe Assad had used poison gas on his people, were accusatory and destructive. At least in their attempts to shut Virginia up. Whenever Virginia had implied that the rebel forces in Syria were not angels and paragons of virtue, or ‘medical men’ but just another lot of Islamists, pushing a narrative for the British and American intelligence services, deeply weird Sunni Islamist shit stirrers creating stories and videos in order to keep on justifying Western intervention against Assad and Russia, these ‘Tyrannical Sadists’ piled in. The aim of these trolls, whose role was to counter-troll people like Virginia (and there were only a dozen or perhaps twenty like Virginia who commented at the Telegraph or Spectator) was to make them verbally cower and submit. Where they did not do so, then these state employed counter-trolls had the ability to remove comments or faff about with them, long after the editing period had timed out, in order to make them appear illiterate and therefore unworthy of consideration as serious ideas.

Virginia enjoyed whipping up the online stuff about what was happening in Syria. It was like idly poking at an ants’ nest with a stick, on a summer afternoon. All those links which went back to Kosova, one didn’t really need to mention the more extreme accusations, like the body parts trafficking, if one just hinted a bit then the counter-troll odd bods would spring into overdrive. Virginia wondered why it was so important for the state to carry on pretending it had never collaborated with Islamic extremism. And why they went on protecting Blair. It seemed Western Governments and Intelligence networks took a great deal of trouble to hide the truth of their dark arts from the people, the citizens of their own countries whom they were supposed to be keeping safe. It must have been during the Soviet era, Virginia supposed, that the security services and governments in the west had decided that Islamic extremism was the lesser of two evils. Was it naive to suppose a person who mistakenly believed their most vile actions were sanctioned by God would be less harmful than one who did not believe in Him?

Probably the best definition of who these state sponsored counter-trolls were was the definition of the type of sadist named the ‘Enforcing Sadist’. This was exactly the type whom Virginia realised she was up against: ‘Hostility is sublimated in the "public interest".’ These types were ‘often policemen, "bossy" supervisors, deans, judges; those who believe they possess the "right" to be pitiless, merciless. They were coarse, and barbarous and believed their task was to control and punish, to search out rule breakers’. Or in this case they had been employed deliberately to control and punish and search out those who were rule breakers and refused to believe the Western governments’ narrative.

Finally there were the ‘Explosive Sadists’. This definition was the one Virginia thought could be applied most accurately to her and her mother. “Unpredictably precipitous outbursts and fury; uncontrollable rage and fearsome attacks; feelings of humiliation are pent-up and discharged; subsequently the perpetrator of such behaviour is contrite.” Yes, that was the family characteristic, it probably went back to Alison Carter and even before her. The frustration, the feeling of impotent rage, when prayer had no effect, before resorting to black arts, bad temper or online trolling, followed by contrition.

‘Vidui’ or ‘’Viddui’, the idea of contrition and atonement in the Torah, differed from confession in the Christian tradition. It was meant to be done privately and Virginia preferred this arrangement, since God knew all her sins anyway. Virginia had played Ernest Bloch’s piece of this name, when she had learned it for a violin exam in her teens. She still liked to play it now, sometimes adding improvisations, as a way of expressing her contrition, privately. God however, in the Jewish tradition, felt one should make public confessions when one had harmed another, but Virginia was not really sure how to go about this. Unless it was to give a public recital, or busk in the street, playing the Bloch piece to express how contrite she felt, but that would not actually be a public confession, only God would know what she was referring to and only if it included some of her own improvisations on the melody would He be able to distinguish her personal contrition from Bloch’s general expression of that sentiment. Since God could do all that then the public confession must be meant for the humans involved. How could one confess to cursing one’s enemies and to believing that one’s curses had taken effect, or might in the future take effect? How could one publicly confess to carrying out those little acts of voodoo, black magic or witchcraft, unless one were to write a novel and set out the diabolical acts as the work of a fictional character, which would anyway be a way of avoiding confession?

In the Jewish tradition the confession of the sin did not bring immediate forgiveness, but made a point in time after which a person's demonstration of the recognition and avoidance of similar, future sinning showed whether the transgressor had truly recovered from the sin and therefore whether they deserved to be forgiven for it. This seemed fair and reasonable, to Virginia. She knew God knew about her ‘explosive sadism’, she admitted it to Him privately, but she also knew He knew she hadn’t reached a turning point yet, at which she would wish to entirely avoid, practising her old, family skills on public figures with power, even if she gave up practising them on those whom she knew, or had known, personally. The dark arts seemed to have very little effect on public figures though, and Virginia knew most of her antipathy towards them was impotent fury, which was why God probably took no notice of her efforts in this line and why she felt no desire to offer to change her ways.

It was odd, thought Virginia how one could recite the words of the Christian confession on a Sunday morning and feel that they applied to something more mundane, small acts of snappishness and irritation towards her children, and Nick, even getting mad with the senile old cat. But one could feel somehow that these admissions did not include the big things. As a child Virginia had imagined God to be part of Turner’s painting of The Music Party at East Cowes Castle, which was possibly why she thought He could hear music better than words. Virginia wasn’t sure why they had had a large print of that work, in the solar, she supposed with hindsight it must have been her mother's. She could never figure the painting out. Time and time again her mother had tried to show her where the woman was seated at the piano, but all Virginia could see was the big nonsensical, ruffled, crisp whiteness of God.

It was strange how music without words, felt more like a true expression of contrition, than reciting words, there was something about the place one went in one’s head, when one played by ear, or memory, or improvised, that definitely had a direct line to God, or was it the Devil, or both? She wasn’t sure if other instrumentalists felt this, or if it were just violinists. She wasn’t sure how long the Devil had been considered to have had all the best tunes. Was it just another form of anti-Semitism because the Jewish violinists had all the most virtuosic skill? Virginia never attempted to use her own violin playing in her dark practices. But when one did play, music seemed just to go out of one’s head in a format which did not seem to need to be presented by the unconscious author of one’s life, to one’s conscience, which thought itself the decision maker. It went out as raw code. God intercepted it and understood it, no Bombe decoding machine necessary, en-route.

Was virtuoso playing akin to virtue signalling? Virginia wondered. Were the best violinists Pharisees? No, she thought not, God understood the message in the music and the separate message in the mind of the person making the confession through it.

It didn’t seem to be violin music that the Devil was interested in, these days. There was all that awful drill and grime or whatever it was, which seemed to be the ‘music’ by which young men were in the habit of stabbing each other, that was more his sort of thing, at this period. The Devil’s music had always been rather more popular than God’s, but over time the music which people thought belonged to Satan often turned out to be innocuous. It seemed Satan claimed whatever the music was that was the most popular at any given moment. Virginia had been fairly sure that the music of Pierre Boulez, played at top volume over the enormous teak speakers, had been the Devil’s music, when she first heard it, booming through the floorboards of her bedroom, when she was five or six years old. But she had never had the experience of practising the sort of music that might communicate with anything from the darker corners of her life. Xenakis and Berio and the shrieking hysteria in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, were quite reminiscent of the mania of Pat and the troubled psychopathy of the mad woman Virginia had seen in her dream of the black satin evening gloves, but even Peter Quint’s deeply disturbing, melismatic strangeness could not force the evil spirit out of the corner of the oldest, unused north west wing of Kineburn and into a hideous dance.

That spirit was more malevolent than any of the spirits which had once been the souls of flesh and blood women. And malevolent was the word. It did not carry out evil acts, it simply brought absolute, unadulterated fear to the surface of one’s entire being. It was a purely negative force. It made the air dank and cold all around it, on the hottest days of the year, it made the light green, it made the blood curdle, the skin creep, the teeth chatter, the hair stand on end, it could not be shown to friends as a joke or made light of. It had no voice and thankfully it could not follow you when you ran away from it. Though you could sense it below you on the days when you’d run in to rescue a swallow, that had swooped inside and couldn’t find its way out. On those days it seemed as if the swallow or starling or jackdaw was a decoy that the malevolence had used to trick you, to lure you in. Yet you couldn’t leave the bird to suffer where the malevolence could get at it. So, you had to run in. Malevolence in that pure form was static. One had a choice over whether to respond to it, but the choice was not to allow any other free spirit to become ensnared by it. If one fell to one’s death and succumbed to the malevolent force oneself, then at least one would have died attempting to counter evil with benevolence.

The bird was nearly always upstairs, the staircase was right next to the little room in which the malevolent force was present. It was a spiral staircase and so one had to watch one’s steps as one turned at the bottom, or one could trip or stumble near the spirit. It was also necessary to make sure one didn’t trip over Freddy who stood on guard at the bottom, hackles raised, lips pulled back in a hideous expression of loathing. (Rather like the look Rory Stewart would give Boris Johnson in the leader’s debate. As Virginia would discover later on.) Once you had got upstairs things were much more dangerous. There were huge holes in the floorboards which were also covered in lumps of rubble and old lime plaster over which one might trip. Beneath the floorboards of the room at the top of the stairs, on the left-hand side, was the generator. The generator was a malevolent force of its own, of the opposite kind to the one in the room at the bottom of the stairs. Its disagreeableness was made up for by the light it brought to the thick country blackness which the family had to live in when the oil ran out and they were skint. The reason Virginia was frightened of the generator was that her mother knew a woman in the village who had known someone else who had been scalped by a cranking handle when her long hair had got caught in it. Virginia used to imagine this woman’s scalp hanging on the door of whatever barn or outhouse her generator was in, as a ‘Red Indian’ might have hung it, in warning to other women with long hair who might be tempted to crank a generator, when it wouldn’t start.

On the wall of the room above the generator was a drawing in something like chalk pastel of a rusty hue, depicting a man, such as little children always draw, only this one was wearing a Puritan’s hat and beside it were the words ‘Help me’. Compared to the malevolent spirit at the bottom of the stairs this drawing had not been frightening, it was merely evidence of a flesh and blood child having been in the house about the time that the Poet had made his accusations against the housekeeper. And yet whoever the child was who had made the picture of the Puritan man, they seemed to have been scared of him, given the words, adjacent to the depiction.

The other rooms were not so bad, though the wooden floors were all equally rotten and the floors of the rooms below all equally flagged. Nobody would survive a fall. But Virginia never failed to catch her bird and return it to the outside. Virginia used to ponder on the nature of these lessons she had been taught, obliquely in childhood. But the big questions involving transcendental matters always veered off into discussions about politics and history and childhood memories, in Virginia’s mind.

It was hard to keep up a sensible narrative in one’s mind, too easy to indulge oneself. However many times Virginia chewed over things she never came to exactly the same conclusion as she had come to before. Sometimes she was in favour of reasoned argument as being the most profitable way of spending one’s time on earth. At other times she knew it was pointless, that people rarely changed their minds in any significant way. But then she had changed her mind about quite significant things, for example, for years she had considered herself to have been on the side of the Parliamentarians, particularly the Levellers and she still was, but she also considered herself to be a Cavalier, she was not a Puritan in the sense the 17th century Puritans were, she could not do with their extremes. And yet by modern standards she was a puritan and would probably have found the Cavaliers a bit much. Probably most women like her would have not considered themselves to be either one thing or the other. The 17th Century was not like the present day, not everyone had to choose between being a Roundhead or a Cavalier, in the way that they now had to choose between being a Brexiteer or a Remainer. Then there had been all the time she had considered herself to be in favour of Thatcherism followed by the slow realisation that despite its being a necessary shake up, it had probably gone a bit far and messed the proper order of things up a bit too much, so that honest men couldn't do what she considered to be entirely honest work. The change that had been made resulting in all this leisure industry and shopping and financial services and half the country being accountants or solicitors for the other half felt like a mistake, somehow.

On one of the more obscure questions she was fairly clear. She believed in telepathy. Choral and orchestral music making depended on telepathy and mass communication between minds, which did not require spoken communication, though of course most people did not admit there was anything more involved with this than a good conductor, or a composer who had expressed his intentions clearly. The insane, like Pat were also extraordinarily telepathic, being able to communicate clearly with those of whom they were fond, even if their own minds were disturbed and could not communicate sensibly or rationally otherwise at all, during manic episodes. And nobody who had a dog could imagine it possible to live without the ability to communicate with it silently and know that you understood one another. These examples were ones which people accepted, in a way, though they still preferred to seek out reason and science as explanations of them. They could search all they liked; reason was not everything. Why had the transcendental become so old hat while pseudoscience was having a moment in the sun? In the end, Virginia supposed, the pseudoscientific had always been just a way of warding off the transcendental. Real science sometimes emerged from pseudoscience and succeeded in warding off both, for a while, in the collective mind. But the very nature of transcendental nothingness was its ability to slide invisibly into interstitial spaces and convey itself in ways that reason could not grip.