The Great Acting Blog: “Very Peculiar Haters”
I generally think haters should be ignored. They’re usually anonymous or people we don’t know, and they usually fling their poison when hidden behind a computer monitor and/or when safely ensconced in another country on the other side of the world.
However, there is another kind of hater, a very peculiar kind of hater, rare but no less poisonous. The kind of hater I’m talking about is someone drawn from your own community, who has a good standing in it, who has influence. Their destructive comments seem, at first glance, to be uncharacteristically petulant and rude, it comes at you like a bolt from the blue. It has the power to create an initial shock because it does not reflect who you thought they were. They might be someone you regarded as serious and thoughtful but their comment childish. This kind of hater should not be ignored. Why? Because their standing within your community means they have the potential to influence others and change the direction of the conversation, away from the considered and in depth, toward the crass and destructive. Ordinary haters tend to be fleeting and so have little real impact, but peculiar haters, embedded as they are in the community, possess the potential to obstruct future conversations. This is why they have to be stood up to – they need to know that they cannot and will not get away with it, that if they try something again, they will meet with resistance. This will make them think twice next time, and it will protect what you have built.
But why do peculiar haters do this? Why would they attack other, productive members of the community? Are they not eating themselves by doing so? Well yes, yes they are – that’s why their actions are so dumb. The trouble is, they are consumed by jealously. You have created something that works, that is valuable to the community, and the peculiar hater doesn’t like it one bit and they want to shut you down.
I say that the peculiar hater is doing us all a favour by revealing their true, hidden nature: we are able to see that they do not truly value the community that they profess to be a part of, nor do they value it’s members – they are as a snake in the grass. And further, they demonstrate to us that they are not the person of stature that they lead us to believe they were.
Subscribe to The Great Acting Blog
