Gordian Got Your Tongue?
ESSAY
You can fit somewhere in the ballpark of fifty baby Gordian worms (commonly referred to as horsehair worms) onto the average pinhead. They’re so small that Mayfly larvae, which are tiny themselves, accidentally ingest them while hanging out—doing larvae stuff—in the water—where both creatures start out their life. Once a baby Gordian gets swallowed, it burrows down into the Mayfly’s insides. There, it waits, content to not become too much of a bother. That’s because Gordian worms aren’t after Mayflies. Instead, like Machiavelli himself, they play the long game.
Mayflies aren’t considered adults until after they gain their wings—which, if the old adage holds up, occurs just about every time a homeless person pisses through a sewer grate (every time a sewer grate rings, a mayfly gets its wings, or so the legend says). Once they become winged, which can take up to two years, they escape from the water and fly into the air as free as can be for the next day or so. Then they die—oftentimes over land.
Crickets are commonly mistaken for being as vegan as the average Portland, Oregan barista. While they do mostly dine on various forms of plant life (leaves, fruits, and grasses), they also enjoy aphids, larvae, and the occasional dead bug.
Re-enter the Gordian worm—literally.
The cricket stumbles upon the corpse of a dead and infected Mayfly, where he adopts a waste-not-want-not mentality and the Gordian worm hits the parasitic jackpot. Then baby worm becomes big worm—reaching the staggering length of up to four feet while inside an insect the size of your thumb. It’s enough to give most of us the willies, which makes sense. Things that have been bad for human beings over long spans of time (like parasites) often evoke an involuntary reaction of disgust, fear, and even aggression. This is called a pathogen-avoidance response. Though, even more unsettling to me than the worm gorging itself on the cricket’s hard-earned internal fat stores and growing to stomach-swelling size, is what happens next.
Gordian worms can only live in one of two places: inside a host or inside water. Once they reach adulthood and are ready to lay eggs, they must either exit the cricket directly into water or very nearby. One problem—crickets are not particularly adept swimmers.
Therefore, they often avoid any body of water sizable enough to drown in. So, we have ourselves an ecological standoff—or we would, if the belly-dwelling parasite wasn’t also capable of hijacking the cricket’s nervous system. So, hijack it does, and it drives the cricket Uncle Bernie style to the nearest body of water where the host kamikazes his non-swimming ass into the deep end. There the worm wriggles loose of the drowning insect, exiting the backside of the host-soon-to-be-husk. Then it slithers about its merry way, presumably without a shred of remorse.
PERSONALITY:
What do parasitic worms have to do with human psychology? They’re gross and that’s a psychological reaction. It’s also a response that makes sense. Parasites come with a slew of potential harms to the host. Yet, just the notion of parasitism can raise our collective hackles. This can extend well beyond the usual suspects that we learned about in eighth-grade biology (e.g. protozoa, helminths, ectoparasites, etc.). The psychological unease that we feel toward parasites extends even to the behaviors of certain people.
The Dark Triad model of personality (which includes narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavelianism) is perhaps the most widely used framework for psychological research into a subset of people that seem to show a talent for and a willingness to manipulate, deceive, and exploit others for personal gain. In the past couple of decades, this model has caught significant traction, both in research psychology and pop psychology alike
It’s no revelation to any of us who have traveled widely or lived a relatively unsheltered life, that there are people in every place who refuse to play by the rules of a functioning society. Paltry ideas such as honesty, good faith discourse, and reciprocity aren’t tenets they feel the need to uphold. Which is likely one of the reasons they predate on and parasitize others. The problem with human social parasitism is that they have the same basic operating system (and threat-detection software) as you and I. Therefore, they can become uncannily effective at social parasitism without so much as raising a solitary internal alarm bell. How?
A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology investigated one of the most effective methods people high in Dark Triad personality traits use on others. It’s not enough for a parasite to simply avoid detection, as that wouldn’t lead to unearned resources. Instead, researchers at the University of British Columbia investigated how manipulative people weave together the signaling of both virtue and victimhood to make a sort of moral gilly suit that allows them to prey upon the altruistic impulses of others.
Why would anyone want to be a victim though? Being a victim sucks—even in today’s world. Feel free to go down the honor-killing rabbit hole sometime, if you have the stomach for it. Yet there are certainly countries, cultures, and eras that are worse than others. You don't have to look very far to realize that it sucks way less to be a victim in the modern West. So much so, that the researchers of the UBC study argued that “contemporary Western democracies have become particularly hospitable environments for victim signalers to execute a strategy of nonreciprocal resource extraction”. Which is to say, the more egalitarian, victim-sensitive, and philanthropic a society becomes, the better it is for those who signal victimhood—legitimately or otherwise.
There were three main assertions of the study. Firstly, those who scored high in Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy, and machieavelliansim) traits were more likely to receive low scores on the Honesty-Humility scale, which is a component of the HEXACO Personality Index. Low scores on this scale are associated with people who “flatter others to get what they want, are inclined to break rules for personal profit, are motivated by material gain, and feel a strong sense of self-importance”.
Secondly, participants who scored high in Dark Triad traits also showed an increased likelihood of signaling both virtue and victimhood. The correlation between Dark Triad and virtue signaling was significant but paled in comparison to the increased frequency with which they signaled victimhood. This makes sense in a victimhood culture rather than a dignity or honor culture. Lastly, and the icing on the personality-disordered cake, Dark Triad types showed an increase in the willingness to derogate competitors to cast themselves in a more favorable light. None of this is revelatory.
There was a time when we didn’t need academic studies to show us obvious truths about human nature. There was a time when children’s stories did the job—telling kids that social predators and parasites may even go so far as to hide under granny’s bonnet and blanket to get to you. This is one of the key reasons why group identity politics is destined to be corrupted. Each person must be assessed as an individual and sweeping categorical assessments of innocence, guilt, victimhood, privilege, etc. based on group affiliation alone fail to contend with one important fact: there are predators and parasites in every single demographic.
No sex, race, sexual orientation, political bent, education level, or vocation are exempt. Some psychopaths are school teachers. There are machiavellian mental health counselors. There are narcissists running non-profits. To social parasites, a society that simultaneously elevates victimhood status and assigns it based on sweeping demographic categories functions an awful lot like a bug zapper that forgot how to zap.
PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDING:
When do you think the cricket first realizes that he’s been successfully parasitized? Is it while he’s drowning—with his little breathing spiracles closed tight against the inflooding water? Maybe not. Is it while his own treacherous feet shuffle toward the deep end of the watering hole that he would have avoided only the week before? I don’t think so. I imagine that the first time the cricket became aware that something was wrong—that something else had a grip on him—was when he lost his ability to chirp (which oddly and somewhat unrelatedly is something that only the male crickets do). In addition to everything discussed so far, the Gordian worm has the chilling ability to manipulate the creature it parasitizes into silence.
Of the social benefits conferred to victims spelled out in the UBC study, the one that I see most often in the real world is what's referred to as psychological standing, which is a subjective sense of legitimacy to speak up on a matter—an assumed authority of sorts. Phrases such as “my lived experience” or “as a [INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTIC]…” immediately jump to mind. It’s important to remember that these are morally neutral sentiments that can have actual utility, depending on the situation. If I’m planning to climb Mount Everest and the guy at the gear shop begins his recommendations with “as a career Sherpa…” I’m probably going to listen a little more closely and assign a fair degree of credibility to what comes next.
However, these sorts of expressions are more and more frequently used as a social cudgel to delegitimize well-thought-out objections, avoid having to contend with valid counterpoints, or to simply shut up "nonvictims"—manipulating you into silence for any one of the categories of privilege that have become akin to original sin. When this happens, you have to figure out if you’re dealing with a person engaging in good faith or a parasite trying to get ahold of your tongue. If it’s the latter, you have to ask yourself—are you a cricket or are you a man? The answer may matter more than you think.