If in Some Smothering Dreams You Too Could Pace
Fighting a Total Culture War to prevent your neurotype-demographic from becoming permanent mind-slaves of the Blue Egregore is no excuse for being a jerk.
I mean, it's an explanation, but that's different from an excuse: being a jerk has consequences, and you need to take the consequences like a man.
This, then, is the mindset of a soldier (though our beautiful cutting weapons be words instead of swords): to inflict pain, to incur guilt—and yet to have only tactical regrets. Given the chance to do it all over again, you would—but solely to be more skillful in projecting rhetorical force to secure the objective, to say more clearly what needed to be said. Not to inflict less pain or incur less guilt.
