Does having fun in your life protect you from becoming a sociopath?

Since 2020, we have witnessed charming, well-educated, "civilized" people all around us — especially from what my husband calls (as others do) "the laptop class" — reveal, during 'lockdowns" and medical tyranny — a side that is, bare teeth and all, nakedly sadistic.

Now, as our stunned society slowly tries to set itself upright from having wallowed for nearly three years in an irrational, animalistic seizure of hatred and cruelty — as it struggles to settle its hat and to brush the dust and mire of the gutter off of its suit, and to straighten its necktie — few indeed from that group want to glance back at the Lord of the Flies-type scenes of savagery that these "civilized" people cheered on.

But we who were targeted know what happened and cannot forget it. We click, sometimes ruminatively, on compilations in social media of "respectable" politicians, comedians, talk show hosts, and thought leaders, avidly stating that they wished we would just die, that we should be denied medical care, that we should be locked indoors forever, lose our jobs, and so on.

We — the targeted — must reckon with the traumatizing fact that we were on the receiving end of cruelty which the perpetrators seemed really to enjoy.

Remember all of those affluent ladies (so often affluent ladies) — total strangers — who gestured wildly at you to pull your mask up over your nose? What was their energy like? Almost eager, almost erotic, right?

They liked it. They liked the power.