The triggering of Styxhexenhammer
Styx666 loses control when he gets it wrong and gets told no.
Sometimes, the smartest people in the world can be triggered simply by getting it wrong.
And I legitimately believe that libertarian commentator Styxhexenhammer is smart. Very smart.
But intelligent people can be triggered too. In fact, it can be very easy for them to be triggered by being wrong (and not wanting to admit it) because they are so used to being right and smarter than everyone else that, when they get it wrong, it’s a shock to the system.
And Styx was triggered. It started when one of his fanboys issued a threat of physical violence and ended with him calling me a coward and a joke before bragging about just how many people he had watching a live stream to really put me in my place.
Let’s dig into the case study of the triggering of Styxhexenhammer.
Admitting you’re wrong is a skill.
We live in a world where there is no incentive to admit that you’re wrong.
In fact, there’s a disincentive to do so, because people will hold one instance of being wrong against you for the rest of your life at the most inopportune moment.
And that’s a shame because there’s not a single infallible human being on the planet. If there’s one thing we can count on (besides death and taxes) is that every single one of us will get something wrong at some point in our lives.
But as it is, most people struggle to admit when they’ve screwed up, leaving it a really underdeveloped skill for the majority of the population.
If admitting you’re wrong is not a muscle you flex often, you aren’t going to have developed the ability to do it. It’s like riding a bike. If you’ve never ridden a bike, or haven’t in a very long time, you might be a little shakey when you get on. It’s natural, from a lack of experience.
On top of that, there are some personality styles that not only dislike admitting they are wrong, but downright loathe it. They may even be terrified of it. They tend to be the more detail-oriented styles, the more autistic styles (if you will), the ones who do deep dives into things more than the average bear and therefore are almost always in a position to be the expert in the room.
Being wrong calls into question their very identity.
And that’s the personality style I suspect Styx has. The triggering of Styxhexenhammer started because he got something wrong and didn’t want to admit it. Even when it became obvious that he was defending the indefensible, he dug in his heels and tried to shape reality to a land where he was right.
It started with a threat of physical violence.
I’m a member of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, and have been since April 2021. I also happen to be their current endorsed candidate for Governor of New Hampshire (long story).
We’ve been pushing back on Tulsi Gabbard lately, for her endorsement of the New Hampshire GOP nominee for Senate who happens to be a war hawk. So when Styx tweeted this, it was natural for the LPNH to respond. What I didn’t expect to find was someone posting a photo of me in response to them, presumably trying to tell them that I’m a grifter or a leftist or any other story they’ve invented.
In response to that, I noted that I was the person who had called out Tulsi just the other day at an event in New Hampshire.
When I did so, the person who posted my picture responded with a threat of physical violence against me. I immediately reported the tweet to Twitter and told them so. In response, they immediately deleted the tweet.
Was I afraid of the person? Absolutely not. However, I’m also not going to stand for anyone making a threat of physical violence against me without defending myself.
Well, I set off a metric ton of REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in his comments and Styx started to respond:
Now, at this point, I wanted to offer Styx the benefit of the doubt because it was entirely possible that he had not seen the threat of physical violence prior to the author deleting the tweet. I informed him in several places that it was a threat of physical violence, which is a violation of the non-aggression principle (NAP) and I wouldn’t tolerate it.
Styx didn’t have a leg to stand on here. And he could have ended it all by admitting he was wrong. It would have been perfectly reasonable for him to just drop the topic entirely and move on to far more important things.
He didn’t do that.
Triggering is truth.
Every trigger is caused by knowing that at least a nugget of what the person is saying is true. It may be a nugget of truth covered in a mound of bullshit, but there is truth nonetheless.
What that means is that something cannot trigger you if you know in your soul that it is completely untrue. There would be no reason for you to be upset. That would be like me telling you “you’re a turtle.” That probably wouldn’t trigger you (unless you’re Mitch McConnell) because you know you’re not a turtle.
To trigger Styx, I kept hammering on an inherent truth that he couldn’t run away from: That he was defending a person who made a threat of physical violence, which is a clear violation of the NAP.
Styx’s trigger was KNOWING he had been caught being wrong. And there was no way out of it.
If he had known there was no truth to what I was saying, there would have been no reason for him to be triggered. He would have just disengaged and moved on.
But he didn’t do that.
Our behaviors always give away our true motivations. No matter what Styx said, his behaviors showed that he was absolutely triggered because he could not let go of trying to reframe the situation to one where he would be proven to be right. Anything else is a threat to his identity and perception of self.
After a few more back-and-forths, Styx escalated and tried to scare me with his audience by quote-tweeting me and calling my campaign into question.
I ignored the bait. You must always take control away from the person you are trying to trigger by essentially ignoring what they say to you and driving the conversation where you want it to go.
And that’s exactly what I did, continuing to hit on the obvious, undeniable truth that Styx was defending someone who was in clear violation of the NAP.
I also accused him of being an inauthentic shill without mentioning his name. In reality, I don’t think Styx is an inauthentic shill. I just think he’s wrong. Authentically wrong. But when you’re playing the triggering game with someone, there’s nothing that says you have to tell the truth.
Really, if people believe everything they hear on Twitter, that’s a them problem, not a you problem.
Styx responded by quote-tweeting me again.
I responded by hammering on that trigger again. I used different words in each tweet, but the message was always the same - hitting on that core nugget of truth that Styx was desperate to argue away.
Since Styx was also trying to insinuate that I wasn’t a libertarian, I also added some extra libertarianism concepts of voluntary association. It was perfectly fine for Styx to create a community where they accepted open violations of the NAP, just as long as it’s fine for me to create a community where we don’t do that. We just have different values and people are welcome to associate with whichever community they choose. No one forces anyone to live by anyone else’s rules - it’s ok to have different values and leave each other alone.
Styx was now both quote-tweeting me and responding to my tweets, so you could tell the trigger was controlling his behaviors. I made sure to mirror his behavior.
Mirroring people’s behavior is just when you do to them exactly what they are doing to you. Its purpose is to very literally to hold a mirror up to them so they can see what they are doing.
We’ve covered that something will only trigger us if know there’s truth in it. Well, here’s another nugget: We are only triggered by behaviors we see in other people if we know that we are also guilty of that behavior ourselves. When other people have flaws we subconsciously know that we have too, it is much easier to identify and attack those flaws in other people than it is to admit we have those flaws and attack them in ourselves.
So, I kept hitting on the same notes - Styx was wrong and he knew it and he really could have already walked away from the conversation knowing he was wrong:
You can see that Styx started to really double down on the candidacy part here. He did that because he clearly wanted to move on from the main point that was triggering him as a deflection. He tried to transition the argument…he just didn’t transition it in a great direction.
I’m fairly certain that he anticipated that I would feel threatened or intimidated by someone with a larger following than me challenging me for the role of candidate.
In other words, he thought I would be driven by ego and would want to defend my position above all else.
The mistake Styx made was that he did not properly evaluate my priorities.
I’ve never spoken to Styx and I have no idea what he knows about me. If he listens to online gossip, it seems likely he assumes I’m a grifter that just wants attention and that’s why I accepted this role of being a candidate for Governor.
He didn’t anticipate that my real priority is winning the long game. By that, I mean liberty winning in New Hampshire. If there’s a better candidate than me to run, I am more than happy to let that person do it and support them!
I personally think Styx would make a great candidate for office, and an even better one in New Hampshire. He would have a team of people from LPNH to help him run, no problem. The problem is that Styx lives in Holland and New Hampshire has a seven-year residency requirement to run for Governor.
So I told him so. First, I challenged him to accept a role that I knew he wouldn’t:
What resists, persists.
What that means is that, when you have a problem, fighting aggressively against it, you’re more likely to make the problem worse than solve anything. Instead, you have to find a way to flow with the person you’re triggering.
Styx had anticipated that I would fight against the idea of him running for Governor as a shot to my ego. So, instead of fighting him for the job, I told him he could have it.
Not only did I position myself on the high road, but I also reminded him of the thing that was really triggering him in the first place…the thing he was desperate to run away from.
And he couldn’t fight it!!!!!!!!! So, he deflected completely and challenged me to a debate:
This is where I knew I really had him on the run. He had changed topics entirely and completely, seeming to abandon his first two strategies.
This was an attempt by him to try to take back control in the situation. I had just taken it away from him entirely by not resisting his previous tactic and had essentially cornered him. If you have nowhere else to go, you inherently have to change tactics.
At this point, it was my job to make sure I kept him out of control to continue to let him simmer.
So, at the same time that I made the above response, I also mirrored his behavior by quote-tweeting him and simply saying “no” to his demand of a debate. This kept him out of control because I refused to enter the playing field he wanted me on.
And then he quote-tweeted me and called me a coward.
Insults are inartful.
Generally, insults are horrible ways to try to trigger people, if for no other reason than there is no creativity or originality to them. It’s too easy. It’s inartful. Using an insult to try to trigger someone is like going to a cheap whore when you could go to a high-class callgirl instead - they are two different leagues of experience.
If you want to trigger someone, really go for it. Say something that is going to make them question who they are and what they really believe. Any fool can piss someone off. Triggering is an art form that should be treated with respect.
But given that we were hours into this little exchange at this point, I wasn’t really that surprised that Styx went there.
I made the choice not to respond to the insult. After all, I have nothing to prove to Styx. He was trying to use his audience to bait me into a debate. Again, he incorrectly assessed my priorities, probably assuming I would do anything to get in front of an audience (remember, he thinks I’m an attention-seeking grifter).
But particularly given the events of the day, his audience was not interesting to me to be in front of. I don’t think they align well with my purpose and goals, and would probably just proceed to make my life difficult.
Additionally, I have a standing rule that I don’t debate. And if I were going to debate on a topic, it would be the woke left’s ideology and how it’s being deployed in schools, not big tech free speech.
So, I denied Styx what he wanted (remember, it was my job to maintain control at this point) and instead switched the topic back to something he had tried to move on from.
To twist in the knife a little more, I reminded him that he had moved on from it as a deflection.
Styx took a few more swings at me but, after several hours of this, it came from such an obviously triggered place that I mostly just swatted it away without paying it much mind.
I rounded things off by offering the best summary of the fight that I could.
All of the things in this tweet are true - they are all things that Styx said to me in the course of his triggering.
The moral is to learn to admit you’re wrong.
Styxhexenhammer could have literally avoided hours of nonsense had he just acknowledged to himself that he was wrong and moved on with the rest of his day.
He didn’t even need to publicly acknowledge that I was right. We both knew that anyway! But he did need to admit to himself that he needed to take the L and walk away. When he didn’t do that, things just got worse.
I ended the exchange by thanking him very much for the case study. Hopefully, he learns something from the experience and comes back stronger next time!
I noticed you deleted all the comments criticizing you, including mine. While a lot of them were nasty about it, all I said was that this essay made you look like the triggered one and you were displaying childish behavior. That can hardly be called nasty, yet not only did you delete it, you banned me from commenting. I don't think that's appropriate nor a healthy thing to do, but as a libertarian, I support your right to do it.