Most groups have one.
Not a psychopath in the clinical sense. I mean the everyday bad actor. The person with no obvious brake pedal. The one who says the cruel, racist, or contemptuous thing, then looks around to see who is brave enough, or foolish enough, to object.
They are seldom in the centre of the room. That would be too easy. They are in the corner, making comments. Testing the temperature. Moving the boundaries an inch at a time.
Your gut usually knows before your brain clicks in. A small tightening. A little vigilance. You understand, without quite articulating it, that a challenge will not simply get you a disagreement. It may get you punished — mocked, or recast as humourless, precious, disloyal.
The person who says the ugly thing is rarely the one accused of ruining the mood. That honour usually goes to the person who notices.
With the rise of chat groups, these masterful bastards have found new ways to torment the rest of us.
Le Tour de France
I have been thinking about this because of a chat group I have belonged to for almost a decade. It is essentially dormant for eleven months of the year, until July, when the Tour de France glides onto our screens, into our podcast feeds, and the chat fires up.
For those who don't know, the TdF is a sporting event, reality TV show and travelogue rolled into one giant extravaganza: 21 stages, 3,320 kilometres, 184 riders, an entourage of hundreds of thousands, and around 150 million viewers (and only one winner, usually Pogacar). Naturally, this spawns millions, if not billions, of texts. My chat group would average about 100 per day.
The group grew out of a cycling training group. I joined when I was younger and more athletic. We have about thirty members, of which about half text every night of the tour.
And this brings me to the problem. There is one older bloke in the group who regularly makes racist, sexist, elitist, or just gratuitously mean comments. He'll make disparaging remarks about the African riders and elitist remarks about riders' accents, mocking their backgrounds. He'll also squeeze in some sexist comments about the women's version of the race. And if anyone tries to challenge him, they'll get a spray and be accused of being humourless and woke.
He always does it with a hint of humour. That is part of his skill. He hovers in the zone between "only joking" and "I meant every word" — ugly enough to matter, deniable enough to survive. Mostly the group has learned to ignore him. The thread moves on to time gaps, crosswinds, doping allegations and bike lust (we would all kill for one of their $20,000 bikes).
Groups like this develop a language to protect themselves from action. "That's just him." "Don't take it seriously." "You know what he's like." These sentences sound like explanations, but they are really invoices. They transfer the cost of his behaviour to everyone else. We learn to perform tolerance.
The group stays intact, but something within it becomes less honest.
I'm not saying no one ever challenges him. They do, occasionally. What follows is reliable enough to be called a policy. The challenger spends the next few weeks paying: gibes, jokes with their name in them, and small exclusions that are always deniable and never accidental. The group watches this too. That is the real lesson being taught, and everyone learns it.
Every group has a moral accounting system. Some people are charged full price for their behaviour. Others are quietly subsidised.
The Exit Fee
The obvious answer is to leave. Mute the chat. Exit the group. But this is one reason bad behaviour survives: the exit fee is paid by the person with a conscience. If I leave, he loses nothing. I lose the people I like, the jokes, the occasional meet-ups for coffee on a Sunday ride, and a piece of my own history. He remains, and the group adjusts. The person most troubled by the behaviour is the one who disappears. Groups often end up belonging to the person willing to make everyone else uncomfortable.
This is the strange arithmetic of shamelessness: one shameless person can reorganise thirty decent ones. Psychologists have a name for part of the machinery — pluralistic ignorance. A room full of people, privately appalled, each reading everyone else's silence as approval, each concluding they must be the only one who minds. The silence manufactures its own evidence.
Which is also why every solo challenge in our group has failed. A lone objector can be picked off. Change will come when a second and third voice join in; the first person is no longer alone enough to punish — and everyone else discovers their private discomfort was never private at all.
Who Owns the Room?
I don't know exactly what to do about our psychopath in the corner.
Thirty-plus years as a psychiatrist have taught me one thing — if I challenge him, I'll probably come off second best. People with anti-social tendencies are masters at manipulating and harming others.
Ignoring him keeps the peace but costs a little self-respect. A mild challenge is dismissed as oversensitivity. A clear challenge invites punishment — and nothing changes.
I could try to organise the silent majority — my own argument points that way. But a decade in this group tells me the appetite isn't there, and life is too short to run a resistance campaign in a chat group.
I could wait for him to grow up a little and change — and that does sometimes happen to people with antisocial traits, usually in their late 30s or early 40s — but this bloke is in his late 60s. Realistically, he isn't going to change.
Finally, I could do the obvious thing. Just leave the group. Check out. From a psychological perspective, that's the clear winner. The usual advice for dealing with people with antisocial traits is to ditch the fantasy that they'll change — just get away. After all, it's just a chat group. It's not real life. It's simply another version of social media.
So, that's my plan. Yes, I know — I spent an entire section explaining why the exit fee is unjust. It is. I'm paying it anyway because, for a chat group, it's a fee I can afford.
Next year, the thread can keep pinging, but not with me. The group will probably keep tolerating it. The race will go on, probably with Pogacar winning again. And I'll find my tribe elsewhere.
That's the thing about tolerating shitty behaviour: eventually, he's no longer in the corner. He's running the room.
Does anyone have a better plan? What would you do?