Suppression, 5
But the key point is the intention, not the means: when someone has the intention to harm, anything at hand is likely to be used as a weapon. “To the man who wants to use a hammer badly, a lot of things look like nails that need hammering.” – Mark Twain. Things do not just happen; things are caused. And the ultimate causative factor in society are individuals.
And another key point is sheer results: if the end result is suppression, well, call it suppression, regardless of what are the purported intentions of the individuals or how much they are aware of the actual consequences of their actions. Their intentions and awareness may be arguable, their consequences are not. As the awareness of acting suppressively is related to the awareness of reality, it may be uncertain on the part of the subject, but it can be quite certain on the part of his or her fellows. Opinions are opinions, facts are facts. Also because, to the degree one is a decent individual, one won’t need too much time to realize one’s tools are harming instead of being helpful; so if after a reasonable time span one does not stop a possible harmful outcome one way or another, this means that individual is mad enough to be dangerous whatever.
A case in point of sheer results regardless is what has been labelled merchant of chaos. A merchant of chaos is someone who profits or even lives out of you perceiving your environment, in full or in part, as dangerous, hostile, threatening, degraded, or in whatever kind of low condition.
The merchants of chaos either just exploit an environment that is actually dangerous, or they strive to make it appear to you seemingly more dangerous than it actually is, or they actively make the environment dangerous, or more dangerous than it was. It could be said that the whole trick of the merchants of chaos is making the environment appear to their target victims worse than it actually is, but that would be too restrictive and cause us to overlook those who just exploit what they find nice and ready, as well as those who work hard to make an enviroment actually worse. So it is quite safer to stretch the label to include all of these variants.
