When I was young, it was common for people to blame Christianity in particular or religion in general for the existence of scolds. It never seemed to occur to these people that scolds love to scold people, and will use whatever seems to them the dominant moral framework to scold people.

Scolds need to be distinguished from more general manipulators, who will also use whatever they perceive to be the dominant moral framework of the time to get what they want. For example, suppose a person who is often late and doesn’t want to just apologize for it will try to get people to stop complaining about it. If people are very concerned with racism, they’ll figure out how objecting to them being late is racist. If people are concerned with communism, they’ll figure out how objecting to them being late is communist. If people are concerned with demons, they’ll figure out how objecting to them being late is demonic. They are using whatever is popular, but, unless they’re lucky, the connection is often extraordinarily tenuous.

Scolds tend to operate differently. They stick closer to whatever the dominant moral paradigm is, but make no allowances for context—or implicitly throw away every other concern. Since a human being must balance out all of the virtues in order to live well, this means that they will always do things below the standard of the scold, who makes no allowances for that balance. Thus the scold always has the opportunity for the pleasure of telling somebody else what’s wrong with them.

If one tried to prevent the scolds by getting rid of all rules whatever, the scold would probably just start hurting people by hitting them with whatever sharp objects were ready to hand, since this would no longer be against society’s rules. Such a life would, of course, be, as the saying goes, “nasty, brutish, and short,” but the scold would die with Ahab’s words on his lips, “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

There will be no escaping the scolds until the end of time when the angels bind up the weeds and cast them into the fire. And one can only escape the scolds then if one is not a weed oneself. And, after all, that’s the thing each of us actually has control over.