Hooray For Our Side

Creating Oppression By Fighting Oppression

A lot of people go through life living with an oppressor and oppressed mindset, that is, seeing most of the world as being divided up between those two or more groups, and it often gives people a feeling of purpose. It would be better to give one’s life purpose by doing something purposeful, but it is what it is.

It is indeed true that mankind has a tendency to mistreat those who end up under their thumbs, (which I hope some of these essays oppose), but the oppressed mindset thing is also used as a manipulation tool. Convince a group that they are being mistreated and that you will fight for them if they elect you to office, or maybe that you will happily lead them in an armed revolution. (Of course, after fighting in the armed revolution, instead of being given important jobs they will be lined up against the wall and shot, since they are too dangerous to keep around. Obviously not always true, the American Revolution being an exception. Nothing is perfect.)

"All revolutions devour their own children." ~ Ernst Rohm

People have a natural tendency to emotionally bond with one group or another, our tribe versus their tribe, our team versus their team, so I think the oppressor/oppressed mindset can be seen as an extension of that phenomenon. This is useful to the manipulators. Have you ever tried to count the number times Hillary Clinton would say “I'll fight for you” in a speech? Fight for who, exactly?

It gives people an explanation for the worlds problems without needing to look further into reality, and you don't have to consider the possibility that some of your opponents are decent people. It has the advantage of explaining the world with little effort or the need for much intelligence, and it is common in university degree programs with titles that end in the word “studies.” The student suddenly finds an explanation for all of the worlds ills. (It is my hope that, as the college degree financial bubble continues to burst and colleges have to live more in the real world, the “studies” departments will be the first to go.)

Anyone who sees the world this way and sees himself as a member of an oppressed group will naturally see the solution as being that his group become the oppressors, and he'll be helped along in his belief by someone pulling the strings. After all if he didn't see it that way he would not have a world view of the the world consisting only of oppressors and oppressed. The beauty of being among the oppressed is that, once you have identified others as the oppressors, any actions you take against them are justified. You inherently have the moral high ground, and those on the other side are either immoral or stupid, a comforting way to see oneself. To get people to do evil you must convince them that they are doing good, so monstrous evils are often forthcoming.

All of this seems to be at least part of the explanation for the divisions we see here in the USA. It's the old divide and conquer, and telling people that they are the oppressed is helpful. The problem can and is made worse by people using their feeling of oppression to give their lives purpose; if they didn't have an oppressor they would need to invent one. This means that a step towards winning the culture war could be to provide more people with meaningful lives, and I think that the opposite is being done, that is, trying to decrease the meaning in the lives of people so as to use them for political pawns. It can be useful to deny people a sense of purpose so that they will adopt your political or revolutionary agenda.

This is related to the phenomenon of sundry persons yearning for victim status.

https://drp314.substack.com/p/benefits-of-victim-status

Women derive great satisfaction from raising children and caring for their families, but if they buy into feminism and turn their backs on all of that they will need something else to give them purpose. (You may now mark me down as a knuckle dragging throwback to the dark ages.) Similarly, atheism may be pushed since an atheistic mindset is one devoid of purpose. Belief in God and a higher power may not provide you directly with a sense of purpose but it strongly hints that there is one.

How do you know whether the oppression you are against is real? Consider this from Britannica on false consciousness:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/false-consciousness

False consciousness, in philosophy, particularly within critical theory and other Marxist schools and movements, the notion that members of the proletariat unwittingly misperceive their real position in society and systematically misunderstand their genuine interests within the social relations of production under capitalism. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.

Despite its close assocation with Marxism, the term false consciousness was never used by Karl Marx. The first treatment of false consciousness as a theoretical concept occurred in History and Class Consciousness (1923) by the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács. The concept was further developed in the 20th century by Marxist scholars such as the German-born American philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Since the late 20th century the concept has been utilized outside explicitly Marxist theorizing in studies of oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and race. See also ideology: Hegel and Marx.

The mind reels at the above. To my limited understanding this says that we will use the fact that people are not oppressing us to claim that they really are but just don't realize it. In fact, we wouldn't realize we are being oppressed if we were not told. (I asked my wife once if she considered me an intellectual and she said yes. I wasn’t sure that I liked the answer.)

The solution would seem to be to generally promote purposefulness in yourself and those around you. It's true that not everyone can be a brain surgeon, but everyone has abilities that can be used for the betterment the world around him. And be aware that there are those who push purposelessness, victimization philosophy and feelings of oppression for their own purposes.

"All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal." ~ Ayn Rand

"We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day" ~ John F. Kennedy

Stay Brave, Stay Free