We’re not taught to critically engage with the ways we engage with the world around us. Like, we’re purposefully influenced to shy away from it. Get defensive. Emotionally manipulate the situation to get away from it. Act offended. Run away.
Maybe it’s partially this dichotomy between good and evil that’s to blame: you’re either in the green, or completely in the red; sinner or saint. No room to contemplate our own mistakes and misgivings for fear of being irredeemable.
To critically engage with the world around us requires something the status quo won’t give us: self-awareness. Call it questioning your circumstances, whatever. Our world isn’t perfect. We are not perfect. A myriad of systems, influences, institutions, and signals invade and shape our perceptions and understanding. Why not engage and pick it all apart?
I mean, these factors hurt people daily, hourly, by the minute! Why accept it? Why let it keep free real estate in your mind?
This free real estate isn’t always apparent. One way this free real estate manifests itself is in the neverending trivialities of day-to-day life. Full schedules. Endless errands. Mind numbing “habits.” Intricacies that only stress us out, spread us thin.
We’re either, because of our socio-economic and racial status, relegated to working long hours at multiple jobs. Our mental and physical energy literally drained and/or beaten out of us. Many of us don’t have much of a choice in this. But even in the hyper-exploited, people become aware and fight back! Exploitation is not destiny.
What fascinates me is the middle of the crowd. The people with time and some amount of leisure, afforded to them by class, race, and gender status (along with their willingness to be complicit actors), who do everything possible to not have any time leftover. The rat race explains most of this. Accumulation as a life principle (bank-rolled with the idea that continual burnout and pushing your limits will make you happy when you’ve finally burned your body out to a crisp).
When the things that give you space and rest are labeled sins, it shouldn’t surprise us when people torture themselves.
I don’t think this unwillingness to critique our social structures is solely the result of being too busy. Obviously most white people are content reaping the meager benefits they receive from the death machine. Many have internalized the values and malicious intent of the parasites above them. Maybe busying yourself is partially self-inflicted to avoid the consciousness you’ve buried, while being a structural requirement for society to consider you “normal.” Societal expectations and the social regulations that flow from it have always acted as control mechanisms.
I don’t know. This conversation is hard to have. We must avoid victim-blaming, essentialism, while also admitting that people are to blame for the abuse they propagate (especially when they’re confronted and continue in their fucked up ways).
I don’t understand why people don’t want to burn this system down. It rots our bodies, minds, and environments. It turns us against one another for shiny trinkets. It encourages abuse, and fosters abusers. It rewards them! It destroys and perverts our relationships and interpersonal worlds. Needless hierarchies that only isolate us from one another. How the fuck do people not see this and immediately get fuckin’ mad as hell? What? Righteous anger is only reserved for the pious? Naaayyyy! Fuck that!
How do we explain this? What factors play into a person’s apathy and downright complicitness in a system that’s hurt so many of their friends, loved ones, and complete strangers? It’s either/a combo of ignorance/isolation, the internalization of malicious/exploitative values, preservation of their status quo, outright maliciousness/abuse (to stay on top, to gain power, etc), and an inability to analyze/critique/question the mindsets/processes/perceptions that society has given them.
None of this means people aren’t capable of change. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s both conscious and systemic. This doesn’t go down well in a society that uses “individualism” to hide the malicious collectivism of capitalist accumulation. If we’re all running over each other to reach a small piece of gold, are we really all individuals? Is this really freedom? How the fuck does freedom allow you to run people over for your own self interests?
I’ll leave y’all with some wise words from Simone de Beauvoir, writing in her “Ethics of Ambiguity:”
“We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.”
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