Loved this essay. Please go read it all, it’s just fantastic. Via Denise and the Carnival of Bent Attractions.
You Would Think: Meandering Through the Maze
And it’s the equality that sends the theocrats into a tizzy. They start calling it “oppression” the very same second they are told they don’t get to control everything without challenge; that they must share the law with other people who do not necessarily agree with the tenets of their religion or their morality; that they must share social power with people who do not share their worldview. If we are all sharing power equally, then plenty of folks might be uncomfortable, but no one is being oppressed. Nonetheless, this particular claim of oppression arises again and again, always from the right, and always whenever they are not allowed to control other people.
Like any effective exercise in double-standard based discriminatory behavior, they never explain precisely where the oppression they claim to be experiencing is actually occurring, they just repeatedly claim that it is happening over and over until people who don’t pay very close attention start to believe that it must be at least kind-of true. People actually start to buy into the idea that the equality of a minority group is somehow oppressive to a majority group that is currently enjoying a disproportionately larger share of sociopolitical power. That conservatives can successfully wield this argument without making a single logical connection is what interests me. They’ve primarily appealed to ignorance, social prejudice, and emotion (predominantly faith and fear), from beginning to end, just as they did when they used their religion to justify slavery and then, when they lost that conflict, to justify the racial segregation that followed slavery in America and oppressed black people for roughly another fucking century.
I’m less interested in the architects of the theocracy movement, whom I view as garden variety powermongers — history’s never had an age without ’em, bless the dark little shadows in their chest cavities where their hearts should be — and more interested in those who allow themselves to be used as its cinder blocks, who totally fucking baffle me. Why are so many regular people susceptible to such obvious lines of bullshit, especially when said lines of bullshit do eventually curve back around to kick said regular people in their regular asses? (You people who are willing to throw queers under the bus, you know these people are coming after you next, right? They’re coming for your marriages, your birth control and whatever entertainment choices you have that they deem immoral. And they’re gaining ground legislatively.)
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Language is powerful. Our understanding of any given concept is strongly affected by whatever terms we have to apply to the concept, and the way those terms are understood to relate to other terms about other concepts. A good deal of that is socially constructed. For example, teaching small children that gays are “bad” and “wrong” and “gross”, or the children merely inhabiting a world that regards gays in this fashion, is the kind of thing that trains children to believe that gays are not quite entirely people. Gays are not like Us; gays are different; gays are Other. Culturally, “Other” is almost always synonymous with “enemy” due to a bunch of other social narratives, thus training children to Other gays is a pretty effective mechanism to get the adults the kids will someday become to make social war on gays (or sometimes direct violence) without even giving it a second thought. Oppressing gays becomes internalized as “the right thing to do” with no real reason ever required.
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Associating concepts via the terms we use to describe them in a complex network is how socialization occurs. It’s how we learn to be a part of our culture, laugh at jokes, function in the supermarket line, pee in the bathroom, and hold down an accounting job. It’s also how brainwashing works. Funny, that. And messy. It’s the kind of messiness that ensures there’s no easy way out of this chronic social problem that we have with systemic inequality. We train children not just to understand that there is a hierarchy of bodies, but we train them to understand that there has to be a hierarchy of bodies. We train them to understand that such a hierarchy is necessary and natural (and worst of all, that it’s ethical). Which is why it is that, when you pick at someone’s reactionary defense of the hierarchy long enough, eventually they will sputter, “That’s just how it is!” But that’s not just how it is. That’s how we make it.
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It’s not really a problem of language, though language is a critical hinge. I think it’s a problem that powermongering has created inside consciousness, inside the bodymind, using language as both a tool and a weapon. The entire strategy is very simple: divide/manipulate/conquer. It’s just that the division accomplished via the manipulation is sufficient to ensure that most of the time practically no one sees anything but the [manufactured] desire for conquering, which they mistake for authentic desire (“human nature”), and round and round we go, like a big hedge maze where everything looks the same and we have all been here before.
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The longer I think about it, the more I believe that locating our authenticity is the only thing that can save us from this cycle of inequality. If enough of us simply are who we really are, who we really want to be, then the hierarchy, the very structure on which the inequality props itself up, will dissolve for lack of support. Equality wouldn’t look like oppression to anyone. Perhaps even oppression itself would no longer be desirable.
Heh — life, it’s the ultimate role-playing game: to escape the maze, we must find the center.
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