“For love of the world we move away from status of self.”
-Unknown
June 13th, 2023 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 24
Hierarchical assumption normalized in the social realm does vastly more damage than it is given credit for. Things like affluence, perceived confidence, and beauty all serve to elevate people in the harmful arbitrary social hierarchy that currently exists.
That being said, hierarchy is arguably important. How else are humans going to tenably coexist unless they have some sort of shared analysis and organized praxis about how to be? But the current status perception metric is foremost damaging because humans are less advanced than they think themselves to be and are much more reliant on each other than business-as-usual late-stage capitalism would have them think.
Money and the larger financialization structure that money is dispensed from in the Western world organize a very superficial hierarchy that has the power to cast a distinct darkness or lightness across any given person’s reality. The capitalist profit-oriented model that determines class outcome does not function as a meritocracy and instead rewards unscrupulousness, greed, and wealth hoarding, not to mention the way it forcibly absorbs and commodifies things with independent value and often even explicitly anti-capitalist origins.
Capitalism’s predatory nature is evident. It demands work for often inadequate pay and rewards a small (often unscrupulous) few at the peril of the many. Capitalism successfully trots out the myth of meritocracy to a structurally disadvantaged mass, many of whom, in a Stockholm syndrome-resemblant way, then volunteer to argue and vote in favor of maintaining this exact failing system in perpetuity.
There is a human orientation towards life where one does not assume the understanding one has of things to be the same as anyone else. Many allistic people give the impression of a sense of difficulty and discomfort in interaction with autistic people. This perceived difficulty in conversations with autistic people can be turned on its head, and it can be realized that the difficulty that is felt is felt by autistic people in interaction with almost everyone they meet. There’s a feeling of social exhaustion to the experience of autism that accompanies a confusing discrepancy (or one-sided awareness) of difference in perceptual experience. Arguably, there are no scientific grounds for one way of seeing things being more moral or more benevolent or constitutive of a better person overall. In her often cited “What is Autism?”, Dr. Nick Walker describes the experience of an autistic child:
“An autistic child’s sensory experience of the world is more intense and chaotic than that of a non-autistic child, and the ongoing task of navigating and integrating that experience thus occupies more of the autistic child’s attention and energy. This means the autistic child has less attention and energy available to focus on the subtleties of social interaction. Difficulty meeting the social expectations of non-autistics often results in social rejection, which further compounds social difficulties and impedes social development. For this reason, autism has been frequently misconstrued as being essentially a set of ‘social and communication deficits,’ by those who are unaware that the social challenges faced by autistic individuals are just by-products of the intense and chaotic nature of autistic sensory and cognitive experience.”
Dr. Walker then ends by directly speaking to the phenomenon on mention here, when she says:
“Ultimately, to describe autism as a disorder represents a value judgment rather than a scientific fact.”
People experience things differently, and it’s not necessarily something that can be categorized in a value set in any way other than by a differentiation of perspective and sometimes opinion. This view, mentioned now in the context of neurodivergence, has been described in broader discussion by Steven Novella and Tim Minchin as neuropsychological humility. One cannot help but wonder about the advancements the human species could make if each member could open their mind to there being more than one way of thinking. It sounds clichéd, but an open mind to the reality that at any given moment, different beings are orienting themselves towards that moment in a different way makes clear the way social status is not something most suited to hierarchical evaluation.
Through adoption of this lens maybe then the current human orientation towards perception of other humans (which is superficial and, based on the more hateful iterations, eugenicist) could change. A realization that is being had around hatred directed towards trans folks and violence against people of color is that there is a eugenics problem in the U.S.. This is arguably partly due to an impotence in creating and a lack of consensus around an ethic for acceptable social categorization. In a void of ethical consensus, dominant types of categorization include assumption, hate, and profit motivation- arguably in large part due to the lack of safeguards against unscrupulousness.
In the U.S., many people are so nascent stages in their respective ways of thinking about justified hierarchies that it becomes necessary to look especially to traditions of cultures that are not American for notes on how social status could be awarded differently. These often imperialized, U.S. oppositional cultures that have autonomously survived often offer a more coherent analysis of what a value hierarchy could be modeled like. These cultures of thought represent a diversity ranging across the spectrum of Indigenous, socialist, anarchist, democratic, Marxist, communist, and other theoretical traditions. These perspectives on group organization are compelling for their less structurally corrupt and eugenics-prone analysis of reality as humans differently experience it (as figured into a larger perspective on how a large group of humans should cooperate). While Enlightenment era thought was seminal in protecting the rights of the individual in many ways; modern America’s social valuation discourse is tragically underdeveloped, making it capable of profound harm.
In thinking about alternative hierarchies that could exist there are endless possibilities for more fair and useful systems of categorization among humans. There could be a distinction between people who are dedicated to advocacy for plants and animals and humans and people who relegate their concern to just animals and humans and people who restrict their focus to humans. That could be an alternative social status hierarchy that helped grant opportunities and access to resources with a more meritocratic bent and better safeguard against corruption. This is just one such alternative idea.
Despite great advances, humans even in their best moments know so little that it’s just a scratch at the surface of the larger reality of things. If all members of the human species operated more mindfully of that reality, though it is terrifying, potentially the archaeological dig into the greater reality of things would be more fruitful. Interesting enough, many humans for a variety of reasons (nihilism, religious belief in an afterlife, etc.) are not very concerned about what we do know (that future generations will face formidable challenges in the face of global warming and climate displacement, the interconnected ecological structure of the world work, etc.). A social value system constructed with a bigger picture and a decrease in artificial certainty in mind begins in small micro instances of de-centering late stage capitalism’s trademark hierarchical go-to perceptions.
“It’s by our reflective and reasoning powers, with which we seem to be exclusively endowed, that we know that it’s injurious first to others and then to ourselves, to resist the social instinct which governs us, which we call justice. It’s our reason that teaches us that the selfish man, the robber, the murderer, in a word the traitor to society, sins against nature and is guilty with respect to others and himself. ”
- Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Upcoming Events
Online/Worldwide, AKST Time:
Sexual Knowledge Virtual Seminar- June 15th 5-7PM by the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, zoom link here
Juneteenth- June 19th
Emma Goldman’s Birthday - June 27th (1869)
Local, AKST Time:
The Pride Market - June 15th 4-7PM, at Grow North Farm
Jazz in the Park- June 17th at 4PM, every Saturday at this time until August 19th, at Peratrovich Park
Community Action Night - June 19th at 6PM at the Trophy Lounge
Fifth Annual Pride Block Party - June 24th 12PM-7PM at the Writer’s Block Bookstore & Cafe
Fight Back Against Airbnb & Landlord Greed Rally & March- June 25th at 4PM, at the Martin Luther Memorial
Community Discussion Meetup- July 15th at 1PM. use any contact info in the About page to request location info
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“One of the reasons our groups and formations are so vulnerable to conflict is that, as human beings, many of us are deeply traumatized by white supremacy and capitalism. We have been forced into survival mode, and pitted against each other, in order to succeed, or even survive. Unfair dynamics have sometimes conditioned us to fight, or flee, rather than deploying skills that we’ve never had the chance to cultivate. The truth is, when we are empowered to resolve conflicts constructively, we pose a greater threat to authority and the system. Our cultivation of these skills of cooperation is not in the system’s best interest, so it’s no surprise that the state or the labor market presents us with few opportunities to learn such lessons. Our alienation from one another strengthens the system and our enemies.
The emotional beatings we take in this society, due to ignorance, cruelty, self-absorption, or poor communication skills, can leave us battered in ways that make us incredibly reactive when we feel harmed. I know I struggled with this for years, and I sometimes still do. When we get accustomed to operating in defensive and survival modes that have seemed to work for us in the past, it can be very hard to shift gears when we are trying to create a more just world — one where our defensiveness, evasion, and aggression might not be the best responses. But we are wounded people, and being injured ingrains particular responses. Our minds apply the lessons of survival, deploying tactics that have worked, or at least made us feel better, in the past, without necessarily evaluating the needs or wants of ourselves or others in the present.”
- Kelly Hayes on this episode of Movement Memos
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Note: This newsletter marks the 24th issue, two years of monthly newsletters, and what will be the last WWADWWAD (?) Newsletter that is posted on Substack for a year. At this time the writer Bailey Demir intends to resume newsletter writing on July 13th, 2024.