“Tragedy is life seen close at hand; comedy is life seen from a distance.”
-Aristotle
October 13th, 2022 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 16
In a time of increasing income inequality, carceral punishment is repeatedly the go-to response to people’s efforts to survive without resources for survival. (And included in the definition of a lack of resources is a deprivation of mental health supports)
This is evidence of the low regard that the resourceless are often held in by those in positions of power. It highlights how evidently little we care about the people for whom abiding by the laws is not always an option, the people for whom society does not function.
“In fact, even if that whole story about the state of nature was true, so what? If your ancestors agreed to live in a society, what does it have to do with you? When you were born, was there somebody there from the government going ‘do you accept the terms and conditions?’ No. Some philosophers, like Rousseau, tried to get around this by saying it if you enjoy the benefits of the society you implicitly agree to live by its rules. Like you may not have signed a literal contract, but by continuing to enjoy video games and hummus, you do sign an invisible one. And if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
-Abigail Thorn, Video: “The Social Contract”
To be a certain level of financially comfortable is to think society functions pretty alright, after all, “I could do it! Why can’t you?” And while privileged people are right, life is hard for everybody, to be financially comfortable is also to be able to afford the healthier more street legal drugs of the widely sought out numbing variety. Part of having resources is having the pharmaceutical (and even experiential and material) ingredients to dial in psychological experience such that painful emotions are not felt. But when the pain is numbed the pleasure is numbed as well, and often privileged people with access to medicative options do not feel particularly good, either. In absence of straightforwardly “good” or “bad” emotions, the natural predilection is often for a less manic less depressive, dissociative state.
One such "good" emotion would be a humanitarian impulse towards compassion. While western society has produced science that indicates that every individual's trauma is their society's problem, the widespread disposition of upper class western society is characterized by a numbness to reality. There is a stunning lack of urgency where the survival of fellow humans experiencing lack is concerned. Could it be that dissociation is a debilitating sort of self imposed lack, too?
The wealth disparity situation is dire but often those at the table of the power to enact change languish in this dissociative state, acutely aware of their highbrow type of lack, while those in danger of addiction, eviction, and incarceration by virtue of their type of lack, aren't at the table at all (because they are on the menu, as it is1).
“And the other experiences are not better or worse, but just as legitimate. And we have a lot to do still. I think we don’t talk enough about vulnerability as a normal condition. We often see vulnerability as weakness. But when you talk to somebody, even just for half hour, you realize that all sorts of people, every category marker, are vulnerable.”
-Ocean Vuong, Video: “When I write, I feel larger than the limits of my body.”
To illustrate this dynamic what follows will be a hypothetical common to capitalism involving two prospective contractors, each competing for a bid at a job for which we are hiring. Each are unknowns to us as to their ethical agreeability or good faith. It could be said that were their services to be comparably priced, one look at the more resourced contractor’s more updated equipment by comparison to the less resourced contractor and some people would be more predisposed towards the one with more resources. In having more resources, one yields an extra type of power over their competition. There’s less worry that for instance, the more resourced contractor’s car will be repossessed, thus interrupting their ability to complete the job. It is a cruel calculation but a recurring phenomenon under capitalism. Devastatingly, we use a similar calculation when deciding whether or not people should be able to buy houses.
“Were you to preach in most parts of the world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent of a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience, if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities…
Almost all the governments that exist at present or of which there remains any record in story have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest or both.”
-David Hume, “Of the Original Contract”
If one of the contractors is visibly without as much resources as the other, what is the explanation for when we trust the one with more resources to do the project better? What if his excess of resources is ill gotten gains made by unfair play or wealth hoarding? When we put trust in the one with more than the other, based on their perceived greater access to resources, we further encumber someone already experiencing financial hardship by supporting their competitor.
We illogically attribute decent values to financially secure people, as if maintenance of that human minority’s comfort should necessarily demand political priority in a time when 34% of Americans are living at less than or just two times the poverty line.
In this society, to be without resources is to be alienated according to lack.
“Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day by the small wages he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master though he was carried onboard while asleep and must leap into the ocean and perish to moment he leaves her.”
-David Hume, Of the Original Contract
There is a rightful response of bristling indignation from the lower classes at the false equivalency that comes with judgments made on the basis of wealth and resources, as this society promotes.
To see the class cruelty one need look no further than Ivy League education requirements, “high” fashion, and zoning laws (and arguably also, no further than interventionist military actions, in the act of wielding military strength over less wealthy nation states). The rich have created a world where you have to have money to have money.
Fortunately for humanity, the wealth tyrants are outnumbered and a whole lot of people have better ideas.
~ ~ ~
“ I don’t know, all the rules that I learned have been disproven either by others or by my own work, and I realize that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just following the curiosity. ”
-Ocean Vuong, Video: “When I write, I feel larger than the limits of my body.”
~ ~ ~
Upcoming Events
Online/Worldwide:
First ever Abolition Transmission radio show - October 20th at 1PM AKST www.abolitiontransmission.org
Local, AKST Time:
Autumn Warm Clothes Swap/Collection - October 15th, at 6PM, clothes swap with the ulterior motive of gathering warm clothes for distribution to the community as the weather gets colder. For location, & other details message @shitwicki
Community Action Meetup- November 12th at 1PM, message @baileywwadwwad for location
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“The legal system specializes in not understanding why people behave the way they behave, just in suppressing it. Which is why in Canada, where indigenous people make up 5 % of the population, they make up 30% of the jail population. And indigenous women make up 50% of the female jail population in this country, it’s an absolute scandal. Same in the U.S. .
The more oppressed you are, the more marginalized you are, the more you’ve been traumatized by history (and you know which groups those are in the United States) the more likely you’re going to end up in jail, because the legal system doesn’t understand trauma, it doesn’t understand human development, and it confuses punishment with rehabilitation. So as a result, in terms of supporting healthy growth of human beings at any level, we need understanding, of what’s driving this behavior.
And it’s not a question of allowing bad behavior or permitting it or encouraging it. It’s a question of what are we going to do about the phenomena of aggression or drug use or, in the case of children, rudeness or disobedience or anything else. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to try to just suppress the behavior? (Then you end up where we are with millions of people in jail and lots of kids with learning difficulties and behavioral problems and millions of kids being medicated.) Or are we going to try to understand what’s driving it?”
-Dr. Gabor Maté — Video: “The Myth of Normal, Metabolizing Anger, Processing Trauma, and More”
Footnotes:
“[Aren’t] at the table because they [are] on the menu,” as I heard in the description of a similar dynamic in Abigail Thorn’s paraphrase of Carole Pateman’s thought in The Sexual Contract amid her recent video The Hidden Rules of Modern Society on Philosophy Tube.