by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Aug. 19, 2005
Try and tell me you haven't seen this happen. You are sitting around with friends and acquaintances talking about some topic or the other, at a dinner party perhaps. Someone there is more articulate, better informed, and, I think understandably, more passionate about the topic.
Are the rest of the people in the discussion pleased at discovering this resource so close at hand? Not likely, unless the person is seen as a celebrity, as "other," as someone unlike the other guests by being seen, in some way, as being superior. More likely, if this person is seen as a peer, as a member of the class of people represented there, they will become the focus of negative metalanguage, dirty looks, interruptions, unnecessary and contrarian responses, and before long the "expert" is silenced or maybe just leaves early.
The same person can be invited to "give a talk" and in the discussion afterwards is equally distressed by sycophantic and superciliously fawning responses from an audience consisting, essentially of the same sorts of people who were so dismissive at the dinner party. In either case, real discussion with real give and take does not happen and needed learning does not occur.
So what is going on here? Why are we so eager to shoot ourselves in the foot this way? Why do we find it so hard to learn from each other, to share openly, to allow ourselves to be influenced by other, ordinary, people who just happen to have more access to knowledge and experience on a particular topic than we posses?
Welcome to the inner workings of a class-based dominator culture. We have all been programed to the war of one against all, the incessant inner voice that drives us to compete for status in the group. We have been subtly conditioned from the earliest age to resent anyone in the group who appears dominant, even if it is only in the context of simple conversation. We have learned to dominate others of our class when we can get away with it, and resist domination by others of our class at nearly all costs.
On the other hand, we have also been conditioned to be uncritically accepting of the views and "information" of people we recognize as being of a superior class. This is the mainspring of our enslavement. This is why we can not liberate ourselves from our parasitic elite. This is our undoing.
Authoritarian societies all function this way. The US is a relatively new country, but as an example of an authoritarian European culture, we express a very ancient outlook on life.
This kind of society is organized optimally for only two things, war and conquest. In these patterns of early conditioning can be found the seeds of all our identified social problems, racism, corruption, drug abuse, crime, you name it. It is the poison pill that makes solidarity and mutual support so needed, and yet, so impossible.
Sometimes this is referred to as a "slave mentality." But I think this approach fails to enlighten. An addiction to rank, especially ambition to improve one's rank in society, is a silent killer of human potential and a built in lever that is used to enslave us to the service of our social betters.
The real proof of my assertion comes in the experience of those unique situations where considerations of rank are suspended. Most notably during disasters, great and small, the earthquake, the accident at the side of the road, we tend to let this go, to become, if only temporarily, only human like every one else with only a desire to help.
In fact some people become so conscious of their superior rank that they loose connection with their humanness and come to see people of lower rank as innately inferior. Numerous social science experiments have demonstrated that this switch can be turned on in almost anyone, anytime, when they are placed arbitrarily in positions of power over others. Power putrefies, or as Lord Acton would have it, power corrupts. It also segregates. Because of these built in inter-group conflicts arising from rank competition, we end up being comfortable in groups made up entirely of people exactly like ourselves, and from who we can learn essentially nothing new. We trap ourselves in helplessness.
So our challenge as mere humans is to de-condition ourselves to the imperatives of our cultural programing and learn to form community with each other before this dominator culture manages to stir up so much war and oppression that the whole species becomes extinct.
I submit that the first step is to learn to listen to each other without assigning rank. Learn to listen to what the person next to you is saying without consideration for the impulse to discount based on a deeply hidden fear of being put down as less informed, and therefore less worthy. The fact is, that in community, everyone is heard or it is not a community.
Here is another thought to chew on. At the top of the social ranking system people can listen to each other without fear of loss of social rank much better than those of us toward the bottom. At the bottom is the relentless war of one against all.
At the top is a community of us against the rest of them. At the bottom is a gladiatorial, dog eat dog daily experience.
At the top it is all cooperation and mutual aid. Now tell me how a rank based social system can produce anything other than gross social injustice, war and decay?
We may not, individually, be able to stop the merry-go-round of rank and class, but we can make a sincere effort to get off it. Stop struggling and just listen, please.
© by the author.
What do you think?
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This kind of society is organized optimally for only two things, war and conquest.
In these patterns of early conditioning can be found the seeds of all our identified social problems, racism, corruption, drug abuse, crime, you name it.
It is the poison pill that makes solidarity and mutual support so needed, and yet, so impossible.
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I submit that the first step is to learn to listen to each other without assigning rank.
Learn to listen to what the person next to you is saying without consideration for the impulse to discount based on a deeply hidden fear of being put down as less informed, and therefore less worthy.
The fact is, that in community, everyone is heard or it is not a community.
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