Personal Resources
Internalized Oppression
In Sustainability and Well-Being Asoka Bandarage argues that “the ecosystem and human communities are collapsing due largely to...incredible technological and material growth, [which is causing] insecurity, fear, and conflict across the world.” She argues the cause is not the current financial system, globalization, or capitalism, but “the deeper psychological dualism of self versus other on which all other dualisms and systems of domination are based.” Aggravating this dynamic, according to Bandarage, “narrowly based social movements” foment fear and incite divisions, while “analyses that go to the root of our predicament have virtually disappeared.”
Hector E. Garcia, in an Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies article, wrote: “[Humans] are increasingly relying on the hard-wired fear, anger, and aggression in the human reptilian brain…. Awe over the industrial and scientific revolutions lured us to reduce reality to the tangible…. Self-abasement [gives] us license to become indifferent to the suffering of others…. [We] are blocked by the mindsets of winning-is-the-only-thing and looking-out-for-#1.”
During his only visit to the United States, Albert Camus addressed inner (subjective) realities as well as outer (objective) realities in his “The Human Crisis” lecture. He said: “Yes. there is a human crisis because in today’s world we can contemplate the death or the torture of a human being with a feeling of indifference, friendly concern, scientific interest, or simple passivity…. It no longer matters that we respect or prevent a mother’s suffering. What counts is ensuring the triumph of a doctrine…. Mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe…. Each of us carries [this venom] in our own hearts…. You don’t think badly because you think you are a murderer, you are a murderer because you think badly. Hence, you can be a murderer without ever having killed, and this is why we are all more or less murderers…. We are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared…. Whenever we judge France, or any other country, or any matter, in terms of power, we are aiding and abetting a conception of man that leads inevitably to his mutilation. We are reinforcing the thirst for domination and we are headed towards the sanctioning of murder….”
Social stratification today is often justified with the myth of meritocracy, which is alleged to be a system in which people move up social ladders based on their talents and achievement. But Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues: “Merit is a sham…. Middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work…. Only the rich can win…. Meritocracy now concentrates advantage and sustains toxic inequalities…. Merit itself has become a counterfeit virtue, a false idol,…a mechanism for the concentration of wealth and privilege across generations. A caste order that breeds rancor and division. A new aristocracy, even…. The avenues that once carried people from modest circumstances are narrowing dramatically. Middle-class families cannot afford the elaborate schooling that rich families buy….” Based on narrow, prejudicial criteria to determine skill, this meritocracy justifies the cutthroat upward redistribution of wealth, power, and status and claims inequality promotes the general welfare.
In Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton examined the impact of status—“one’s position in society...[and] one’s value and importance in the eyes of the world,” which increasingly is “awarded in relation to financial achievement.” He reports: “The consequences of high status are pleasant. They include resources, freedom, space, comfort, time and, as importantly perhaps, a sense of being cared for and thought valuable—conveyed through invitations, flattery, laughter…, deference, and attention.” But this pattern prompts status anxiety, rooted in worry “that we are failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.” Our position on the social ladder is of great concern because “our self-conception is so dependent on what others make of us…. Our position hangs on what we can achieve.”
Commenting on Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?”, Thoman Friedman reports that “the meritocratic promise that if you work hard and go to college, you will rise” carries with it “a double message” because, as Sandel writes, “It congratulates the winners but denigrates the losers.” It communicates that a “college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem.” This belief devalues the work of those without a college degree,
As expressed by Sandel, “Elites have so valorized a college degree—both as an avenue for advancement and as the basis for social esteem—that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate, and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college,” As Friedman puts it, this dynamic has “led many working people to feel that elites look down on them.”
But it’s more than a feeling. It’s a reality. Even if people without college degrees were never disrespected face-to-face, they would still know that society disrespects them. Their inferior status often leads to a sense of inferiority, or humiliation, which leads to resentment, irrational anger at elites who consider themselves superior, and a willingness to ally with politicians who fight with those elites.