[Medium.com censored my months-old account. I suspect it is because my posts had a conservative lean. I don’t know what to do with my posts, so I might as well repurpose them here. Tell me what you think.]
There are oppressed people today in North Korea, China, Ukraine, and various parts of Africa and South America. They are not our subject. I am writing about (typically, younger) people living in rich nations in the West who have convinced themselves into the state of oppression.
The self-exalted oppressed have experienced no real oppression according to the standard definition of the term but want to reap the benefits of the classification, most of all the feeling of moral righteousness over the other. This replaces the deep guilt many younger people feel because their lives are relatively easy but they have been exhaustively informed about how hard things were in the past.
For many of these individuals, the Past exists only as a gossamer ether. Because it is mostly encountered on screens nowadays, the Past might as well be another TV show — we have grown up in the age of content and fail to distinguish between fact and content, because fact is a distant and nebulous ghost. Television is much more real to the young today than the Past because it’s there. It has a room. It can be watched.
TV is the projection of distant events, and the Past has come to occupy this same intangible category — Distant Events. The Past is now content. But the Past is a special kind of content — it is equipment. “I deserve something for the suffering of the past,” says the self-exalted. These young people have become self-exalted because they have lied to themselves for so long that they have ceased to distinguish between truth and lies, like Fyodor Pavlovich from The Brothers Karamazov:
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love… […] A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it?” (pg. 44, Pevear & Volokhonsky trans.)
To be fair, this is not entirely our generation’s fault. We are guinea pigs for the Internet and the age of ubiquitous content. Nevertheless, there is work to be done.
For the long-gone self-deceivers it will take a sledgehammer event to reinstate truth’s authority. The event must convince the self-deceiver not primarily of truth’s reality- that can be overridden with the endless supply of lies- but also of truth’s utility.
An example: In Alexander Mackendrick’s great film The Sweet Smell of Success Sydney Falco (played by Tony Curtis) lies habitually for a sensationalist news rag, betraying and maligning many innocent men. Near the end of the film, he demands that the truth be told when he is framed for suppressing evidence and a damning lie is finally told about him. In desperation he calls for the truth’s help because he sees its utility, now that its revelation benefits him. “For God’s sake, tell him the truth!” he pleads, like a good hypocrite.
The self-deceiver must be convinced first that the self-lie, though immediately pleasing, inevitably grows into a devouring beast. They must see that lies hurt others, but also the self- unfortunately, the self-deceiver is likely to care only about the latter.
If the self-deceiver does not learn this and happens to occupy a correct position, they are increasingly likely to claim the available benefits of being considered oppressed. With such a juicy wealth of advantage available to pluck from the perennial tree, they will persuade themselves into the state of the self-exalted oppressed.
Now convinced that they are “oppressed” according to a skewed bastardization of the notion, they award themselves privileges over their “oppressors.” They selectively follow and enforce personal social laws that benefit them; that is the entire aim of the self-deception that is done by the Ego overpowering the superego and latching on to an illusion of moral justification. A common thread, predictably, is “by any means necessary,” which translates first to “rules for thee but not for me.”
This Ego convinces itself that its behavior is in fact for others and only circumstantially includes the self. It has found a shortcut to being completely selfish- by classifying its selfish action as action intended for the benefit of the group, which is in truth the tribe.
Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness Unto Death that the self is a self-relating self, and the common condition of despair is an interruption in that self-relation. The human creature is endowed with materials that invent a conception of self-self as so inclined by the purity of the creature’s spirit. For materialists, we might characterize the issue with the astonishing opening words of Alexandre Kojeve’s highly influential [as well as controversial and despised] Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: “Man is self-consciousness,” combined with Feuerbach’s well-known “Man is what he eats.”
In the far-gone days of unrepentant self-deception, the self has long ceased to understand what hypocrisy is, except as the term can be weaponized against others. Because the self-lie is incongruent with the truth, they must externalize and superimpose it over their eyes as a pair of spectacles, cutting away all undesired facts - like cramming a Rembrandt canvas into a post-it-sized frame.
If the self lies to itself, there is an interruption in the self-relating self that diminishes the solvency of the spirit (or mind) directing the self’s action in the world. The self has entered a state of pure and encompassing inauthenticity (or bad faith, take your pick - the concepts are essentially alike) and is unable to do the right thing for the right reasons and therefore will only rarely and circumstantially do right — like any large corporation, it, as a rule, cannot perform morally good actions. At bottom, everything is for the sake of profit.
We should have some sympathy, because the cause of all this is despair. These self-exalted are unprepared for the assault of meaninglessness that society launches upon them and have built walls towered so high that they block the sun. They feel they need to be suffering and to fight against suffering because they have not had their war like the past generations. War locates meaning both materially and metaphysically - there is a reason to fight and a reason to believe in God. If there is no war, it must be invented. Beneath all of this lies a noble instinct. But as Kierkegaard adds, despair without faith leads to sin.
Knowing that there is something missing deep down, this subject will languish in a state of impotence due to the thorn of truth poking into its side. Like in an old video game, every slash of the sword fails to cut. It has left port in an old rickety rowboat, hoping to reach a promised land rather than paddle back to the jetty. Every sprung leak is a blessing in disguise that encourages the sailor to save himself and return to the truth. My reader will likely know this quotation already - it is essential to understanding human psychology:
“ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually- memory yields.” (Nietzsche, pg. 80 of “Beyond Good and Evil”)
We should acknowledge that the tools for self-deception and distraction are today nearly ubiquitous. We are stumbling in the dark from the dizziness of peering into the abyss of endless knowledge. For all these human tendencies, the self-exalted oppressed are becoming very numerous.
Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” (in his Tractatus) and that all philosophical problems result from confusions of language. The self-exalted are now creating philosophical problems with the deliberate misuse of language. As we all know, we’ve reached what Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoevksy predicted - in fact, we reached its zenith at least a decade ago.
I propose a solution: We must re-localize the war. All these self-exalted types are concerned about oppression. But if the younger generations are “oppressed” in any meaningful sense, then it is not by “systemic racism” or “rape culture.” The true oppressors — if we can call them that — are using these shifty terms to distract us. You are oppressed by your bank, by your school, by Big Tech, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex — but inside all of this, most of all you are oppressed by yourself. The individual’s war is revenge. Dismissing any and all violence, let us re-direct our war toward the real culprits - the schools, the banks, the large corporations.