The seduction of therapeutic alienation.

in racism •  4 years ago 

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By annihilating one's own individuality and personal responsibility and joining a group of victims or so-called oppressed minorities, one can flatter oneself with the comforting delusion that someone else is responsible for one's own personal failure. It is within that group that one can sate their isothymos; that desire for equality and anonymity.

All are equal within a group; all share the same fate. It is comforting to tell oneself the lie that nothing one does will make any difference because the deck has been stacked against you. Freedom is not only difficult, it is terrifying to those who don't know how to make use of it.

Psychotherapy aims chiefly at making you feel good about yourself. You can feel better about yourself if you can externalize blame, guilt and shame, and put someone else at fault for your misery or failure. It's good if you can blame a whole other group for all the ills of your group, or even better if you can blame some vague and mystical systemic oppression, but no therapy of alienation comforts and instils a sense of pride and righteous superiority than being able to blame a combination of groups of supposedly racist people, the oppressive System, and historical disenfranchisement.

With all of these convenient causes for your failure, you can feel good about yourself―you can enjoy well-feeling―while you completely excuse yourself from actually having to be a good person or having to take responsibility for your own well-being.

"It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarified for us to breathe...the paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them." — Steven Pressfield

"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free" ~attributed without verification to historian Edward Gibbon.

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