After all, to other up (“Fuck you pig!” from a poor PoC) is awesome and is a fundamentally different act than to other down (“The poor are stupid.” from a rich white lady).
No.
No, no, no, damn it, for the love of all that’s good in the world, NO.
The rich white person who thinks that people on welfare thinks that they’re punching up.
The “free speech advocates” who quote Strom (and attribute to Voltaire) and say, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize” think that they’re punching up.
The people who rail against granting minorities equal representation in the name of meritocracy, because the system has been set up to give white people higher grades, think that they’re punching up.
Yes, the punching is worse when it’s actually going down, rather than up, because the punch has more power behind it. But it’s not a “fundamentally different act.” Dehumanization is dehumanization is dehumanization. You need to convince yourself that these people are not, in fact, people, to make it okay to hurt them. And you know what? Some people need to get hurt, so, sure, convincing yourself that it’s okay to hurt them may be necessary.
What’s not necessary, though, is to lie about the nature of what you’re doing.
A fundamental truth of the universe is that human beings are awful. You don’t have to lie to yourself to convince yourself about that. This means that yes, you’re probably awful, too! I have no idea who any of you out there are, or what you do, but, congratulations! You’re awful! So am I! We have that in common!
You are capable of the same atrocity, and indifference to atrocity, that pretty much everyone else in the world is capable of. You have participated in a system that does awful things, to your own benefit. You have bought goods that were created from exploitative labour processes; you have spent money that has caused the death of innocents; the taxes you’ve remitted to the government have been used to torture people, to kill people in far away countries who are no threat to you, to your family, or to anyone you care about.
“Cops are pigs” and “politicians are rats” and “terrorists are rabid canids” shouldn’t be necessary to hurt someone. Calling someone human should be sufficient, should be among the worst insults possible! If you look around and see what humans do to each other every day, you shouldn’t need to reduce them to something less-than-human to justify hurting them. A rabid canid isn’t responsible for its behaviour: it has no sense of morality, it has no conscience. A domesticated canid knows only “good canid” and “bad canid”; a feral canid knows only “part of my pack,” and “not part of my pack”; a rabid canid doesn’t even know any of that. Calling a murderous human being a “rabid canid” is an insult to rabid canids, who are animals suffering from a horrible disease and don’t know any better.
What makes reducing a human being by calling them “animals” so horrible is that, even with awfulness encoded into their very nature, written into their DNA, humans have the unique ability to choose to be not-awful. The ability to choose makes our good deeds better, and our awful deeds worse. So, when you call a corrupt cop “a pig,” you’re absolving them of their responsibility to not gorge themselves at the trough, because that’s what pigs do. When you call a dishonest politician “a rat,” you’re absolving them of sneaking off with your stuff and spreading disease and rot, because that’s just the nature of a rat. When you call a terrorist a “rabid canid,” you’re absolving them of the moral obligation to not murder, because a rabid animal is literally reduced to the instinct to attack anything it comes across.
If we’re not allowing ourselves to lie about what America is anymore, take a step further back and stop lying about what humanity is. We have so much potential, so much we could accomplish if we simply looked into ourselves, examined everything going into each of our choices closely, and chose to be not-awful. We won’t, though.
That’s the real tragedy here. We are the stories we tell, and so many of the stories we tell are designed to reinforce the awfulness. And, chief among those stories? The story that you are this awesome creature, with a conscience that prevents you from doing anything bad, and that people who do bad things do them because they’re bad examples of humanity, more animal than person. It’s bullshit, and it’s harmful bullshit.
Calling someone an animal in order to make them okay to hate or hurt has one purpose, and one purpose alone: it prevents you from holding a mirror to yourself, and seeing exactly how horrible humans are, how horrible you yourself are. And that’s the worst thing of all, because until you see that — truly see it — and recognize it in yourself, you can’t reject it and choose to be better than your vestigial primate instincts. You can’t truly be moral until you recognize the forces in you that are… not immoral, very few people deliberately and consciously act against their own convictions, but amoral. The instincts that tell you to attack threats and out-group members, that tell you to go against your better judgement to conform to your own group, that tell you that something is okay because you or your in-group is doing it, but not-okay when someone else does it, because you’re moral creatures; you’re humans and they’re animals.
No.
We’re all humans, and that is a horrible thing to be. So we have to be better. Because we can be better.
And it starts with discarding dehumanization, holding up the mirror, and gazing into the eyes of the monster within.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t judge people for letting their own monster within run around unleashed. Absolutely we should, and we must. But pretending that having a monster influencing your actions is somehow unusual is only giving your own monster tacit permission to act out, and to ignore it or excuse it when it does. And that, my friends, is what causes all of this that we’re currently experiencing. And that’s what has to stop.
