I recognize that it’s speaking to an underlying emotional truth - something I’ve known on a gut level for a while now but can’t quite put my finger on. I know it’s not, as I’ve seen liberals argue, that it’s an excuse to legitimize violence against them (their own violence is all the justification one needs) or some kind of “No True Scotsman” argument. There’s something deeper and more fundamental, something to do with how the nature of their class position causes them to set themselves apart from and above the vast majority of humanity. Anyone who can help me put this into words?

  • semioticbreakdown [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    Paulo Freire might be who youre looking for.

    Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity, has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to accept dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of aliena-tion, for the affirmation of men as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

    The attempt to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically: a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men’s having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others’ having, to consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.

    From Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

    It’s a willingness to divest themselves of their humanity, by dehumanizing others, in order to maintain class relations and further the accumulation of capital. In doing so they reduce everyone to objects or machines in service of capital. There is a parallel here with the conception of animals as not “having souls” and not feeling pain. It was not always this way in the western world, but came to be stripped from them in the process of historical development as a result of material conditions (The Christian conception of “dominion” thus allowing you to do whatever youd like to animals was not the causal factor, but apologia for the way things were - post hoc justification for the keeping of animals as property). Similarly there should be no surprise that the machine conception of the organism has arisen as a common way of thinking about the brain, people, animals, and so on. In some sense, it’s true; we are all reduced to machines by capital, our agency and autonomy is subordinated to a hierarchy and collective conscious over which we have no say. But it becomes true of all of us. The bourgeois are not human - becoming bourgeois won’t make you more human.