How to Reognize Oppression

 

Amanda Gorman

Many Canadian universities now require an essay to apply for competitive programs. Most competitive of all, reputedly, is McMaster Medicine. And many of the essay topics assigned are concerning. They seem designed to elicit one’s political position; and could be used to select and exclude on this basis.

Here is one example from a recent intake:

OPTION A: In The Hill We Climb (2021), National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman wrote "...being American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it." What aspect of the past will you play a role in repairing?

It is not possible, of course, to either step into or change the past. If there are wrongs in the past, they cannot be “repaired.”

This sounds as though one must embrace the current leftist call for “equity” in order to enter medical school. One must endorse and practice discrimination on the grounds of physical appearance or ethnic identity. 

In justice, granted, if harm is done to an individual, they deserve compensation--by whatever party or corporate entity caused the harm.

One cannot, however, simply look at someone—say, their skin colour--and know they have been mistreated; any more than you can look at their skin colour and know they are lazy, or avaricious. This is the essence of prejudice.

Nor can you rely on people self-reporting the matter. If saying you are abused gets you privileges or payouts, many who aren’t will claim to have been abused.

However, there actually is a way to tell—and doctors are best positioned to do so. 

The Center for Disease Control, official arm of the US government, notes that, “In one long-term study, as many as 80% of young adults who had been abused met the diagnostic criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder at age 21.”  Psychology Today maintains that “In almost every case of significant adult depression, some form of abuse was experienced in childhood, either physical, sexual, emotional or, often, a combination.”  

A recent study by Martin Teicher at Harvard, confirmed by other researchers,  demonstrates that childhood abuse causes permanent changes in the brain.  

The Wikipedia entry for “Depression” accordingly gives, at this writing, under “Causes”:

Adversity in childhood, such as bereavement, neglect, mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and unequal parental treatment of siblings can contribute to depression in adulthood. Childhood physical or sexual abuse in particular significantly correlates with the likelihood of experiencing depression over the life course.  

Childhood abuse has also been found also to correlate strongly with panic attacks, dissociation, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder (manic depression), schizophrenia, alcoholism, addiction, drug abuse, and eating disorders.  

Childhood abuse has also been found to produce higher rates of cardiovascular disease (heart disease), lung and liver disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, asthma, and obesity.  

A summary meta-analysis by Judith Carroll and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), concludes that the psychological damage resulting from childhood abuse and its effects on physical health are “well documented.”

Medical doctors are thus in a favourable position to diagnose abuse, from its established symptoms—not just current child abuse, but past abuse. This could be a genuinely just basis for determining compensation.

But if a student suggested this to McMaster, would he or she be permitted to become a doctor?

Faux Oppression

 

Moving to a new home has brought me to the growing revelation, after just a few days, of how sordid and constrained my previous situation had been. How did I stand it?

Leading to the broader insight: people can get used to anything. Like the proverbial frog put in water and the heat gradually turned up.

For this reason, you simply will not hear complaints from the currently oppressed. If you hear complaints, it means one of two things: either you are hearing from the previously oppressed, but not oppressed now, about what used to be their situation; or else you are hearing from the habitually relatively privileged, not getting what they have come to expect.

The former seems to be the case of blacks in America; they are far more vocally irate and discontented now than they were, say, in the 1940s, or the 1960s, when they had good reason to be irate and discontented. Now they are systemically favoured, with “affirmative action.”

The latter is the case of feminists. Girls are generally raised as princesses, spoiled and indulged. Boys are treated more severely. Any attractive woman continues to be indulged in adulthood; ugly women are more likely to become feminists. And then, in the 1960s, something changed. Technological improvements in the home made it possible, for the first time, for men to live comfortably as bachelors. Suddenly women could not count so automatically on the deference to which they were accustomed, and which they expected from observing their mothers and fathers. Therefore the big trouble began.

Onde will note, however, that when women, now relatively obsolete in their traditional role, move into the male workforce, they always still demand special deference. They must be accommodated.

Indians, Canada’s “First Nations,” contrary to the constant claim, have always objectively been treated with deference and special consideration by the rest of society. This has not been good for their long term interests—just as it is not in their interest to spoil a child. Worse, Indian children are often raised without a father in the home, which usually means, without discipline. Therefore, like a pet that is taught to beg, they are always at the table looking woeful. They deserve whatever is on your plate, and are not yet getting it.

In the meantime, by appeasing these inappropriate and unreasonable demands, we are all able to comfortably continue to ignore the oppressed, indeed to comfortably oppress and scapegoat them: children, the young, the “mentally ill.” Working class white men: “rednecks,” “hillbillies.”

And so spins the world.

The Real World of Oppression and Abuse

It is not easy to tell just who is being abused or oppressed. Most often, most people get it backwards.

For example, if the government mandates discrimination in favour of a given group, as with “affirmative action,” that group is by definition not being socially discriminated against. Everyone else is. Indeed, the moment a given group is commonly understood to be discriminated against, it necessarily isn't. Otherwise the social consensus would be contradicting itself, believing both A and not-A at once—that the group is genuinely inferior or immoral, and that it is wrong to think this. Perfect Orwellian doublethink.

The group might have been discriminated against, as a group, in the past. But it certainly is not being discriminated against in the present.

Does discriminating in favour of a group now make up for discriminating against “them” in the past? Surely not, because the same people are no longer involved. It simply adds a second wrong to the first, and evey discrimination _for_ a given group is automatically and equally a new discrimination _against_ another.

It is even difficult, as Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, to realize whether you yourself are being abused or oppressed. Nobody was more concerned about slight gradations in skin tone than blacks in the Jim Crow south; and it has always been easy to find Jewish anti-Semites. The problem is that, if you are really consistently oppressed and abused, you internalize it. Only when this discrimination or ill-treatment does not tally with previous experience are you likely to feel suddenly and urgently that there is something wrong. Consider the children's story of the Princess and the Pea.

Some people do have a good enough moral compass to see through a consistent oppression. But it takes more than that to speak out. If you are genuinely oppressed, you know that the consequences of doing so will be dire; and you have little reason to hope things could ever be any different. Accordingly, true oppression is rarely brought to public attention, at least until the perpetrators and victims are all dead.

It is the squeaking wheel, however, that get the grease. Necessarily, this is not going to the the group that deserves it. Accordingly, all government or social attempts to respond to them, to reward them for squeaking, are going to worsen the overall social problem of oppression and abuse. This extends necessarily, I think, even down to any kind of workplace committee to enforce “respect” or prevent “bullying.” These become ideal tools for bullies, and magnets for them; as witness, in Canada, Richard Warman, a classic bully. Or this recent news story, of a lobbyist against domestic violence who recently shot her husband dead on a street corner:

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/woman-charged-with-killing-344266.html


Consider some historic examples. We can see well enough now that the Protestant English oppressed the Catholic Irish over hundreds of years. But notice that the leaders of the Irish protest against this, right up to 1916, were almost all Anglo-Irish and Protestant. They were landed gentry, people who were accustomed to, and expected privilege. Their noses went out of joint when they discovered, nonetheless, that they were discriminated against in England by association with the Catholic native Irish.

When independence came, they too found the association unfortunate, and split off into Ulster. Only then did we begin to hear Catholic voices.

Before, during, and after the American Civil War, with rare exceptions, it was not the blacks whose voices were heard demanding freedom: there were black slaves fighting for the Confederacy. It was the white Northern abolitionists, on the one hand, and the Southern slave-owners, the white gentry, on the other, who protested loudly that their human rights were being violated—the latter demanding “states' rights.” It was a hundred years past the war before the blacks themselves started loudly demanding civil rights.

South Africa is a close parallel. It was the Boers, the white settlers, who raised their voices in protest against ill-treatment, by the British and the Empire. It was not the blacks, up until the example of the civil rights movement in the US made some think there might be something wrong with the current state of affairs.

Nazi Germany? Hitler rose to power on a platform of “affirmative action” for the poor downtrodden Aryan German working man, cruelly oppressed by the unjust Treaty of Versailles, on the one hand, and the rich capitalist Jewish bankers on the other.

Canada's “First Nations”? When the Liberal government in the sixties proposed the obvious and then-thought-enlightened measure of desegregation and making native Indians full citizens like any other, as King was demanding at the time for blacks—human equality, in other words—the Indian lobby raised merry hell. The last thing in the world they wanted was to surrender their privileges. The modern “aboriginal” movement has risen from this fight against equality. Treaty rights had to be expressly written into the Canadian Bill of Rights—as an exception to the general doctrine of equal rights.

As these examples show, it is generally “affirmative action” in favour of the “officially oppressed” that produces the very worst oppressions, abuses, and violations of human rights: in history, and in our society today.

Consider, for one example, feminism. It is taken for granted by the social consensus, but it is far from obvious that women have ever been an oppressed class. It is at least as easy to make the argument that they have always been pampered, protected, and favoured. So what happened? They suffered some loss to their expected position of privilege, perhaps, due to the First and then Second World War, in which men rather dramatically showed how valuable they really were when the civilizational chips were down. The “Playboy philosophy” of the fifties and sixties was surely a bit of masculine triumphalism. At the same time, the progress in automation of housework reduced the importance of the woman's traditional role in the family. As Hugh Hefner himself pointed out, before he introduced the idea in the 1950's, the notion of a “bachelor pad” was unthinkable. Single men lived in boarding houses: the work of maintaining a home was just too great.

So, feminism: a traditionally privileged group raising merry hell over the sudden loss of their privilege.

It has resulted, not in equality, but in systematic favoritism towards women, and discrimination against men, in every aspect of the working world, as has always been true in the home.

But it is not men who have suffered the most. Consider children. They have lost their very right to life—abortion is now, in Canada, both unrestricted and fully paid for by the state. All the hue and cry about “child abuse” actually systematically promotes child abuse: studies consistently show that the mother is the one individual most likely to abuse a child, and yet the “child abuse” lobby works feverishly to separate children whenever possible from their fathers and from the extended family, giving any abusive woman who cares for it a completely free hand.

And everywhere, children are restricted, repressed, regulated, and generally frowned upon as social undesirables. Especially boys; but girls too.

Consider the “diversity” quotas in universities that favour black or Hispanic students with lower grades. Do they help blacks and Hispanics? Quite possibly not—they simply ghettoize their degrees. On the other hand, they severely discriminate against Asian Americans and Jews, who score disproportionately high in academic testing. In doing this, the new quotas replicate pretty exactly the old quotas on the number of Jews admitted to universities. Society as a whole also suffers, of course, by having less-qualified doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so forth.

“Diversity” quotas also still favour women, insanely, even though women are a clear majority of the students at universities.

So, in the midst of all this misdirection, how does one figure out who is oppressed and who is not?

There are a few simple tests.

Consider the following statement:

“All X are violent.”

Now substitute quantities for X. Would this be socially acceptable if the word were “blacks”? How about “men”? “All men are violent?” Hmm-suddenly, no problem. When the answer is not the same, group A is plainly socially privileged, and group B is oppressed. Go ahead and do the test with assorted groups.

Of course, it only works when “violence” is part of the stereotype of the target oppressed group. To make the test complete, you have to try it with an assortment of socially disapproved attributes.

“All X are stupid.”

“All X are greedy.”

“All X are selfish.”

“All X are lazy.”

If the same group sounds okay when used in a number of different sentences like this, that is a meaure that they are particularly badly oppressed. If the same groups sounds scandalous when used with a number of different sentences like this, that is a measure that they are particularly highly privileged. Note that just sounding odd is not the same as sounding scandalous; consider whether you might get in trouble for saying X at a society cocktail party, or in print.

Following this procedure, you can come up with a point score. You might even make it pretty scientific and objective, by summoning a cocktail party of people who do not know one another as a focus group, and sticking to the Seven Deadly Sins.

You can also do something like this whenever you hear a general comment about a group.

“All heterosexual sex is rape.” Many argue Andrea Dworkin never really said this, and many mock it, but it seems to be socially okay to say it.

But how about “All homosexual sex is rape”?

See those red flags going up?


A second test, specifically for abuse, is to apply Aristotle's law of non-contradiction: if a group or individual is blamed both for doing A and for not doing A, you have clear proof that there is nothing wrong with their actions: the problem is who they are. In other words, classic, textbook abuse or oppression.

So, if America was wrong to the left for not going in to Afghanistan to save Afghan women from the oppression of the Taliban back in the nineties, and then wrong to go into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban in the oughts, the problem is not America, but anti-American prejudice on the left. If the government was supposed to desegregate schools back in the fifties, to end oppression of blacks, and supposed to create special schools for black children in the 'oughts, to end oppression of blacks, the problem here is not oppression of blacks. If, when a man has four wives, it is oppression of women, but when a woman has four husbands, it is oppression of women, woman are not being oppressed.

You can even try this in your own life; and you may be surprised what you discover. Are you commonly put into such double binds, in which you know that no matter which of the available choices you make, you will be blamed either way? “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Then you are being abused, and that person is your abuser.