Here in America we like to think of everyone being just as good as everyone else, but of course, as we all know, some folks are more equal than others. We live in a nonstop class war, and while it occasionally flares into confrontation, most of the time it is a “cold” class war, in which the folks who have more are constantly trying to quietly maintain acceptance of this situation on the part of those who have less. And I have to say, I take my hat off to them, both in terms of their persistence but also in terms of their cleverness.
That said, any time you have one group of people exploiting a situation to get more for themselves than anyone else, that is a form of oppression. And most of us here in the USA are victims of it.
Now of course here in America it is no longer legal to oppress people with legislated discrimination and acts of violence. So it has do be done subtly. Turns out it is actually pretty easy to oppress people entirely via propaganda. The oppressed classes become willing participants, even purveyors, of the class differences once you set them in motion and make these differences an element of membership.
I think the most obvious aspect of this shadow oppression comes in the form of “a sense of permission.” This is all from a chapter from my book “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid,” but to reiterate, poor kids (and for that matter most kids who go to any govt funded public school) are steeped in the idea of having to “ask permission.” It is nonstop training in being told you cannot act on your own, you must always seek permission from higher authority to do anything.
So just to see how this plays out, let me ask you: do you have “inhibitions”? For example, do you feel uncomfortable about going out and speaking in public, dancing in public, or singing in front of a crowd? Are you easily shamed and embarrassed by critical comments of something you posted online, to the point that you either 1) just snipe back with a more insulting tone or 2) stop posting comments in online discussions altogether?
Or how about this: Have you ever thought of writing a book, but when you approach the concept, do you immediately look for some “professional” person to advise you on how to do it? Do you fret over what people will think of it to the point that you give up? Do you edit for hours, scared to death that you may have made a grammatical error?
If you have answered “yes” to any of these questions, you are not just shy, cautious, polite, or uniquely sensitive. You have had freedom and power removed. You have lost your sense of permission, hence, you have been “oppressed.” It’s all internal now. And it’s a little like discovering you are on candid camera, because it all happened over years of conditioning, without you knowing it.
The thing about class differences is, there are many privileges and perks that people enjoy, and there are simply not enough of them to go around. So if the “have nots” start complaining, this might result in the “haves” having less. So a constant effort must be made to convince the have-nots to accept their situation. A big part of that is convincing the “have-nots” that they do not have permission to even complain, much less actually ever get anything. Because it’s your own internal sense of permission, it is very hard to get past it just with external actions or by changing a law.
The mid 20th century saw tremendous social change in terms of people in oppressed classes removing the official non-permission to have this job or sit in this part of the bus or whatever. But changing the laws was just step one. The cultural legacy is still there. It’s not all about the official rules. A lot of it is about cultural legacies, about fitting in, your social mores, and what someone in your class or neighborhood is “allowed” to do. To fix the problem requires internal reworking your insides as well as changing of official external rules.
Instead of constantly trying to amass extra energy to overcome a sense of non-permission, it is much more efficient to remove the resistance, by dealing with the “de-permissioning” of your spirit that once happened. It is just one part of “getting in touch with your inner rich kid.”
© Justin Locke
