Hegemony…
Tags: White Privilege, Culture, Culture Change, Racism, Social Justice

…cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class which manipulates the culture of that society — the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that the imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class…

The definition above was taken from the Wikipedia web-page for cultural hegemony.

The writing below was excerpted from Chapter 3 (The Mystification of Experience, page 49) of a book by psychiatrist R. D. Laing titled “The Politics of Experience” that was released in 1967.

It is not enough to destroy one’s own and other people’s experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. …

…we have to destroy our capacity both to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses…., …we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brain-washing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.

One of the factors that makes clarity of cognition extremely difficult for those who have been indoctrinated from childhood in some culture or other (and we all are born into a culture, but Western European cultures, U.S. culture is one, are much more alike than they are different…it may be that all cultures dominated by or influenced by colonialism have similar features…?) is that in order to learn new ways (hopefully more accurate or at least less influenced by hierarchical notions) of thinking and comprehending, they first have to identify and unlearn the old ways of thinking before they can learn new cognitive skills. This process is harder for adults because there are two things that have to happen…identifying and unlearning the old and then learning the new whereas a child doesn’t have to do the identifying and unlearning.

An example: U.S. culture (Western culture?) encourages and pushes binary thinking…yet…most (all?) characteristics associated with living Earthlings (including plants, I think) are actually located on a continuum. Our thinking is nudged by our culture toward the extremes obscuring the reality that we’re dealing with a continuum. That binary usually is arranged in a hierarchy of superior and inferior. E.g., Tall, Short.

Think about all the characteristics you have in your thinking repertory that you apply to living things. Is that characteristic more accurately located on a continuum or is it a true binary configuration? Binary fits easily into boxes, continuum doesn’t.

No…a group of “elites” didn’t gather in a room and dream up binary stuff, this sort of talking/thinking evolved over time and since it worked to keep (or maybe even elevate) phenomena that those with power favored (here in the U.S., since the Europeans invaded, my presumption is that our culture has always been dominated by wealthy white men. I can’t think of a time when it wasn’t and I became a young adult in the 1960s which is the closest I ever perceived it coming to not being dominated by wealthy white men. A number of murders of public figures (Medgar Evers, JFK, RFK, Malcom X, MLKjr) ended that. Challenges to any of the “isms” of oppression often elicit violence, which tells you that you’re dealing with folks who care little about others…what they want is power…mainly (I suspect) to assuage their fear.).

At least that’s the way I suspect that it works? We’ve inherited the culture of our ancestors and I’ve been thinking about ways we might have ended up with a culture (culture being, in part, how we think about and understand things) that tends to uphold lots of crappy stuff but doesn’t appear to do so.

I’m reluctant to sort folks into “good guys” or “bad guys” (binary thinking), rather I work toward viewing folks as just trying to figure things out and using the tools (language, ways of thinking) they inherited and coming up with ways of comprehending and doing that are more or less harmful…especially to those with little social power. That more or less harmful continuum might reflect a continuum of the experience of fear…the more afraid someone is the more threat they feel and the more likely they are to use violence to reduce their experience of threat/fear. I’m speculating, I don’t “know”.

My evaluating is (I hope) more oriented toward impact rather than intent and toward actions rather than beings. Talking about “good guys” or “bad guys” is really a shorthand notion for evaluating impact and one that can easily get reified and thereby create confusion.

I’m working at sorting this all into some sort of configuration that helps me understand Earthlings. But, I have ingrained in me the very often misleading Western predilection of seeking to explain things in universals (which corresponds to groups or collectives) instead of specific situations (which corresponds to individuals)…which is paradoxical since here in the U.S. there is so much emphasis on individualism. Jeez…like I wrote elsewhere…thinking is hard.