Sabotage: Part 10 - The Supreme Problem

The process of repair is being sabotaged. The fourth step of the process of repair is repentance. The fourth sabotage is oppression.

"Stay Healthy": a deeply divisive and polarizing message these days.

Note: this essay was originally published on Revue on October 23, 2022.

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 |

Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 |

Say your name is Joe but I insist your name is Jean.

Let’s say you believe your name is Joe because that’s your name.

Let’s say I insist your name is Jean because I believe I have the right to name you because of who I understand myself to be, and you do not have the right to name yourself because of who I understand you to be.

Let’s say this plays out in a number of other beliefs I have about your identity, and the way you choose to live. Again and again, you establish yourself on your own terms, and again and again I refuse your self, in a way that makes it clear that my ability to accept or refuse you is a core part of how I see myself.

Perhaps you’ve seen this scenario play out in thousands of different ways, and wondered:

What is that?

I’ll tell you what it is.

It’s supremacy.

It’s a belief that I am supreme.

I am demonstrating a popular core belief that there are people who matter, and I am one of those, and there are people who do not matter, and that you are one of those. I am attempting to impose a reality founded on that belief, under which I am the one who gets to define you, and your right to exist is not a foregone conclusion but something that will be established and mediated by what I and other people who matter are comfortable allowing. I’m establishing that my understanding of who you are is more important than your understanding of who you are. I’m establishing my license to permit you to exist.

I am wrong about all that. I actually believe a bunch of unsustainable lies about you and me and how society is supposed to work. Unsustainable because a society that believes that some people do not matter inevitably becomes a society optimized to destroy people, and a society optimized to destroy people will do that as long as there are people, and society is made up of people, so if you’re a person, you might want to oppose me.

Anyway: I’m wrong, and not only wrong but wrong in ways that endanger everyone, including myself.

You have beliefs of your own in this scenario.

You believe I am a supremacist asshole.

It so happens you are correct.

Supremacist because I believe I have supremacy over you, and asshole because that is an asshole thing to believe.

Now, let’s say I have more power behind me than just my own will. Let’s say the world is arranged in ways that force you to live in my lie instead of your truth, and the legal and political apparatuses of our society also impose a reality under which I am the one who gets to decides the limits of your ability and your right to be.

Now I am not just a supremacist, but an oppressor.

I am an oppressor, because power agrees with me. My view is accommodated over yours, even though my view is a lie, even though the accommodation hurts you and dismisses you and your identity.

But what I believe is still a lie. And I am still a supremacist asshole.

I oppose you, but it is not my opposition to you that makes me oppressive, it is my empowered and accommodated supremacy.

If power agreed with you, for example, you would not be an oppressor, even though you oppose me. You would not be an oppressor, because your view is not a lie, and power accommodating your view would not hurt the person you oppose or dismiss them or their identity; it would merely prevent them from doing the same to you.

If you’ve been reading all along, this may all seem obvious and repetitive, but I have always believed it’s good to define your terms at the outset. And, in an age of empowered liars, I’ve found it can be instructive, even powerful, to repeat true things.

Thanks for your patience.

Now that this is out of the way, there is a massive problem in my country (which is the United States) that I’d like to bring to your attention, because I’ve been given to understand that this problem must be solved before anything else can be solved or even considered.

This makes it the supreme problem we face today.

A pretty big problem!

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Here is the supreme problem: conservatives have not been made perfectly comfortable yet, and that is something they find extremely oppressive.

So it’s a problem of oppression. They’re being oppressed. Listen to them; they’ll tell you. They won’t stop telling you.

Let me lay it out for you. We could use conservative Christians as an example; since I’m a Christian, I’m pretty close to this one.

Conservative Christians believe their way of living is the best way to live.

Fair enough, right?

They believe this because as they understand it, their way of living is the way God instructs people to live (you might say it is their interpretation of their understanding of God’s instruction, but that is very oppressive of you). Now, if you haven’t heard of God, well he (he now, always always always he) is a pretty big deal. Such a big deal, in fact, that conservative Christians are also convinced that living in any other way will result in suffering, and in fact should result in suffering—that any suffering that comes from being out of step with their way of living is deserved.

In fact, conservative Christians largely believe that anybody outside of their religious structure of belief will be punished forever and ever and ever in ceaseless unimaginable torment, and not only that this will happen, but it should happen, because this is what all human beings deserve. Before you get too hard on conservative Christians, you should be aware that they also believe they, the conservative Christians, deserve it, too—it’s just it turns out they won’t get what they deserve, they’ll get eternal paradise instead, because they’ve been saved, by which they mean they have lined up their beliefs in the correct way, which means that they believe that God actually personally intervened and paid the cost they owed himself. Many of them also believe they’ve been saved because they were chosen before the start of time to be saved, and they know they were chosen to be saved because they lined up their beliefs in the correct way, and so they live in the best way to live, but that is all pretty chicken-or-the-egg type stuff for some people, by which I mean me.

Either way, lucky them!

Because they’ve been saved from the eternal conscious torment we all deserve, they live in the best way to live, which will not result in punishment, but rather in a meaningful life of satisfaction and joy.

But everyone else that deserves ceaseless unimaginable torturous punishment is absolutely going to get it.

These are religious beliefs, and we have freedom of religion in this country, so they are free to have them. So far, so good, I guess—though one might wonder what practices a group of people might develop, if they believe that everyone else is in line for a well-deserved eternal torment, and they are pre-selected to be spared.

I’ll also notice that for a group that insists that they are only spared because somebody else paid the cost of their failures, they seem singularly hostile to the idea that they should pay any cost for the benefit of someone they think undeserving, if the payment causes them the slightest discomfort.

Here’s where the problem comes in for conservative Christians: there are people who don’t live their way, and yet they seem to also live meaningful lives of satisfaction and joy.

They exist, these other people. They don’t seem to need the conservative Christian way of living to find satisfaction or meaning or morality or joy.

It’s an aggressive act against conservative Christians—an oppressive act.

Gay and trans people exist, for starters, as do other people who do not conform to the gender norms that conservatives consider standard. This is a pretty big problem for conservative Christians. It’s not because they hate queer people, and I have been told it’s very important you understand that. It’s because they are deeply convicted that being queer is a wrong way to live, and they don’t feel they should have to show any sort of tacit approval of gay people by interacting with them in any way that might be construed as approval or tolerance of behavior they personally disagree with, because if they did that, it might give gay people the idea that they don’t deserve to be punished forever and ever in ceaseless torment, and that wouldn’t be a very loving message for them as Christians to deliver.

These beliefs find many forms of expression.

For example, conservative Christians believe they should be able to own and operate businesses without having to serve gay people in any ways that might be seen as approving of or even tolerating the existence of gay people’s gayness, and they believe they should be able to enter any public space they want without ever having to see or hear any positive or even neutral acknowledgement that gay people exist. Most of all, they believe that their children should not have to encounter queerness at all, and certainly not in any sort of positive or even neutral or tolerant way.

Again: conservative Christians don’t hate queer people. It is so important that you understand that. They just don’t agree with queer people—with their existence, I mean. A queer person exists, and a conservative Christian respectfully disagrees with that existence as a matter of deep personal conviction. So we see, conservative Christians think that the question of queer people’s existence should be mediated by the question of whether or not they personally agree with it, and the degree to which they are comfortable with it, and that queer people should be permitted to exist in the world only to the degree that conservative Christians agree they can exist, or else conservative Christians get very uncomfortable, and what so many of us forget these days is that conservative Christian comfort is much more important than anyone else’s.

And from my observation, the thing that comforts conservative Christians more than anything else is seeing people punished for not living in the one good way to live, which is the conservative Christian way of living.

The punishment of other people seems central to their comfort and identity.

I suspect that this is why so many conservatives find the existence of an unpunished gay person so oppressive. The right to be queer ends where a conservative Christian’s line of sight begins, you might say.

It’s a religious belief, remember—a loving one. And we do believe in religious freedom. And who would set themselves in opposition to love?

Right now that belief isn’t being respected—not perfectly, anyway, not yet. Right now society and law to a certain degree expect that gay people will be treated equally under the law, the same as anyone else.

This means that conservative Christians are forced to do terrible, difficult, awful things, things like explaining the existence of queerness to their children, and that’s very hard to do without making it sound as if they bear personal animosity toward queer people (which let’s be sure to remember they do not), all while still making sure their children are very clear and sharp on their parents’ deep conviction that being a queer person is an absolutely unacceptable thing to be, so much so that should any child of theirs make that choice, that child should expect to be shunned and have core aspects of their life and identity rejected, because any loving Christian is so sure that being queer will cause suffering and ostracization, that they will lovingly make sure that it does.

This gets much much much harder to do when gay people are allowed by society and by law to exist in public spaces in the same way as anybody else, because what happens then is that their children can clearly observe that queer people actually are not being rejected by anybody but bigots, and that there are other ways of living than the strictures of conservative Christianity that could lead to meaningful and moral lives of satisfaction and joy, and that could mean that instead of being the loving grateful people they claim to be, their parents might actually be bigots, and their way of living might not be best after all. And that might lead them to wonder if conservative Christians actually live lives that are more moral and more full of satisfaction and joy than all others, or to wonder if conservative Christians even actually live the way they claim to live, or just use their moral posturing as a pretext to push their supremacy.

And that, my friends, means that there is a very real danger that conservative Christian parents won’t have the option of shunning their gay children to punish them for being gay, because their gay children would instead have the option of shunning them and moving on with their lives in a society that accepts gay people.

Hopefully by now you can see why existing is a very aggressive and discomforting thing for queer people to do to conservative Christians, and such an oppressive problem to be solved, a question to be answered.

But don’t worry! Conservatives captured the courts using shocking and scandalous abuses of power. So now they are solving the queer question, and many other questions as well.

There are laws coming and laws already here, designed to walk back all that oppressive societal and legal acceptance of other people; laws that make it illegal to talk about being queer, and illegal to get married to your chosen partner if you’re queer, or to have and raise children if you’re queer, or to exist around children or patients if you’re queer, or to enjoy equal protection under the law for employment or medical care if you’re queer; laws that make it perfectly OK to not provide medical care or prescription medication or even delicious cakes to queer people if you have convinced yourself Jesus wouldn’t want you to. And there are laws coming and some already here that prevent recommended and often life-saving medical treatment to queer children.

And sometimes uncomfortable conservatives are so uncomfortable with the existence of other kinds of people, they can’t even wait for laws. Librarians are being hounded out of their libraries for shelving material that treats queerness as normal, and treating queer people like the equal human beings that they are. And conservatives are even shutting down libraries in their towns, because they’d rather have no library at all than have a library that makes them feel uncomfortable. And an Oklahoma English teacher was just fired, for providing students with a QR code link to the Brooklyn Library; a link providing electronic copies of books banned by conservative school boards for the crime of promoting awareness. And a Nebraska school board just closed a school newspaper after the student journalists ran a Pride month issue. And children are going to start having their genitals inspected, and are increasingly being bullied and harassed for not conforming to gender norms. And a lot of people are going to suffer and die, and so on, which (let’s remember) is exactly what conservative Christians believe should happen, so I imagine conservative Christians will become a bit more comfortable with things than they were before.

And many many many many similar things are happening, as well, as the empowered hate group (which is, it bears frequent mention, what the Republican Party happens to be) gorges itself on the accommodating neutrality and compromise and exoneration that feed their ignorance and complacency and denial.

So in Florida Governor DeSantis is leading an aggressive prosecution of former inmates for the alleged crime of voter fraud—even though they were told by the state that they could vote; even though the citizens of Florida voted in 2020 to re-enfranchise felons and that vote was administratively sabotaged by the same governor; even though actual vote fraud by conservatives was discovered in the state and went ignored—and DeSantis is using the charges he is ginning up as a proof that the election system is broken, as a pretext for further dismantling the apparatus of democracy. And the Texas Department of Family & Protective Services is struggling to function, because nearly 2,300 employees have quit, following governor Greg Abbott’s prosecutorial policies of targeted investigations of parents of trans children.

And then we have the oppressive problem of women, who have bodies and even sometimes have ideas about what should be done with those bodies, and some of those things even include life-affirming and often life-preserving medical treatments, such as abortions. And this simply isn’t acceptable to conservatives, who haven’t agreed to allow women to exist in that way.

So we’re going to have a lot of laws about abortion, too, and as a result we know that a lot of women are going to suffer and die, and a lot of women already have suffered and died, and conservative Christians know this perfectly well, but at least they will be spared the uncomfortable sight of women living meaningful and moral lives of satisfaction and joy while existing without conservative Christian approval outside of the beliefs of conservative Christians.

There aren’t any laws forcing conservative Christians to live a queer lifestyle that I’m aware of, by the way. I don’t believe there has ever been a law even suggested that would force conservative Christians to get abortions, or to restrict an adult from being around children because the adult was Christian, or to dissolve Christian marriages, or so forth, nor will such things occur if conservative Christians lose their battle with those opposing them.

But queer people and women and many others do seem to be advocating that this not be done to them, and far too many people seem to be agreeing with queer people and women and others, and refusing to listen to conservative Christians, so we have a lot of work to do on our supreme problem. Because all of this is very, very, very uncomfortable for white conservative Christians—dangerously uncomfortable. Dangerously because if a conservative Christian is allowed to stay uncomfortable too long, they might have to hurt somebody themselves.

For example, they might have to hound a weeping schoolchild out of a school board meeting, for the oppressive act of suggesting through a piece of art promoting inclusion and health, that other people have lives that matter.

That’s what they did last week in my neck of the woods. A bunch of conservative Christians saw a mural that seemed to present the existence of other people and they bullied a schoolchild about it until they got some satisfaction.

And you might think, “wow, what a bunch of entitled supremacist assholes, what a bunch of authoritarian utter shitbags, what a bunch of oppressive fucks who shouldn’t be accommodated in any way or have their nonsense tolerated or accepted in polite society by decent people.”

Yes. You might think that.

But let me ask you: what choice did we give them in the face of this oppression of existence, this sight of people living unpunished lives without securing conservative Christian approval for it?

Because let’s remember that conservative Christians live in the best way to live, the only way to live satisfying moral lives of purpose and joy. If people live in other ways, then they will naturally suffer. And if they don’t naturally suffer, then I’m told suffering will have to be created until conservative Christians have been made perfectly comfortable.

And it’s not just the conservative Christian supremacists! There are conservative white supremacists, for whom the existence of Black people voting is very oppressive, even though Black people are not trying to keep white people from voting. And there are conservative wealth supremacists, who believe that people with money deserve to live and people who don’t have money don’t deserve to live unless they can be made profitable, and so find the sight of any expenditure that exists simply for the public good without thought to profit (or even the suggestion that we all live in a society that we share together and depend on each other for) to be very oppressive indeed, even though they would remain hugely wealthy even in a society that taxed them in a way commensurate to the value they had received from that society.

And there are many other types of conservative supremacists as well, all experiencing another facet of the supreme problem.

There’s a lot of overlap between types of supremacy, but certainly wealth supremacists might not be white supremacists, and the white supremacists might not be Christian supremacists, and male supremacists might not be any of the other three, and so forth—yet they all believe one core thing, which is that some people matter, and other people do not, and that being asked to acknowledge the right of other people to exist in the same way as them (or even to be forced to confront the sight of people living differently than them without punishment or control) is deeply oppressive.

Honestly, there’s a lot of overlap. There’s more overlap than points of difference.

Supremacists seem to have unified around their belief in supremacy, to the point where the particulars of supremacy don’t even seem to matter to them or they mush into each other, until a conservative Christian might identify their wealth supremacy and their male supremacy and even sometimes their white supremacy as core components of their Christian supremacy, far more than (for example) any of the diametrically opposing things that Christ taught. And a conservative Christian supremacist might learn that the politician they support actually doesn’t live in their stated way of living at all, and actually might have even (for example) paid at least one girlfriend to have at least one abortion, and threatened to murder his wife and children on multiple occasions, and so forth, and yet that conservative Christian doesn’t hesitate for even a moment in their support for that politician, because even though the politician has made a mockery of their stated religious beliefs about abortion and family, he still intends to help conservative Christians establish their domination over the bodies of women, and that was really the point all along, you might observe if you are an observational person.

So that’s how you can have conservative Christians so oppressed by the sight of women existing with bodies that belong to them, even though many conservative Christians are women, for example. And you might resolve many other seeming contradictions within conservative ideology, as well.

And in time you might even start to think things like “wow, it almost seems as if what matters to these people isn’t so much the stated principles or strictures of their stated ideologies, but simply in their ability to establish and enforce their dominance over others.”

But this essay was meant to be about the process of repair, and sabotage of that process. Let’s get back to that.

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I’ve been methodically going through the process of repair, which I see as a progressive sequential human movement.

First you awaken to awareness of brokenness and connectivity. “This is broken, and it is something shared between all of us.”

Then you move to conviction, based on that awareness. “It should be fixed, and it can be, and I bear some responsibility for it.”

Then you move to confession, a public airing of this awareness and conviction, to change the atmosphere of what is considered good and what is considered possible.

And I’ve been describing the sabotage of the process of repair as a regressive sequential human movement, with each step designed to halt the process of repair, preventing repair’s progress by unnaturally raising the natural costs of improvement and maintenance and repair, on behalf of a supremacy that refuses to pay any natural cost, including the cost of blame for the unsustainable brokenness which they create, and from which they profit.

So we see awakening sabotaged by ignorance.

And we see conviction sabotaged by complacency.

And we see confession sabotaged by denial.

And I’ve been describing the ways our society is optimized not for repair, but for brokenness, which we can observe when we see the ways that our systems and institutions move to enable and accommodate not the steps of repair, but the steps of sabotage—a morally empty accommodation that favors supremacists and creates a state of supremacy.

So we see ignorance accommodated by neutrality.

And we see complacency accommodated by compromise.

And we see denial accommodated by exoneration.

And I’ve been talking about the ways we can oppose these sabotages and their accommodations, by accessing tools available to us all, which tell a different and better story, which raise the costs of sabotage and accommodation.

So we can oppose ignorant neutrality through our determined witness to things as they are.

And we can oppose complacent compromise through a rugged and tenacious hope.

And we can oppose denial and exoneration through a self-examining moral clarity.

And if we do this, it is my belief that we can change the atmosphere—that is, our collective way of imagining and believing what is good and what is possible.

And that will move us at last to repair.

But before we can repair, we have to actually realign our beliefs and intentions and resources: away from an alignment with a culture of brokenness that profits from brokenness by making other people pay brokenness’ higher costs; toward an alignment with a culture of repair and willingness to pay our share of the lower costs of repair.

As I mentioned, I’m a Christian, so I’ve been using a term from my religious tradition to describe these steps.

I think of this realigning work as “repentance.”

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What is repentance?

The Jewish tradition talks about repentance as “teshuva.“ Translated, as I understand it, “a return.”

Now: I want to be careful here to state that I was not raised in the Jewish tradition, nor do I claim any authority on that tradition. My understanding of teshuva was first gained in non-Jewish spaces, through what I have no doubt were supersessionary methods with which I am no longer comfortable—though I have since begun supplementing that understanding with Jewish voices who can speak to it with authority.

I reference teshuva with respect, with a clear understanding of my position as an outsider to the practice, in genuine hope that I will honor it by so doing, and with a genuine willingness to be corrected in any place where I fail.

Having said this: I do find it useful to consider repentance along the lines of a return.

With a return, there’s movement. You start in one place …

… then you realize that, for whatever reason, you don’t want to be there anymore …

… and then you go somewhere else.

First comes awareness that you’re in the wrong place.

Then comes a conviction that you should go to the right place.

Then comes a confession that you’re in the wrong place and intend to go to the right one.

Then comes a turn, back to the right place. That’s repentance.

Then you actually do the work to go back—that’s the repair.

These elements are all very important, I think, as is the order.

This is also why I frequently find it useful to use streets as a metaphor, because that’s how streets work—both the travel upon them and the fixing and maintenance of them. If you don’t turn, you won’t get back, even if you keep walking. If you just turn, but don’t walk, you won’t return even if you’re facing the right way.

Why would one return?

There are many reasons, but let me suggest that all of them boil down to “you want to get back to where you were.” In the case of repentance, it’s generally understood that the place you are is the result of an incorrect direction. You’re in the wrong place, and you should return to the right one.

But what if the place we came from also isn’t the right place?

What should we want to return to?

I’ll suggest this: let us return to our natural human system, we people of the blameless system. Let us return to being works of art carrying unsurpassable worth—a state we can only truly inhabit if we recognize that worth in all others, yes, but also a state we can only truly inhabit if we’re first completely honest about where we are and the direction in which we’ve been heading. We need to return to our humanity, which provides a value that is shared, invisible, foundational, generative, automatic, inextricable, configurable, and inherited, delivered to us not because of anything we did; but because there was a need for a you and a me, and you and I have fulfilled that need in ways nobody else ever has.

That’s good work. Even more, it’s necessary—because remember, this is a matter of survival. Unnatural corruptions to human systems are unsustainable, after all, and unsustainable things don’t sustain. Collapse is inherent in supremacy, as it is in any lie.

So: what if we want to do the realigning work of redemption?

If what we want to fix is a supremacist system of profit over life, we’re going to have to align ourselves against it—to stop accommodating supremacy.

We are going to have to enter an oppositional repentance—a return in direct opposition to, and in direct confrontation with, blameless supremacy.

Which will be inconvenient, especially if we are the people for whose convenience blameless supremacy was established.

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The opposite of repentance is resentment—entitled sullen anger at the sight of people moving the world toward repair.

The opposition to repentance is the fourth sabotage: oppression.

I found it useful to begin this essay with a definition of oppression: the state that exists when power prioritizes and accommodates aggressive lies that harm other people over the simple expectation of the people who are harmed by those lies, to be permitted to exist.

The first three sabotages comprise suppression. Ignorance suppresses awareness; complacency suppresses conviction; denial suppresses confession.

Suppression means you stop repair before you even have to fight it, by convincing people not to fight.

But blameless supremacists are certainly willing to fight if they have to.

Oppression is what happens when blameless supremacy gets desperate, because suppression has failed, and now people are actually moving to align themselves with repair, which means that repair is about to happen, and that will mean paying the cost of repair, including the cost of blame.

Blameless supremacists will do anything to prevent that from happening—anything. They’ll raise the stakes as high as they must to preserve their supremacy. They’ll harm whoever they can, as much as they can.

They’ll destroy society itself before they pay for their share of society.

As we can very easily observe these days.

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Above all, a blameless supremacy sabotages oppositional repentance in order to claim as its exclusive property the right to define people. It insists on imposing a reality founded on that right, under which it gets to define what human experience is permitted to be, under which a person’s right to exist is not a foregone conclusion but something that will be established and mediated by what it is comfortable allowing. It sabotages repentance to establish that its understanding of humanity is more important than each human’s understanding of who they themselves are, and to establish its license to permit each human to exist—or not.

It also claims an exclusive right to name what oppression is—as something that it would be impossible for blameless supremacy to do, no matter how much harm it does to others, no matter how well accommodated it is by power. Blameless supremacy claims an exclusive right to define oppression as the discomfort the people living outside the boundaries of its permission causes them to feel, by existing. Blameless supremacy claims an exclusive right to define whether or not it hurt you or not, and whether or not the definition of you it forces you to live should bother you, and whether or not the attempt to control and define your existence should be experienced as the hate it is, or as love.

And I think that’s sabotage.

Why sabotage? To make realignment toward repair difficult and unpopular by leaving all control and leverage and priority of place in the hands of those opposed to repair. To make all the steps of sabotage more popular and easier than the steps of repair. To borrow against that popularity to lend credibility to oppression, and to make the perspective of oppressive supremacists the dominant one, to the point that opposing oppression is itself framed as the oppressive act. To establish every flavor of supremacy as a preferred natural order. To force people to engage in a daily fight to exist as themselves—in order to frame the people who engage in that fight as aggressors to the preferred natural order, and then to use that framing as a pretext for further oppression.

To make oppositional repentance hard, and painful, and draining, so that people stay away from repentance, and resent those who oppose oppression.

It all amounts to sabotage: a refusal to align toward repair, in favor of an optimization toward brokenness.

This is a sabotage that makes oppression inevitable, and an inevitability that makes the cost of repentance from oppression high—high enough that people will choose blameless supremacy instead.

And remember, it’s all to avoid the threat of improvement; all to avoid the costs of repair; all to preserve the profits from the higher price of brokenness.

This is oppression: the fourth step in the sabotaging work of blameless supremacy.

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Why would people of awareness and conviction allow a sabotage that makes brokenness inevitable? I suspect the answer isn’t so comfortable. Those of us who accept it do so because we are in the blameless society, too. We want to oppose brokenness and align along lines of repair, but the cost has been made too high for our comfort. We’re instinctively optimized against paying our share of the lower cost of repair, provided somebody else remains to pay the higher cost of disrepair—and blameless supremacy will always make sure that the cost of opposition is high, and that there is somebody new to oppress.

Sabotage of the process of repair is a supremacist process, and supremacy offers its enablers temporary limited membership in its supremacy, in exchange for enablement.

And while supremacists may indeed be hateful, I think enablement of their hate is what creates the supremacy. The accommodation is the supremacy.

So we will always find that very fine people have decided to accommodate our blameless society’s oppression by agreeing to abandon our oppositional repentance for an appeasing reconciliation.

That’s next time.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, available in most of the usual places and some of the unusual places, and co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media. He is he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, see how he run like pigs from a gun, see how he fly.