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elfsThe Great Chain of Being is a Medieval theological idea that there is a hierarchy of all things with rocks at the bottom and God at the top. In between is everything else; it presupposes the idea that insects are “greater” in God’s eyes than bacteria, and that human beings are greater than every other living thing; above humans are only “divine beings” and finally God himself.
In the “human beings” range, though, the Medievalists placed men above women (naturally), and in the 18th and 19th century the early race scientists (including US President Thomas Jefferson) further amended the Great Chain of Being so that white people were on top and the other races ranked according to, to quote Jefferson, “their lack of coolness and steadiness … an overabundance of sentiment and sensation … an imagination dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”
The Right is obsessed with hierarchy. It’s one of their defining characteristics: Someone Must Be In Charge, and since that’s so, the world must have been arranged so that the ones best suited to being in charge must be obvious, and since that’s so, it must be those who are currently in charge: white men. With that settled, the only trick left is to figure out who those white men delegate to, and in what order.
Moral Injury “is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” Moral injury is a powerful incentive to act violently, it is permission to act violently when it seems as if there is no other route to correcting a moral injury.
The values of the Right are rich with a singular moral injury: how dare you try to change your place on the Great Chain of Being? Minorities have a place on the great chain; anyone who claims that Blacks have an equal footing with Whites in this world is committing, to the Right, a moral injury.
Trans people are committing the moral injury of trying to exchange places with the other sex on the Great Chain, and trans women are just outright terrifying because men insecure in their manhood but secure in their place on the Great Chain worry endlessly if that could happen to them. After all, the Great Chain says that those lower than you on the chain must serve and defer to those above them, which is a sweet deal for straight white men, but it also means they’re perpetually saddled with the terror that someone might usurp their place or, worse, transform one of them into a being lower on the chain.
Even Furries are committing the moral injury of suggestion that maybe everything about being human isn’t all its cracked up to be, and maybe the sensual experience, aesthetic response, or familial structures of some animals are worth learning from and enjoying.
Part of this terror comes from a sense of empathy, of the awareness that, even if they are lower on the chain, trans people, black people, Asian people, furries, and women are still “human enough” that they know they’re being used, misused, mistreated.
White men in the US constitute a Dominant Minority. And a Dominant Minority lives in utter bugfucking terror of one thought: “How will those we dominate treat us when we’re no longer dominating them? I know how I would react if the tables were turned.” The imagination of various cities burned to the ground during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement was a necessary part of the right’s fantasy of how the downtrodden should react, of how they themselves are planning to react when they become the downtrodden, of how they will react when the forces arrayed against them try to raise everyone to be on the same platform with them.
It’s only gonna get worse.
In the “human beings” range, though, the Medievalists placed men above women (naturally), and in the 18th and 19th century the early race scientists (including US President Thomas Jefferson) further amended the Great Chain of Being so that white people were on top and the other races ranked according to, to quote Jefferson, “their lack of coolness and steadiness … an overabundance of sentiment and sensation … an imagination dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”
The Right is obsessed with hierarchy. It’s one of their defining characteristics: Someone Must Be In Charge, and since that’s so, the world must have been arranged so that the ones best suited to being in charge must be obvious, and since that’s so, it must be those who are currently in charge: white men. With that settled, the only trick left is to figure out who those white men delegate to, and in what order.
Moral Injury “is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” Moral injury is a powerful incentive to act violently, it is permission to act violently when it seems as if there is no other route to correcting a moral injury.
The values of the Right are rich with a singular moral injury: how dare you try to change your place on the Great Chain of Being? Minorities have a place on the great chain; anyone who claims that Blacks have an equal footing with Whites in this world is committing, to the Right, a moral injury.
Trans people are committing the moral injury of trying to exchange places with the other sex on the Great Chain, and trans women are just outright terrifying because men insecure in their manhood but secure in their place on the Great Chain worry endlessly if that could happen to them. After all, the Great Chain says that those lower than you on the chain must serve and defer to those above them, which is a sweet deal for straight white men, but it also means they’re perpetually saddled with the terror that someone might usurp their place or, worse, transform one of them into a being lower on the chain.
Even Furries are committing the moral injury of suggestion that maybe everything about being human isn’t all its cracked up to be, and maybe the sensual experience, aesthetic response, or familial structures of some animals are worth learning from and enjoying.
Part of this terror comes from a sense of empathy, of the awareness that, even if they are lower on the chain, trans people, black people, Asian people, furries, and women are still “human enough” that they know they’re being used, misused, mistreated.
White men in the US constitute a Dominant Minority. And a Dominant Minority lives in utter bugfucking terror of one thought: “How will those we dominate treat us when we’re no longer dominating them? I know how I would react if the tables were turned.” The imagination of various cities burned to the ground during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement was a necessary part of the right’s fantasy of how the downtrodden should react, of how they themselves are planning to react when they become the downtrodden, of how they will react when the forces arrayed against them try to raise everyone to be on the same platform with them.
It’s only gonna get worse.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-29 04:50 pm (UTC)