(under a cut because I reserve the right to delete this)

The hierarchy whose rule you live under is a cruel one. You can’t tell whether it’s unusually cruel–you don’t know enough about the cruelty levels of other hierarchies–but it seems to you like the hierarchs are more cruel than necessary to maintain their positions.

It’s not that they hurt you physically. Some of them take pride in never hurting anyone physically, saying physical violence is categorically worse than emotional violence. (Sometimes, when you are feeling brave (which is to say, when your anger outweighs your common sense), you point out to them that a slap hurts less and heals faster than an insult. They never listen.) Others simply reserve it for crimes greater than those you have committed (which still, in its way, buys into the idea of physical violence being necessarily worse).

Instead, they play mind games. They forbid you from acknowledging what they are. They order you not to follow orders, tell you to shun anyone who admits they did things simply because they were ordered to, tell you you should do what they say because you sincerely believe their views are correct.

They ask you if you sincerely believe their views are correct. You say yes. It takes you a while to realise you don’t actually know what “sincere belief” means, but you know what you are expected to say. You keep saying yes.

You learn to find the powerful people by looking for the people talking about how powerless they are. They continue to call themselves powerless even as they punish their inferiors for insubordination. Only serfs speak of the power they hold, a power that never seems to actually manifest. One might think the serfs were safer, and they are in that they are less able to hurt you themselves, but you soon observe that most of them will turn informant for the hierarchs at the drop of a hat. They aren’t safe to question, either.

You know that your caste is near the bottom, but not quite at the bottom, of the hierarchy. There are a few scraps of power available to you, but you have trouble using them effectively. You aren’t a very good liar, and interacting with the power structure is all about lying. Out of practicality, you emphasise the inferior aspects of your caste instead. If you don’t try to claim power, people don’t check your lies as thoroughly, and it’s easier to get away with it.

The hierarchs speak, disparagingly, of other cultures where people “know their place”. The longer you live in your twisted homeland, speaking its twisted language, the more the honesty of “knowing one’s place” starts to sound refreshing, attractive.

You aren’t sure you could bear to defect. It’s not that you “sincerely believe” the enemy is wrong–you still don’t know what that means–but you are very aware of what things are safe and what things are not. You don’t know how long it would take that safety sensor to recalibrate for a new hierarchy, to stop screaming that every word people said and every action they took was painting a gigantic target on themselves and everyone around them. You don’t know how long it would take you to stop looking over your shoulder, expecting the enforcers to show up at any moment. Maybe you would never stop. And conversely, you aren’t confident of the enemy’s rules, of how to navigate a foreign land without setting off their enforcers.

(Not to mention the purely logistical issues: if you were to defect, you would then be living in and dependent upon an enemy household.)

Still, you look. Cautiously, you peek at the closest of the cultures the hierarchs decried for having too overt a hierarchy. You try to ignore the screaming of your safety sensor long enough to get a look at them, though it is hard.

You find they are no different. Oh, they wear different colours, speak a different jargon, but they, too, portray themselves as people who fight for freedom and justice and equality. They speak, disparagingly, of your culture, where people know their place.

(You begin to suspect that the existence of overtly hierarchical cultures is a myth, is some sort of propaganda, but you know it’s possible you didn’t look far enough afield. It’s hard enough, though, to think of moving to the nearest culture. You doubt you could bear moving farther out, and you aren’t sure you can even stand to think about it too hard.)

They say that when it seems like the whole world is lying about something, you should start to wonder if maybe the problem is with you. (They say this in the context of being things like autistic or asexual, but it gets you thinking.) Maybe there’s something different about you, something fundamental, something that leaves you unable to understand the thought processes others are using.

(Nobody ever drops character, even in small groups of close friends. Sometimes, when you think the group of friends might be small enough and close enough, you drop character yourself and encourage them to do the same. They always react badly, always insist that they are not playing a part. Maybe they mean it? What would it even mean to mean it?)

A while ago, you read a book. It was a study of the enemy, a study of the alien. It portrayed itself as such, referred to the people it studied in the third person, spoke with an assumption that you, the reader, would not understand the thought processes the people studied were using, and would not look kindly upon those who used them.

And they were clearly foreign. They did speak a different jargon, associated their castes with different traits. The book treated the jargon and the castes and the thought processes as being inextricably linked. That equivocation obscured things, but you still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that you understood the alien thoughts, the alien motivations, better than your own people’s.

You aren’t sure which possibility scares you more: that everyone around you is lying, or that they are all telling the truth.

Tags:

#here is the post from my thoughts last night #though it’s not the first time I’ve thought about it #political terms tend to be very fuzzy #meaning several sometimes contradictory things at once #often not distinguishable by context #I can’t usually tell what exactly people mean when they say ”authoritarian” #but this is what I think about when they say it #oh look an original post #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

{{next post in sequence}}