"The People", United and Exclusive

Which categories get to count as human?

There are some for whom the great game of human life is figuring out how to hurt the proper people, devoting one’s entire self to correctly cultivating cruelty. I used to be one of them, or at least I can see myself that way now. I saw human beings as instances of categories, categories which in society are in constant conflict with each other, and that an individual’s moral worth was first and foremost determined by what categories they belonged to. Society to me was a zero-sum game, so diminishing one group of people elevated the other groups automatically. Chanting “The people! United! Will never be defeated!” gave me the great satisfaction of declaring myself one of “the people” and everyone I hated to not be one of the people at all, to somehow not exactly count as a person. 

I most recently felt aware of this difference during the drama around the Titanic submarine, when a group of people went missing under the sea and for several days the collective airwaves were soaked with real-time updates as to their possible whereabouts and fate. It occurred to me, now, as both tragically sad and none of my business. How people spend their money and what risks they are willing to take in life are (to me, now,) obviously up to them. However the hell they got there it was horrible to consider five people slowly suffocating in the darkness of the open ocean and I was strangely relieved when experts declared that their vessel had imploded and that all aboard had almost certainly died instantly. 

Unfortunately for them, the people aboard the stricken submarine were too rich to be considered human. “There’s plenty of oxygen on the surface and it will SURELY trickle down to them” read one celebratory sneer that floated by me in a group chat. “When will Musk and Bezos buy their Titanic tickets too?” wondered another acquaintance, casually wishing terrible deaths upon other human beings. 

One time I was getting to know someone and they were lamenting how little they’d done with their life and then they stopped themselves, looking off into the distance and saying “no, that’s just Capitalism talking”. So, then, if they destroyed Capitalism and destroyed those somehow responsible for it then (and only then) would they be granted a deep relief. So, then, we must wish death and pain upon all who are successful under this unjust system, and turn as much angry energy as we can on destroying the Capitalist within and uprooting its pernicious presence in our communities. 

Like I said at the top, that used to be me too. What helped me was to substitute the word “shame” for the word “Capitalism”, to see my self-hatred as a phenomenon that I could address directly rather than having to create (or wait for) The Revolution. The more I resolved my own inner issues the more my relationships with others improved, and the more my relationships with others improved the more material success I found. I turned out to have my priorities perfectly backwards. 

Is this Ideology? Reactionary? My own old voice is determined to ask these questions, and I’ll never not be asking that myself. There’s lots more to unpack about all of that, but for now I know myself to be grateful - grateful to not feel a writhing itch to hate other people, grateful to first and foremost to see myself as responsible for my own well being. As for what I was and what others still are, so certain of themselves as participating in a cosmic battle of good and evil, I don’t see myself as wishing any more suffering upon them than they already experience. All I feel when I look back at what I was is a certain form of sorrow - not condescension or pity, but the hope and wish that someday all of the self-inflicted suffering can find direct and much-needed relief.