Don't Internalize the Violence of the System
Here’s a dirty little game that colonizers have mastered – indoctrinating citizens to internalize the systemic violence baked into capitalism. An entire self-help and productivity industry exists to support this transfer of emotional labor onto the laborer themselves. It’s subtle and flies unnoticed for years or a lifetime for some.
And for those who reject it completely, the ostricization from “normal” society is usually complete. But maybe that’s the whole point. None of this is normal, and those who reject the forced acceptance of systemic inequality simply...leave.
Let’s unpack that, shall we?
Don’t make enough money to cover the monthly bills because inflation is running amuck, diesel is $9 a gallon and your health insurance is rejecting your physical therapy bills? You simply need to work harder, get that second job and pay your fair share.
Can’t make rent next month and facing an eviction notice? You should have skipped that journalism degree and gotten that office job with a 401K in 2005 and then your financial planning would have kept you safe from the violence of poverty in your late 40s.
Don’t have a support network when you have a serious injury turns chronic, your temporary stint in corporate America leaves you blacklisted in your industry and you are drowning in medical bills and have to pay a billionaire exorbitant prices to have your groceries sent to the door because you can’t carry them up 3 flights of stairs? Should have married that asshole you were dating in your early thirties and made a family unit like the rest of society and played the white picket fence game.
Don’t have the money to pay off those credit cards when you had to put your groceries, private health insurance, medical treatments and utilities on your credit card for months after your second shitty tech job went Lord of the Flies and you mutually hit the eject button? You should have been more responsible with your debt and paid off your balance every month and lived within your means.
And round and round it goes.
All of those are examples from my lived experience. That's my inner dialogue when despair and exhaustion can't keep the voices of the colonizer out of my thought bubble. Those aren't my sentiments, they are projections I put upon myself because I was raised in America for 5 decades under the Regan Neocon agenda.
While I’ve always rejected the capitalists games when I could, I also am human and believed those self-help books in my younger years. If I could just figure out how to build a business with my art, I could participate in “normal” society. If I had just chosen the safe job out of college and not launched a production company, I wouldn’t have lost everything in the housing crisis in 2008. If I’d just pursued those stability jobs with steady salaries, I could have accumulated a few acronyms– 401Ks, FSAs and IRAs– and the pandemic wouldn’t have gutted my fledgling new business, again. If I’d just kept my mouth shut when I DID take the corporate route at 47 and just put my integrity in the closet for a few years, I wouldn’t have been violently ejected with a broken neck and nervous system after blowing whistles to people who told me I could trust them, but were actually the wolf draped in a sheepskin enforcing the violence of the billionaire class.
If I. If that. If only.
Everything I noted in those scenarios is a lived experience that would not have happened in civilized societies. In other advanced Western cultures, I wouldn’t be forced to choose between health insurance and groceries. I wouldn’t have to ration my pain meds to get through the month and I wouldn’t need to pay out of pocket for a monthly membership for a doctor to spend more than 7 minutes with me to manage a complex and devastating condition.
In a society that values human life, I wouldn’t have to face homelessness because billionaires took control of the politicians and removed all protections for the labor class. Dismantling the social safety nets the Boomers benefited from and then destroyed for the generations behind them, keeping us all in a position of submission is a wild ass thing to live through.
In a just society, I wouldn’t have internalized any of those scenarios because they don’t exist. We are not governed by people who value human life. We are governed by manchildren who believe toxic masculinity and abuse are how power is generated and preserved and extraction is the only worthy endeavor for a Real Man in the modern world.
We are governed by men who believe empathy is a weakness, democracy is unsustainable and women are to be used for sexual slavery, rape and baby incubators. We are governed by men who see only the profit in a transaction and anything else, like art, humanities, public goods or the collective commons are simply things to be appropriated to extract profit and suck the marrow from then toss aside once the “value” is fully extracted.
We are governed by men who have such wounded egos they will never understand the beauty they suck from the humans in their spheres. We are governed by men who believe that dominance and violence are the tools that lead to success and wealth.
And all of that violence is now just...American culture.
But what they don’t see and will never accept is that men who govern at the barrel of a gun will never know peace. The people they hold under their thumbs will, at some point, fully reject the internalization of this system of oppression that pays for their yachts and their polycule parties. And when that rejection happens, no bunker or rocket ship will save them.
Because human nature can not be contained forever.
Most people want a simple life of stability and filled with love as a verb. They want to wake up and know that the people they love and the home they dwell within are rooted into something solid and supportive. People do not want to watch their neighbors disappear to a concenration camp or watch their child die a slow painful death because an insurance beauracrat rejected a lifesaving treatment to transfer more money to its shareholders. People want to know that the money they give the government will actually benefit the greater good and strengthen the commons so no one is left to starve in the streets.
And what the manchildren in power do not realize, because they’ve built the monuments to their egos so high that only their sycophants can tolerate being in their presence, is that a population will rise up once they realize that the system itself was designed to keep them enslaved and the internalization of the systemic violence was always and still is a choice.
We can reject all of this by simply removing ourselves from these systems of the oppressor. We can say no. We can reject this violence when we choose to. And while that is a monumentous task for many of us who are simply fighting to survive this end stage of a broken economic system, we can start by simply saying NO to the internalization of the violence itself.
We can reject attaching our worth to our bank accounts. We can say no to the judgement, internal and external, that pushes the violence back onto labor’s bootstraps. We can embrace the beauty of letting go of credit scores and external validation from false social constructs of the colonizer’s well honed systems of extraction. We can turn off the algorithms that deliver self-help influencers touting the productivity swill to sell you one more course that will solve all of your problems.
We can simply reject it all.
Refuse to internalize their violence. Make your art and be ruthlessly unapologetic about those creations. Use your voice and bear witness to those who can not speak. Turn to your community and find comfort in supporting each other. Throw an eviction party or a severance soiree. Remove your resources from a system that is weaponizing them against you.
We have a choice and its not an easy one. But it is still ours to make. For now.
Share this essay with someone who is on the struggle bus. Let people you love know you see them by just sharing these words so they can bring a little comfort to those suffering under the violence of capitalism.
