Reply #23: I think it's predominantly the "pecking order" chicken brain mentality. [View All]

[TahitiNut]

We have a huge number of people in our society who suffer a broad range of repressions, indoctrinations, and other authoritarian abuses as they traverse the subordinate roles of life. They overwhelmingly rationalize their experience as "earning their stripes." Like pledging a fraternity and subordinating one's self to hazing in the expectation of 'earning' the authority to do the hazing to others, we 'train' people to suffer with the expectation of gaining the compensation of inflicting suffering on others.

How many autocratic parents employ repressive overkill on their pubescent children? Compare that to the number of parents who nurture a responsible appreciation for human sexuality in their children. (Got something close to 100::1?) Now compare the societal mechanisms that're synergistic with these two thematic approaches. The message given to adolescents is: You can't be trusted with your own genitals! Rather than nurture responsible enfranchisement a la driver's training, we burden others with a priori guilt.

Take a look at our public mores. We celebrate violence and brutality in our 'sports' and throw a hissy fit when a teat is exposed at half-time. Where's the sense in that??

We advocate the Charles Atlas Mutually Assured Destruction when kicking sand in the face of beach-goers but criminalize the mere exposure of female (not male) breasts in bathing areas. Where's the sense in that??

The 'sense' is that You can't be trusted with your own genitals!

There are those who live and breathe for the opportunity to "graduate" from being repressed to inflicting repression. We see this economically. The wannabe-rich support the oppressions of the 'haves' in the expectation of wallowing in the joy of being an oppressor.

If we delegitimize oppression and repression, these people feel cheated out of the payback: the chance to inflict it on others.

Pathological? Sure. I doubt many of us couldn't find this base tendency within ourselves if we were honest.