Exercised power usually opposes a description of itself. Even in the exceptional cases where it does not, such as during the reigns of Frederick the Great and his successors and of other despots who have sponsored the philosophy of power relations, the pictures presented to different social classes have differed greatly, and only the exceptionally independent-minded among the ‘men of letters’ have been able to escape from their ‘self-incurred tutelage’ to the degree necessary to understand the descriptions.
Even where power does not explicitly silence, it can still do so implicitly. It is prone to do so simply according to the default behaviors of the ruling classes expansively defined. Government bureaucrats count, for instance, as part of the ruling class by the most expansive meaning of the term. The Blue wall of silence counts. So do many aspects of the mental health establishment and arguably even the concept of mental health in anything like the sense in which most people believe in it today; every class or interest group: teachers, judges, securities regulators, and more. Among all of those who sense their efforts validated when the GDP of one of a few other official statistics goes up, among essentially any bureau or guild, there is very little chance that a predatory behavioral pattern within the group having been normalized will lead to that group being unseated and replaced by a new bureau or guild aimed at the same function.
In many parts of the world, most of us assume, by and large, that we are safe from violence. That doesn’t change the fact that all power has its roots in the threat or implicit threat of violence. Usually, violence is aimed at all who do not conform, always, at the very least, aimed at those who oppose power and at those mobilized by competition over the artificially constrained and inadequate supply of some vital good such as a drug, a home, or the willingness of a court to engage with one’s arguments.
Stonewalling is a generalized tool for lowering productivity. In the general case, protecting monopoly profits calls for avoiding productivity increases and establishing an industry culture of inept communication, utilization, and verification of text but highly subtle use of subtext.
Power is the ability to silence. Status often does this. Status isn’t power without the ability to back the silencing with force. All power has its roots in the threat of violence.
People refusing to see this mostly do not see it because modern cities and living allow for a privileged sense of progress where one’s safety is assumed. That is the problem of losing the map and territory for some more incredible illusion that we prefer to be true. We forget our hard-won roots against the threat of violence, and we don’t realize the danger that comes from the threat of violence capable of emerging from the pursuit of abstractions that don’t possess any intrinsic value. With this, we end up taking things like social and physical security for granted, and in doing so, we put ourselves in society at significant risk.
Evidence of effective power comes from the ability to silence others. Here, I want to encourage the recognition and adoption of a new term for a broader category of anti-humanity, one that the concept of anti-semitism, for instance, is subsumed in. I see a kind of generalized anti-semitism in the social dynamics of high-growth businesses today. This pathology is no longer strictly about Semites.
A-priori to silencing is implicit physical violence. All silencing has its foundation in physical violence. All preference falsification is due to silencing. All cultural changes are either between a preference falsification regime and a non-preference falsification regime, the inverse, or are transitions between preference falsification regimes. All contain aspects of a professional face (I will describe this in later posts.) that the individual holder of a perspective must hide.
