When I talk about the bullying I experienced for being autistic, people tend to take the wrong things away from what the worst parts of it were. The worst parts of it were not being urinated on or even being groped. Those were actually some of the least worst parts of my being bullied because, at least, they were honest. The common form of bullying I endured was having my social blindness exploited so that I would amuse and entertain by victimizers. The big issue was not merely that they would do that but that they would claim that I was actually popular and talented which is why they were asking for my performances and regardless of the bullshit-nature and complete bad faith of those arguments, the surrounding adults accepted that line which either meant they were beyond stupid or willingly complicit. I’m almost certain they were just beyond stupid.
The pee may be more physically disgusting but, in the end, there is hope there because it’s impossible to rationalize and, if it were reported, it is much more likely that something would occur in my favor as opposed to the more subtle but equally sadistic forms of bullying which would never even be acknowldged in most conexts. When there is honesty, even if it is mean and horrible, there was hope but in a paradigm of pretending and society accepting a bullshit narrative to protect their own then the world is much darker and there is no hope because the hope for justice relies on truth and honesty. If that truth is never acknowledged then all of the perpetrators will never be brought to justice and there can be no atonement or closure for anything that happened. It is not merely that the guilty will go unpunished but that the victims will go without vindication or even being openly believed. I have never wanted them punished but I have been beside myself with indignation that their lines of pluasible deniability were never generally questioned.
Atonement and justice are only possible when truth is acknowledged. The first step in healing the wounds both of the victim and the communiy is to let the truth be exposed to light. Also, no material change can be made if the truth is not in the open. The postmodernist line that truth is relative and lies can be valid is a barrier to change. It is more difficult for oppression to persist if the oppressor has to admit what they’re doing. For example, it is far more difficult for the poor to claim that a capitalist system is unfair than a fuedalist system. A fuedal lord can’t really avoid saying something to the effect “Yeah, I’m oppressing you”. A CEO will often say “You’re oppressing yourself by your sloth and indolence.” A sentiment which is extremely insulting to a working class that works, very often, well over 40 hours per week for almost no money.
The worst thing about Jim Crow, arguably, was the pretense of “seperate-but-equal” and the narative of the “happy darky”. It was only under those pretenses that the physical oppression could occur to the degree it did and itself it was a form of degredation. In 1943, in a rural South Carolina school district, the Black community requested a bus for their students. The response they got was that it would be unfair that people who didn’t pay taxes would enjoy taypayer-funded perks. The oppression there was as much in the narrative, to pretend that the poorest classes of society are being greedy to request the simplest of charity ultimately because they were in poverty and this by the people who actively kept them in abject poverty.
The bullshit, itself, the postmodernism, was a form of oppression. Society maintined a lie it knew was a lie and which denied moral vindication to the oppressed and denied them the hope of escape and a better life through the shameless and obtrusive deceit that could not be reasoned with because it was intentionally illogical. The greatest thing about postmodernism for oppression is absent syllogism, no counterargument can be made.
In my political experience, I have seen the either intentional or unintentional idiocy of moral outrage erupting after an episode of someone saying or doing something explicitly impolite regarding identity politics while fully tolerating almost every dogwhistle and coded phrase up to that point and after. As an activist, when I am expected to be animated about these episodes by fellow activists raptured up in the bandwagon of rage that these episodes are, I cannot bring myself to join them either, at all, or enthusiastically because such eruptions erode my faith in the movement. The fact, for example, that it took the N-word to elicit condemnation is implicitly saying to the more polite racists that their racism is fine and will go unchallenged.
If someone says the N-word in a YouTube video, I don’t care. Disparities in income, healthcare, education are racism that kills people and ruins lives, the N-word doesn’t so much but people only protest if the racism is so obvious that a preschooler would know it was racism. The same is true for all other political causes aside from racism, as well. “Allies” of the disability communiy get enraged over the word retard and then speak to people with intellectual disabilties in doggie voices. They are vehemently against calling people with intellectual disabilities retards but enthusiastically treat them as retards. Unless it is obvious, they don’t understand oppression and then they participate in it. The oppression that was not obvious, according to society, just didn’t happen.
One of my favorite TV series is Chernobyl and the main point of that series is the nature and effect of universal deceit and systemic and institutional bullshit. Lies that are fully known to be lies being told by everybody who collectively, despite the unsaid but scathingly understood truth, repeats the lies with the slight cynical expressions on their faces that betray their duplicity. Every form of human crime against another human of any significant scale must be allowed for by some widespread and officially maintained line of bullshit. Postmodernism and the control of narrative and reality is the foremost requisite to most human suffering and is, in my view, the darkest, slimiest, and most disgusting tool through which oppression is waged because it is the greatest impediment to hope and justice and denier of the most important element in justice, that of moral vindication.
The Autistic Resistance 