Weaponized individualism and suffering

“What presuppositions are we living with, unexamined? It seems to me that the point of philosophy is to examine our presuppositions in order to bring to light the ways in which we are living - the principles according to which we are living - and to change them when we see their injustice”.

              Judith Butler

It is interesting to note that, while people in pain are often viewed through the lens of various kinds of hyper-individualism, professional benefactors tend to work in teams. 'One can be overpowered, but two together can put up resistance. A three-ply cord doesn't easily snap.'(Ecclesiastes) Or, as Malcolm X said: One can't unite bananas with scattered leaves. The already divided and conquered are divided and conquered and snapped over and over again. Double standards, such as this, seem to be standard in these contexts; another form that they take (although, of course, not one that is limited to the settings discussed) is in authority, often of the tin-pot variety, that expects and demands respect because of status alone while being, itself, disrespectful. And if it doesn't receive it, that is prone to throwing mild hissy-fits and to placid and peremptory consternation. About double standards in media coverage Chomsky and Herman wrote: 'While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life.' Regretful and philosophical generalities and the inherent tragedy of human life were and are often evoked by benefactors; for example, in the lukewarm form of tired truisms like: “It's a cruel world”, that imply that the kind of cruelty they have in mind is as immutable a fact as the wetness of water and that to question is equivalent to questioning whether the Eiffel tower is in Paris. Neutralizing perspectives concerning harm are internalized such that we accept and live around it and in so doing reproduce and further it. The world is full of cruelty, perhaps, and it’s also full of clichés, often of the thought-terminating kind to borrow from a phrase coined by Robert Jay Lifton. 

If you hit your finger with a hammer then you yelp and the events importance is unequivocally  registered, if a member of an out-group is bombed into the stone age then the reaction is often as Chomsky and Herman indicate.

Why change systems if the suffering of some enables many to maintain an appearance of individual and collective altruism? Alfie Kohn described five simple ways to prevent social change, the following satirical excerpt echoes points made above: ‘Fortunately, it is not necessary for you to defend the larger system. You can even nod in sympathetic agreement with someone who indicts it. But it is crucial that this nodding be accompanied by a shrug. Phrases such as "like it or not" and "that's just the way it is" should be employed liberally in order to emphasize that nothing can be done about the larger picture. Such protestations of powerlessness are actually very powerful of course, since they make sure that things are left exactly as they are’. In fact people are often kind and generous, for example, they give money to help alleviate suffering. But not much of it is spent in that way, most of it is intercepted and spent on holidays, cars and houses. To return to and to further the point made in the first paragraph a little: Peter Levine noted that pack animals become more stressed and panicked when they are separated from the pack and so he didn’t want patients to speak to him alone which is, at least, a tokenistic gesture in the right direction. One obvious reason for this increase in stress is that a herd animal without a herd is easy prey. It has long been proven that stress can lead to the re-occurrence, perpetuation and the development of several physical and mental illnesses.

In-house problems are typically viewed as individual problems while the problems of other peoples are more likely to be viewed as social, cultural or systemic. We have problem individuals while, for example, Saudi Arabia or the Soviet Union are more likely to be or to have been problematized as societies and they will likely do to us as we do to them. See, for example, the Robbers Cave study undertaken by Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif and realistic conflict theory, a theory for which Sherif's study provided empirical support. The Chinese, as a rule, do not think that they are persecuting the Uyghurs, the British, as a rule, did not think that they were persecuting the Irish, Israelis, as a rule, do not think that they are persecuting the Palestinians and we do not, as a rule, think that we are persecuting or generating out-groups. Wherever we are just so happens to be an exception to the rule, the ubiquity of which, history provides a mountain of bloody evidence for.