Negative stereotyping of outgroups functions as a mechanism of psychological reassurance, reinforcing the comforting belief that ingroups (the sane, the normal, the law-abiding) are inherently good. Outgroups become landfills for disavowal, absorbing collective fears, guilt, pain, and sorrow—allowing the ingroup to maintain its moral self-image. The imposition of outgroup status often follows when individuals question the basic goodness of the social order, nature, God, or of humanity itself. But questioning the social order is not always a matter of speech; it can be a matter of suffering. To be harmed by an order is, in itself, to implicate it. The greater the harm, the stronger the implicit accusation—so the stronger the need to condemn those who suffer.

This logic is borne out in studies on the just-world hypothesis, which suggest that people judge the injured more harshly than the uninjured. Experimental research indicates that the more disturbing the injustice, the greater the impulse to rationalize it—whether by blaming the victim, reframing the harm as a personal misfortune, or insisting that those who suffer are merely unlucky (as in personal tragedy theory). This allows a brutal world to continue undisturbed, its injustices neutralized by a refusal to recognize them as such.

Deep tensions in a society signal deep structural divisions—divisions that inhere in its material practices and worsen over time if left unaddressed. Expressions of these tensions could be read as calls for reform, but they are often treated as the problem itself. If the messenger is shot—if suffering is merely pathologized or if it is criminalized, or erased—then the contradictions in material conditions will not disappear. They will manifest in other ways, often as catastrophe. As Mat McManus suggests, the repression of tension does not resolve it; it merely delays its reckoning.

We rarely notice the infrastructures that support us—social, institutional, emotional, and cognitive—until they are removed. The rug beneath our feet becomes visible only when it is pulled away. Yet dominant framings, particularly those that focus on individual or interpersonal support (the helper/helped model), obscure this dependency. They encourage a wilful inattentiveness to our intrinsic vulnerability, our shared precarity, and our reliance on social norms, institutions, and infrastructures. This inattentiveness, in turn, enables what Judith Butler calls “the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am”—a self-conception that masks our fault lines, hides our need for support, and casts dependence as a personal failure rather than a fundamental condition of life. Secure in the belief that the rug is firmly beneath our feet, we declare ourselves self-sufficient. From the vantage point of this illusion of separation, we impose an anti-interdependence slant on those who cannot feign complete self-sufficiency, amplifying their insecurity in ways that are both hypocritical and performatively contradictory—even the most virulent attacks on interdependence rest on its continued preservation.

This contradiction is sharpened under neoliberalism, where the capacity to appear as a “liberal subject” is both demanded and unequally distributed. Those without the means to sustain this posture—whether due to disability, material deprivation, or structural exclusion—are still expected to perform it. When they fail, they are rendered obscure, or as invisible and as socially dead as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The forced superimposition of neurotypical subjecthood onto those who cannot perform it well may provide them with norms to contest or aspire to, but more often it erases them entirely.

For disability studies founder Mike Oliver, this problem is fundamental: assimilation and just membership are incompatible. His work critiques models of disability that frame justice as a matter of helping disabled people fit into an existing world rather than transforming that world to include them as they are. He contrasts these with a demand for unconditional acceptance, arguing that true inclusion cannot be contingent on passing as non-disabled. Various models of disability—civil rights, affirmation, charity, interactionist, economic, medical—offer competing ways to conceptualize these tensions. Each has been subject to strong criticism, but critique alone does not warrant rejection. These models function as shifting lenses, illuminating different facets of the same structural reality.