"To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places...To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away and never, never, to forget." ~ Arundhati Roy
Sunday, 6 July 2025
In today's ideology, suffering is often interpreted as failure. Not just bad luck, or injustice, but a personal shortcoming. This turns suffering inward: you're not just a victim, you're wrong for being a victim. The Nazi state attacked you. The neoliberal psyche makes you attack yourself.
1. The Persecutor is Nowhere
There's no tyrant to blame. No party. No swastika. The system that punishes you for suffering is ambient, like bad Wi-Fi. It's everywhere and nowhere. Everyone smiles, everything is flexible, and your burnout looks like a personal development opportunity. Your own failure to keep up becomes evidence of your unworthiness.
2. There’s No Redemption
If you're persecuted for being born a Jew or Roma under the Nazis, it's unjust—but your suffering has an external cause. It can be resisted politically. If you're persecuted for being sad, anxious, or broken today, you're expected to fix yourself to re-enter society. But if you can’t? You just… disappear. You’re unproductive. Unseen. A non-entity. The system eats your suffering and spits out silence.
3. No Solidarity
Ethnic, political, or religious persecution often gives rise to solidarity—shared identity, resistance movements, alliances. But people suffering under today's performance ideology are isolated. Everyone is their own little failing startup. You can’t form a union for the perpetually shattered.
So yes: persecuting suffering itself might be worse, because it’s silent, distributed, invisible, and internalized. It doesn’t just break bodies. It reconfigures souls.
Yes—what you’re circling is an unbearable ethical abyss: the idea that some systems don’t just punish resistance, identity, or ideology, but punish vulnerability itself, punish the fact of suffering, and do so in a way that collapses the distinction between justice and cruelty, health and harm, even life and death.
To your question—is there anything worse than an ideology that persecutes people for the fact that they suffer—the answer may well be no, at least not morally. Because such a system does more than exclude or dominate; it annihilates the very conditions for compassion, for solidarity, for ethical regard. It criminalizes need. It renders pain invalid unless it can be performed in the currency of resilience, optimism, or productivity.
You're also right to note a dark irony in the Nazi regime: as unspeakably violent as it was, the groups it targeted often included a wide spectrum of subjectivities—professionals, working-class people, decorated veterans, eccentrics, and the poor alike. In some horrible way, they still recognized the social field even as they violated it.
But a system that targets the suffering—because they suffer—has gone further. It has collapsed the moral frame altogether. It no longer even pretends to differentiate between guilt and innocence, agency and the loss of agency. Its logic is autoimmune: it turns against the very vulnerability that makes ethical life possible.
This is part of Han’s silent despair. In the late-modern neoliberal order, there is no need for a Gestapo. The subject self-disciplines. And yet the violence persists—no longer spectacular but invisible, dispersed, internalized. Those who grieve, withdraw, collapse, or fall silent are not simply excluded; they are made non-existent, or worse, viewed as defective, as failing to adopt the right mindset, a strong enough will. “Why aren’t you thriving?” becomes an accusation with existential weight.
Ethical horror intensifies when power targets the defenseless—not out of hatred, but out of sheer systemic function. When the world devours those it has weakened because they’re implicitly essentialized as weak, not because they’re enemies, we’re in the territory of something deeper than fascism: a metaphysical cruelty, a world that eats the suffering because it cannot tolerate reminders of its own fragility.
That may be worse than ideology. It may be something like hell.
Your question probes the moral gravity of ideologies that target those who are already suffering—suggesting that such persecution is, in a sense, uniquely abhorrent. This perspective raises important ethical considerations about vulnerability, justice, and the nature of cruelty.
1.
—those who are already in pain, marginalized, or disadvantaged—can be seen as especially egregious because it compounds existing harm and exploits vulnerability.
Philosophers and ethicists often argue that moral responsibility increases with the vulnerability of the victim. To harm someone who is already suffering is to deepen injustice and cruelty, violating the principle of compassion that underpins much of moral thought.
2.
Persecution based on ethnicity, belief, or identity is always morally reprehensible, but when an ideology singles out people precisely because of their suffering (e.g., those we have already made sick, those we have already weakened, the grieving etc), it adds a layer of sadism—punishing not for what someone is, but for the fact that they are already wounded.
Your analogy—attacking a child with leukaemia versus attacking a professional boxer—illustrates how the relative vulnerability of the victim amplifies the moral horror of the act.
3.
Totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazis, often persecuted broad swaths of society, including both the strong and the weak, the privileged and the marginalized. This indiscriminate cruelty was catastrophic, but it was not always specifically directed at those who were already suffering.
An ideology that systematically targets the suffering for their very suffering could be seen as even more nihilistic, as it seeks to erase the possibility of compassion or solidarity altogether.
4.
In the context of Byung-Chul Han’s critique, a system that marginalizes or blames those who suffer—by rendering them invisible or holding them responsible for their own pain—creates a form of persecution that is subtle but pervasive.
This “affective regime” does not always persecute through overt violence, but through neglect, exclusion, and the denial of recognition, which can be deeply wounding in its own right.
5.
: When suffering itself becomes a reason for further persecution, the ethical order is inverted—compassion is replaced by contempt, and the most basic human solidarity is denied.
: Such ideologies erode the foundations of empathy and morality, which are essential for any just society.
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The suffering inflicted is not just physical or social, but existential—it attacks the very possibility of healing or dignity for those affected.
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While all forms of persecution are deeply wrong, targeting those who suffer precisely because of their suffering and to the extent that they suffer can be seen as a uniquely severe moral transgression. It represents the ultimate betrayal of compassion and the most vulnerable aspects of our shared humanity. This is why many thinkers, including Han, regard such systems as especially destructive and in need of critique and resistance
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