From Enemies to the Injured to the Capacity to Suffer
In older tyrannies, persecution had an object: a party, a religion, a race, a class. The violence was visible, even when cloaked in legality. The Nazis marked their enemies with armbands. The Soviet purges announced guilt with public trials. The persecutor had a face and a flag.
Today, the persecutor is nowhere. No party, no swastika, no banner. The logic that punishes you for suffering is ambient, invisible, constant, impersonal. This is not merely persecution of those already hurt — it is a structural attack on the human capacity to be hurt at all. Under fascism, vulnerability was recognized but weaponized: weakness was exploited to justify domination. But the late-modern performance order reframes vulnerability as a defect to be eliminated. It treats suffering as a design flaw in the self, a glitch to be debugged. This logic doesn’t just harm the injured; it pre-emptively disciplines the uninjured, training everyone to hide, deny, or monetize pain.
The target is no longer an enemy. It is the condition of being able to bleed.
The Collapse of the Moral Frame
Older systems of persecution, however depraved, still operated within a recognizably moral theatre: guilt and innocence, friend and enemy, us and them. The categories were corrupted, but they existed — and because they existed, counter-politics and solidarity were possible.
A regime that targets suffering itself dissolves these categories. There is no innocent victim — only a failed performer. There is no persecutor — only the “market,” the “metrics,” the “fit.” The moral distinction between unjust harm and natural failure collapses, leaving nothing to resist except yourself.
The Destruction of the Witness
When suffering is delegitimized, the very act of witnessing — naming harm, standing with the wounded — becomes suspect. To testify to injury is “negative,” “toxic,” a “drain on morale.” Solidarity rots in the mouth. Those who break down are quarantined in silence; those who survive are rewarded just enough to become examples that justify the system. The ethics of recognition — the basis of any human community — is dismantled.
Why This Is Worse
Fascism needs an enemy. It kills you for who you are or for who it thinks you are. That is unspeakably evil, but it still leaves open the possibility of collective identity and resistance.
This system kills you for the fact that you suffer. It erases you quietly, without theatre, without recognition. It not only isolates the wounded — it abolishes the category of the wound. By making the very capacity for suffering illegitimate, it destroys the conditions for compassion, solidarity, and politics itself.
This is more than ideology. It is metaphysical cruelty: a world eating its own injured, not from hatred, but from the smooth, impersonal logic of a culture, of a socio-economic order, that cannot tolerate reminders of its own fragility. This is the last persecution, and perhaps the final one — because it targets not the enemy, not the other, but the fact of being breakable at all.
1. This is not just “persecution of sufferers” — it’s persecution of the condition of being able to suffer
The neoliberal/performance-order logic doesn’t only target people who are visibly struggling; it erodes the cultural legitimacy of the human capacity to be wounded at all.
Under Nazism, the existence of vulnerability wasn’t denied — it was exploited to justify domination.
Under late-modern regimes, vulnerability is reframed as a defect that must be hidden, “optimized away,” or monetized.
That shift means that even people who aren’t currently suffering learn to suppress, pre-emptively, any display of weakness — cutting off the ground for future solidarity.
2. Why this is ethically “below” fascism in some sense
Fascism is horrifying partly because it still needs an “enemy” — the persecutor still operates in a recognizably political frame (however depraved).
The political dimension creates at least the possibility of counter-politics.
A regime that punishes vulnerability itself has no counter-politics, only personal “self-repair” or disappearance.
In that sense, it’s more metaphysically annihilating: it abolishes the moral distinction between unjust harm and “natural” failure.
3. The autoimmune metaphor is apt but not enough
Calling this “autoimmune” captures the idea of a system turning on its own life-giving capacities. But unlike the body’s immune system (which at least recognizes what it attacks), this system attacks without recognition.
There’s no diagnosis, no spectacle, no theatre of condemnation — only silent market logic.
This absence of drama is part of its power; it can be endlessly rationalized as “neutral” or “meritocratic.”
4. The destruction of the witness
When suffering itself is delegitimized, the act of witnessing — naming harm, remembering injury — becomes suspect too.
Under overt tyranny, testimony can still be a political act; under this regime, testimony is reframed as “negative,” “toxic,” or a “drain on the team.”
The ability to stand with another in pain becomes socially and professionally risky.
This doesn’t just isolate individuals — it dissolves the very ethics of recognition.
5. Why this creates a “hell” dynamic
Hell here isn’t fire and brimstone — it’s a closed system where:
Suffering is illegible unless it converts itself into productivity or spectacle.
Those who cannot convert are erased.
Those who can convert their suffering are often rewarded just enough to become examples of “what’s possible” — which then feeds the cycle of blaming those who can’t.
I think the truly unbearable dimension is that this isn’t simply indifference to suffering — it’s structural hostility to the fact of it, in all its human, unprofitable messiness. That means the persecution doesn’t stop with the already-wounded; it pre-empts and disciplines everyone, ensuring that whenever collapse comes, there will be no language, no solidarity, and no recognized place for you to exist.
LLM
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