Rigid Radicalism & The Evil “Other”
Punishment is a replacement for a real political orientation.
The Twin Neurosis of Guilt & Resentment
Kill The Spiteful God In Your Head
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We long for narrative structure. As a response to the disempowering conditions of today's world, we often cling to a dichotomy of Good versus Evil. Filled with righteous indignation, burdened by economic stress, haunted by existential uncertainty, and emboldened by cognitive biases and social conditioning, we react by searching for somewhere to place the blame for these feelings. The only power that seems within reach comes from inflicting pain on those we think deserve it. “Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality.”6
Modern conditions create moral panic and foster a social dynamic that blames systemic social problems on individual moral failings. This path leads us towards a belief that other people are a threat; that cooperation is impossible and we must therefore seek out and punish some existential threat or enemy. This general blaming structure is a phenomenon prevalent all along the socio-political spectrum: identifying a target for our discontentedness and deriving a sense of identity, purpose, and superiority by punishing these scapegoats.
Basic functioning requires a constant cognitive dissonance, particularly for politically conscious people who are aware of the implicit violence of our society. Directing a pent up tension towards some external enemy becomes a source of validation for the precarious self - a reinforcement of punitive models dressed up as virtue and “good politics.” Too often, though, we take out our frustrations on members of our own class an community. This is simply a matter of proximity. We can’t get our hands around Elon Musk’s throat, so we instead search for reflections of oppressors as they appear in the behavior and attitudes of the people in our lives. In doing so, we feel as if we are attacking and dismantling oppressive structures, when in reality we are tearing down the people whose wellbeing is enmeshed in our own.
When we engage in acts of punishment against people with whom we could potentially have solidarity, we are being irresponsible with our righteous outrage. Taking out disgust at systemic violence and social injustice on people who are also victims of those oppressive forces (particularly those who are in our same oppressed class and with whom we have some political affinity) is a “reproduction of the dominator within the dominated.”17
How we relate to members of our communities and the people who occupy our lives is how we put our values into practice. If those values are punitive, the affects will be felt in the ways we treat each other. Our material survival requires collaboration, and our social health requires connection. The relationships we must foster to meet these needs should be founded on good-will, dignity, and friendship, not suspicion, judgment, or revenge fantasies. This is not to suggest we sit around singing kumbaya with our oppressors or their ideological defendants. However, the demand for moral purity and the impulse to punish when that demand is inevitably unattainable is a threat to the resiliency of our relationships as well as collective political aspirations towards liberation.
The subject of this work is not abolition per se, but applying an abolitionist framework – a recognition that policing, surveillance, incarceration, and coercion are not adequate responses to “bad” behavior and perpetuate an unjust system of colonial violence and capitalist exploitation – to a broader analysis of punishment as a social practice. Therefore, a basic understanding of abolition as a frame of reference is essential to this work.
Prisons, mass surveillance, and policing are structures of control and punishment which shape our reality. The general belief that “justice is served” when people who break laws or disobey social norms are imprisoned or punished is referred to as “carceral ideology.” This pervasive outlook relies on a system of deservingness, the idea that imprisonment, criminalization, or punishment are justified by the choices people make. Carceral ideology dominates throughout the hegemonic culture but also …