A) Competitive victimhood.

An awareness of the extent and depth of hierarchical mass society forms of oppression and exploitation of all organic life forms has grown considerably over the 20th century. However, this awareness is fragmented into separate categories of victimhood as if there were no common source of these multiple forms of oppression and exploitation. Yet it is clear that the common denominator in the victims of oppression and alienation in such categories as; Young, Old, Disabled,, Sick, Poor, Female, Gay, Unemployed, Immigrant, Enslaved, Coloniised,, Ethnicity, Gender Dysmorphic, Low paid economic,  Precariously employed  or discriminated on the basis of Skin colour, is the existing dominant socio-economic system.

Nevertheless, during exactly the same cycles of social production, these hierarchical mass society systems produce enormous amounts of wealth in the form of visible fixed assets and multiple objects of consumption. The problem is clearly one of the unequal distribution of these abundant resources and it is a problem which is created by those who control the main means of production. The super rich and the extremely rich have for extremely long periods extracted far more than they need for a contented existence; whilst, the super poor and the extremely poor have for long periods extracted far less than they need for a contented existence. Only the moderately comfortable groups situated in the middle income sectors of humanity have enjoyed what is (and should be) the basis for the contentment of all members of any naturally evolved species.

Yet of all the millions of species of life on earth only the human species has created such excessive differences in the mode of existence within it’s own species. It is the disproportionate distribution of the proceeds of social production, based upon the social evolution of the historic and modern divisions of labour within these complex societies, that have created the exclusively human phenomenon of internal-species enforced deprivation and structural victimhood. The historic cases of economic slavery, domestic slavery and in the modern era wage and salary forms of slavery have created numerous categories of human, animal and even plant victims of the current versions of the elite determined anthropocentric system.

In the modern period of educated populations and political forms of governance this phenomenon has now given rise to multiple forms of competitive victimhood. Thus in modern hierarchical mass societies oppression, exploitation and marginalisation manifest themselves in the politicised form of openly orchestrated competitions between victim categories for which category should be defined as the most needy and whose members should be compensated in some social or financial way. We now witness the amazing spectacle of a species which has named itself wise (Homo Sapien) in its daily practice ignoring the practical implications of being a single species and acts as if it were a collective of different species or sub-species, based upon socio-economic class.

So instead of uniting against the hierarchical mass society system of human social aggregation which oppresses and/or exploits them all to a greater or lesser extent, they are all now struggling against each other. These modern categories are involved in often fiercely competitive lobbing and activist group campaigns to elevate their own category of socio-economic alienation over and above the socio-economic alienations of other suffering categories. Whether meaning to or not, these activist groups are engaged in exclusive ‘identity’ battles in order to virtually elevate their own particular category of victim status over and above the status of all the other victim categories. It effectively divides the real human world into a series of competitive sub-worlds based upon virtual levels of social and intellectualised separate identities, rather than  the reality of a ‘natural’ species identity which has existed for over hundreds of thousands of years.

The primary aim of these campaigning groups is secure some current (or future) additional social or financial compensation potential in the existing 21st century informal and formal world of hierarchical mass societies. Despite widespread general over-production, over-consumption, and over-pollution, in the 20th and 21st centuries, this competive victimhood process has become a real world, distorted socialised form of ‘Victimhood Games’. At times it seems as if it is the real world which is mimicking the fictional ‘Hunger Games’  where geographical categories of humanity compete with each other for elite granted benefits. It is a most astounding feature of the success of modern hierarchical mass society divide and rule ideology emanating from our elites that has enabled the reality of an almost universal oppression of so many sectors of society to be corralled within their own almost self-ghettoised physical and intellectual limits within our hierarchical mass society aggregations.

Consequently victim categories have been channelled into competing with each other in the form of exclusive enemy guerilla combattant groups – within the jungle of mass societies – fighting for their own ultimate recognition and some form of compensatory benefit. The tortured logic of these formal and informal ‘Victimhood Games’ orchestrated by their ‘professional’ lobbying groups is to invite the elites in control of the wealth and power of our modern hierarchical systems to choose to put more coins into the modern electronic begging bowl of just one of the categories of the many victims of the elite system.

However, unintentionally meant, this amounts to making one set of victims active participants in effectively further demoting  another category of victim. It is a case of trying to persuade the elite with control of the modern state apparatus to choose to support one particular category of victim in preference to any of the other victim categories. Amazingly, this practice is currently described as motivated by humanitarian concern, rather than a manifestation of a restricted lack of humanitarian concern for all the other categories of victims. Real humanitarian and endangered species concern would be campaigning to create a unified oppositional movement aimed at representing all the victims of this oppressive and exploitative system of living. This single issue inversion of reality  demonstrates the political distortion of rational thinking within modern hierarchical mass societies.

As noted above, it may seem that these competitive charitable industry individual victim appeal sectors have become paradies of the fictional societies depicted in the the ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Hunger Games’ films. However, it would be more accurate to conclude that in actual fact it is these modern distopian novels and films which are merely an exaggerated parody of the real world unfolding around us in which the prequel to the present series of distopian events was the 1930’s Hunger Marches and the First and Second World War killing fields. The fictional paradies of those days were presented in Charlie Chaplins ‘Modern Times’ and the ‘Great Dictator’ and in Berthold Brecht’s, ‘The Threepenny Opera’, ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ and ‘The Good Person of Szechwan’.

B) Victims transformed into perpetrators.

Then there are the victims of hierarchical mass societies who turn themselves into intolerant persecutors of people whose experience of such societies has made them anti-social or intolerant of certain social ‘norms’ or traditions. In this way (and in others) the manifold faults of the ‘system’ become transferred onto the victims of the system. The real depth of this phenomenon is revealed in the behaviour and opinions of many individuals who have arrived at a particular critique of the current version of hierarchical mass societies and become highly intolerant of those who do not share that particular critical perspective. A case in point arises among those left anti-capitalists whose critique takes on a strong dogmatic political dimension so that anyone who takes a different political stance is declared an enemy of theirs and their ideas which needs to to be resolutely defeated. Such human victims of the system are not viewed as other human beings whose varied experiences of social alienation and exploitation have been processed differently and whose motives need to be fully understood.

Instead, a short-cut in selecting evidence and reaching conclusions is frequently chosen and the fact that another group of workers have reached different political conclusions is often interpreted by such sectarian dogmatists as that the former are suffering from some incurable personal mental or intellectual malady. Consequently they are not seen as a different product of essentially the same alienating socio-economic system, and also by only having limited information have reached different conclusions. For example, in the current multi-dimensional crisis, the fact that many traditional working class citizens, having – for very good reasons – turned their backs upon left reformist politicians and voted and/or campaigned for populist candidates, are being declared by many on parts of the spectrum of the left to have crossed some political Rubicon. From exploited and alienated working people they have been intellectually transformed into authoritarian fascists or proto-fascists and need to be openly demonised and actively fought against both intellectually and physically. .

Thus in a number of cases the intolerant so-called politically correct left become the mirror image of the intolerant right and raise the slogan ‘fight the fascists’, whilst the intolerant right raise the slogan ‘fight the liberals or commies’. In this way both sides of this hierarchical mass society politicised spectrum cease to see themselves and each other first and foremost as victims of the hierarchical mass society system who have become the manipulated tools of divided political elites. The danger lies in the fact that this perspective is exactly what the respective elites who are competing for social and political control of their respective countries, need. They want people not to just make political choices but to take permanent and belligerent sides. For those who as yet fail to see how this symptom can unfold it is worth reminding ourselves of Europe in the 1930’s.

The most extreme example of this crisis-produced political phenomenon of left workers versus right workers killing each other in support of one elite or another occurred in Europe of the 1930’s. That was when working class members of the National Socialist Party, in Germany and elsewhere, under the direction of their leaders took to ferociously fighting the working class members of the Communist and Socialist Parties who were also urged by their leaders to ferociously fight back. This convoluted process eventually led to a Second World War fought out primarily between the working class members of Germany, Italy and Japan who were pitted by their elites against the working class members of Britain, France, America and Russia. The final results of this catastrophe were the victorious return in all countries in 1945 of an hierarchical socio-political elite who then governed a much depleted (six million dead) international working class. And the rest is history – as the saying goes.

C) Blaming Weapons instead of the system. .

In this latest round of victim blaming, even inanimate objects are blamed rather than the effects upon individuals of the current system of social organisation. The latest round of shooting in the USA, this time with Donald Trump as the target, has once again triggered the usual torrent of superficial media and politically led thinking. Although others can get drawn into contributing to the torrent of virtual thinking, it invariably stems from those people who prefer to blame inanimate commodities for anything negative that happens within hierarchical mass societies. This produces the phenomenon of otherwise reasonably intelligent commentators, who would never believe that a knife could leap out of a cupboard and stab a human being, or that a bottle of alcohol could leave a shelf and empty its contents down a human throat, or that cocaine in powder form could leave its container and insert itself up someones nostrils, nevertheless quickly lose their rationality.

Being against something highly destructive should not be confused with the blaming of any highly destructive commodity for how it is used by certain individuals. Yet scores of commentators and ‘influencers’ straight away start to blame the availability of knives, alcohol, drugs or high powered weapons, for what happens to turn some people in society from an everyday citizen within some human societies into a killer, a rapist or a militarily paid, dropping bombs assassin. Surely, they know that a bomb cannot remove itself from its storeroom, board a plane and release itself to drop on women and children in Gaza or in Kiev. Most people must know that there needs to be an order from Biden or Putin, actioned by other active human beings in the hierarchical chain of authority. So why do so many refuse to look at the reality of hierarchical mass society, rather than concoct some intellectually constructed virtual reality? Ban the Bomb, the Gun, the Knife, the Poison, the biological weapons, etc., in the mouths of the powerless, is just a strategy of avoiding analyzing the social mess hierarchical mass societies have created since their introduction.

In any case, for those whose mental capacity is not restricted by chemical or ideological impediments, it should be obvious that Campaigns to limit the availability of commodities that can be used as weapons, will not limit the ingenuity of those human beings whose deformed and distorted experiences of living in them, leave them determined to kill and maim members of their own or other communities and will therefore find or invent an alternative means. The real problem for humanity and the rest of life on earth, is to identify what causes some human beings to lose their essential humanity which exists at their birth and is developed during their neonate period of nurture and replaces it with varying levels of deliberate inhumanity. The cause clearly cannot be biological since it occurs among no other species of life on earth, nor among all the human species living on the planet. Therefore, logic suggests, the cause must be located within the dominant social form of human living; in other words in the socio-economic structure of hierarchical mass society living.

It is currently impossible to imagine that enough people will emerge in the short term from the general victimhood of bourgeois ideological forms of thinking and who can therefore rise out of Marx’s “Muck of Ages’ analogy and therefore become “fit to found society anew”. I write these pessimistic words with considerable sadness because even most of the self-declared ‘Marxists’ and ‘ecologists’ have contributed, and are still contributing, their own layers of detritus to that mound of accumulating intellectual and material anthropocentric ‘muck of ages’. It is this 20th and 21st century mixture of elite led, top-down, now well absorbed mixture of ignorance and arrogance which stifles debate, non-dogmatic discussion and restricts non-sectarian activism. The practical and ideological competition at the heart of all hierarchical mass society systems – as now turbo-charged by the capitalist mode of production – has like a virus, infected even those thinkers and activists who are otherwise wishing to attempt to reform the system but currently remain trapped  within the anthropocentric parameters of current hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregation .

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)