A Primer on Structural Oppressions

The idea of structural oppressions is not insane. It comes out of a very specific worldview, and within that worldview both the idea and its consequences make every sense.

Here’s how it works.

The worldview that gives birth to the concept of structural oppressions is that of a complete, unlimited autonomy of godlike individuals. Within this worldview, a human person is exactly like what Christians understand as God’s creation. Within that creation there exists a spirit that occasioned it and can remake it at any time according to its inscrutable purposes.

Of course, anything that comes in from the outside and limits God’s power over his creation makes him not God. People with this vision of the self absolutely do perceive as an existential threat any limitation on what they can put in or extract from their bodies. They absolutely feel destroyed at their core by the idea of not being able to do exactly as they choose at every time. And they absolutely cannot tolerate other gods arising and turning them into objects instead of sources of creation.

The problem is that people don’t control how others perceive them. The human brain works in such a way that it categorizes an object of perception on sight and assigns qualities to it immediately upon encountering in. If this sounds confusing, think about what happens when you see a house. The second you see it, you know what it is and what to expect from it. You know what purpose it serves, what it looks like inside, what it will or won’t do. It won’t, for instance, growl, make jokes or run away. You have created that house in your mind before it did anything to reveal itself to you.

But that’s a house, so who cares. Problems arise because we do that with people, too. We do not discover each human being anew every time we encounter that human being. We create him in our minds on the spot and thus destroy his capacity to be his own and only creator.

No factor that isn’t chosen freely at every single moment should have an impact on God and his creation. But since we aren’t actually gods, there’s a million things we neither choose nor control. The very structure of the human life is that of having no power over crucially important aspects of our lives. This is why people feel structurally oppressed. Things are set up in a way that messes with their godly status. Those things must be wrong and need to be destroyed.

There’s no way out of this problem because we will continue bringing our knowledge and experience to every interaction. I mean, locking everybody up and not letting people socialize could mitigate the pain somewhat. Isolation is the best form of existence for people possessed by the need to be God.