You’re Not Allowed to Believe These Things

Sep 6, 2014 | Disability, For Therapists

The lower you are in society the less you are allowed to believe.  The obvious manifestation of this is fundamentalist religion getting shoved down one’s throat but there are more nuanced ways it plays out as well.  There is this myth in America that we’re all equal and even though it’s patently false those of privilege and power will go to great lengths to get people further down to buy into it.  Some things you’re not allowed to believe follow:

Money and status are the most important thing.  Those on top want to have their cake and eat it too.  They want to be able to reject lower status people and turn around and pretend status doesn’t matter.  It’s an ego thing.  They want to appear humble on the outside while being arrogant on the inside (feigning humility is an artifact of the Christian influence on Western culture).

Those on the bottom (like me) are the ones that know money and status are all that matters because of all the friends (and potential friends) we have lost on account of being low status.  Of course high status people will give other reasons why they reject us and people will believe them because we naturally believe those of more power and privilege.

The world is cruel.  Those in power want those without to be naive as possible.  In this state the powerless can be taken advantage of more easily.  You need both the carrot and the stick to effectively manage and control the masses.  When people stop trusting the system you lose the carrot and consequently lose a lot of your control.  For example it gets more difficult to string people along, promising them a job or marriage, if they just stay in an exploitative situation just a little bit longer.

My life would be better if I didn’t have this disability.  One of the narratives of the powerful is the narrative of contentment of those at the bottom.  And who is really lower in society than those with disabilities!  The powerful’s narrative of fake egalitarianism goes something like this, “If those at the bottom are happy than we are all equal, so let’s pretend they are!”.

Show me!  There is little that scares those in power more than people giving up on hope and taking up conjecture.  Hope requires trust, conjecture doesn’t.  Trusting is deferring to a person or institution with power with a best case scenario of breaking even.  When trust is withheld, it strips a lot of power from that which was formerly trusted.

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