It’s not my fault | Edouard Louis
“It was a chase scene. In the foreground was what looked to be a middle-class man, wearing a white shirt and suit pants. He was trying to get away from several dozen other men, obviously angry, who were running after him yelling and screaming. The man in the white shirt was struggling to get away from them and you could see the fear on his face. He was trying to run, but dozens of hands grabbed for him and held him back, holding on to him like dozens of tentacles that all belonged to a single creature…”
Source: It’s not my fault | Edouard Louis
Very interesting essay. He challenges a whole lot of things we take for granted – not least of which is the continuum of action. Where does violence begin? How does it develop and who is ultimately responsible? He also speaks very eloquently on social hierarchy. If you have a bit of time, read it. I’m not sure why it’s not in the newspapers, because it should be. And read it considering the fact that right now the Brazilian government is working on redefining the term slave-labour as a result of lobbying by the agricultural industry. You didn’t read that wrong. Re-defining the meaning of slave like work, to make allowances for what one can only presume is slave like work.
My Mazamet 
That’s the problem with the lower class, their violence is so outre, so overt. It lacks style and class … and separation. The difference in this story is that the executives could play out their violence in the comfort of their board room. They might have felt bad or conflicted or whatnot, but they didn’t have to do it in the presence of the people they were violating. This separation wasn’t available to the employee’s violence.
I find this in all aspects of our society. I meet with a great many hunters, most of whom are ordinary people, but they have strange ideas about hunting and manliness. They think hunkering down on a sleeping bag with a high powered rifle fitted with a high power telescopic sight and killing an animal from 400 meters away is a manly activity. I consider it to be a cowardly activity as the animal has no avenue to fight back, no avenue to contact his assassin. Now if you wanted to kill that animal in a manly way, you need a knife. Then predator and prey both have a chance. Hunting at a distance is just killing. I learned this from a man who hunted a Grizzly bear … on foot … with a longbow and wooden arrows. Kill shots needed a separation of less than twenty yards (18 m) a distance a 900 lb Grizzly bear could cover in a couple of seconds.
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The thing is, our species values power, doesn’t it? That more than most other things. Even the dishonest/criminal wealthy are to some point revered.
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Power rather than courage, yes. Cheap glamour and the media has a lot to answer for.
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YES, YES AND YES! I’d replace every civilian gun with something that actually requires some skill for success, liks a knife, a bow, a spear or any of a dozen ‘primitive’ weapons that require both skill and courage to use.
Imagine how many fewer fatalities there would be if nutters could only use an axe to kill?
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That slavery article-Jesus fuckin’ Christ!
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Incredible, isn’t it? Happening now in 2017, under the world’s nose.
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But there is old fashioned slavery happening under the world’s nose already, and no one seems to give $hit so why not formalise it? I wonder if this is what it felt like just before the fall of Rome?
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Yes, there’s definitely something odd in the air.
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It’s like a mass hallucination. 😦
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I like the idea of violence as a stream of energy, like it’s conveyed across people like thoughts across synapses. It raises some other questions, like whether violence can be eradicated or just mitigated. Can it be created? Can it be amplified?
Such big questions for so late in the evening, Pink.
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I think it’s particularly interesting in the way it affects relationships and the mind. The classical (and religious) framing is there’s an action, and then a counter action, and the counter action somehow exists in a vacuum. We should ask ourselves some serious questions on the social development of the concept of revenge. What purpose does it/has it served to associate what seems to be more negativity to the counter-action than sometimes to an action itself?
Is that not simply a mechanism to excuse or make light of belligerent behaviour?
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Revenge is one of those things that exists in different states. From the top social perspective, it seeks to separate the counter action from the action. There’s a hidden assumption that no matter how profound the original action, the counter action of revenge is never appropriate.
However, and one can see this in social media ad nauseam, revenge is a guilty pleasure. It’s like people understand that revenge is something more than just a forbidden fruit. Revenge describes the resulting relationship that violence creates in people. Social norms just mute this understanding to the point that people have to band together to gloat over it, to protect from a social superior looking on in disgust.
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Thanks for sharing Pink. I find it an interesting essay. I will maybe say more when I finish reading it
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