How does dehumanizing others help you? Particularly those you say you are helping-- especially those who you tell yourself you are helping BY doing certain dehumanizing things or spreading around certain dehumanizing ideas about them.
It doesn't help THEM, that's for sure. It harms and hurts and tortures them.
Does it make YOU feel more like a complete human being to do that to them?
If so-- and even if not, by virtue of the fact you even see it as necessary at all to dehumanize anyone else-- then you STILL don't believe you are a complete human being. Otherwise you would know that your humanity doesn't depend on your ability to or willingness to do or okayness with doing that to others.
You would know that your humanity doesn't depend on your luck, health, way of thinking, or relationships. Or on anything. You would know your humanity is unconditional.
In this case your so-called gratitude, your thanking God that you are a full person rather than that half person over there or that third-of-a-person you arrested yesterday, or that quarter-person you are looking after in the nursing home, or that eighth-of-a-person you had a fight with last week... that "gratitude" of yours is nothing but societally-enforced narcissism. And I don't mean self esteem-- I mean the belief that anyone could ever be or have been or ever become lesser.
That isn't you. It isn't anyone. Even if right now you don't think those you look down on deserve or need or could benefit from being treated as people, that will change. Stating by someone or other telling you: "And in the meantime, don't you think you deserve better than to believe, and obey society's dictates stating, that your humanity is conditional or negotiable, and that you are only a person for as long as you put out enough work for THEM?"
You're here now, but soon you'll be treated as, or at least feel like, "that half person over there." Yesterday you arrested someone, but tomorrow it'll be you getting arrested. You are treating that old man in the nursing home in a dehumanizing fashion, but what happens when it's your turn in the nursing home as a patient? Last week you told that person you were debating with that if it was up to you they'd be dead, but next week that'll be you others want dead.
NOBODY has ever benefited from being dehumanized, including "in the process of trying to help them." No one ever could benefit from that. Or even be psychologically/emotionally unharmed by it.
Nobody benefits from others being dehumanized either. Society has just told us not to look there. Not to recognize it when it happens. Not to recognize how it harms them and harms us just to see it happen to them... for their own benefit and also because we know it could happen to us too, and will one day if we don't watch it.
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