Us and Them: The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with “Them”.
OURS IS NOT JUST A RAPE CULTURE: it’s a Kill Culture, a Rip-off
Culture and a Lie Culture as well. But, rather than attempting to reconcile
ourselves to living in a multiplicity of malign cultures, it is probably more
helpful to think of ourselves as inhabiting a single Exploitative Culture. One
in which human-beings are consistently treated as means to another’s end – not as
ends in themselves.
The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture,
therefore, lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to
put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with
“Them”.
Generally speaking the smaller the “Us”, the greater the
power. If you’re a member of the “One Percent”, for example, it not only means
that you are obscenely wealthy and powerful, but also that 99 percent of your
fellow human-beings are, in one way or another, exploitable.
Exploitation is always and everywhere associated with actual
physical violence, or the threat of it. Without violence people simply would
not consent to being treated as the means to someone else’s ends – they would
rebel. Exploitative Culture (which is to say all culture) may thus be further
defined as the organisation of, and the devising of justifications for, purposive
social violence.
We thus return to “Us” and “Them”: which may now be thought
of, respectively, as those who must be protected from the imposition of purposive
violence; and those upon whom such violence may be inflicted with impunity.
Consider the current controversy surrounding “Operation
Burnham” the botched, or exemplary (depending on whether you believe journalists
Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, or the Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force,
Lt-General Tim Keating) attack on settlements in the Tirgiran Valley in
Northern Afghanistan.
What happened in the Tirgiran Valley could not have happened
if its inhabitants were regarded by the New Zealand soldiers taking part in the
operation as members of “Us”. To listen to Lt-General Keating deliver his media
briefing on Monday afternoon (27/3/17) was to hear a man doing everything
within his power to make sure that the men under his command continued to be
regarded by the New Zealand public as “Us”; and that the villagers of the
Tirgiran Valley, “the insurgents”, as he called them, were seen as “Them” – our
enemies.
In the eyes of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) Hager
and Stephenson are guilty of engaging in the most basic prohibition of all
Exploitative Cultures: attempting to redefine the meaning of “Us” and “Them”.
The whole purpose of their book, Hit & Run, is to make the reader see the victims of Operation
Burnham as people like themselves: hard-working farmers; a trainee
schoolteacher home for the holidays; parents and grandparents; a three-year-old
girl called Fatima. And the more successful the authors are at transforming
“Them” into “Us”, the more outrageous Operation Burnham seems to the New
Zealand public.
The subtitle of Hit
& Run refers to the “meaning of honour”. The reference shows
considerable insight on the part of Hager and Stephenson, because the concept
of “honour” is inseparable from what it means to be a soldier – a warrior.
The military virtues are all “hard” virtues: valour, prowess,
discipline, loyalty. They need to be, because bodies of armed men, willing to
inflict injury and death on command, are the ultimate guarantors of Exploitative
Culture. Crucial to the success of these hard military virtues is the continual
and favourable contrast provided by the justifiers of exploitation with the
“soft” virtues of civilian life: wisdom, creativity, tolerance, solidarity.
Significantly, Exploitative Culture assigns almost identical
combinations of qualities to the constructs of masculine and feminine. Strength
and masculinity is pitted against weakness and femininity in what can only be
described as the primal social dichotomy: the first and most destructive reduction
of human-beings from ends-in-themselves to means-to-an-end.
For ordinary men to accept their subordination to stronger,
richer and more powerful men, Exploitative Culture supplies them with their own
inexhaustible supply of subordinates – women and children. And since there can
be no exploitation – no power – without violence, the maintenance of this
primal dichotomy is of necessity achieved through the unremitting application
of physical and emotional coercion. Domestic violence, rape, child abuse: these
are not just the products of the masculine/feminine dichotomy, they are also the
most tragic expression of the “Us” and “Them” divide.
The non-consensual penetration of a young woman at a party;
the invasion of a distant river valley by airborne special forces; both are
symptoms of the same dreadful disease.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 29 March 2017.
