Subjugation vs. Exploitation: Fear and Guilt

A black slave in South Carolina stands up and talks to the other slaves about learning to read.

A woman in puritan New England demonstrates cunning.

A woman in Saudi Arabia wants to tuck back her veil and drive a car.

A labor contract manufacturer begins to make their own brand on a third shift from reused parts.

An Indian woman elopes to marry outside her caste, erasing the dowry negotiations of her parents.

sub·ju·ga·tion

  [suhb-juh-gey-shuhn] noun

the act, fact, or process of subjugating,  or bringing under control; enslavement: The subjugation of the American Indians happened across the country.

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This is about the cultural cognition of risk, leveraged by a combination of quasi-religious faith and societal leveraging of a zero-sum concept of "exploitation", to subjugate groups for financial reasons.




Ingenuity is punished in each case by a call to a "higher power".   The lesser common denominators - southern non-landholding whites, teenage girls in Puritan Salem, unmarried unemployed Arabs, or underpaid Mandarin bureaucrats regulating Taiwanese and Cantonese assemblers, families in India accepting the raised warning of the over-reaction to inter-caste marriage...

The commonality is that a powerful class makes a next-to-the-bottom class buy into their subjugation of a third class.

"If you can imagine [end of this prohibition], how will we defend society from [correlated risk]?"

If you allow intermarriage, how will you stop interracial rape?  If you allow a contract manufacturer to reuse, how will you stop piracy or counterfeiting?  If you allow slaves to read, women to vote, marriage without parental permission...?

The cognitive risk of associating the end of a ban on X (say, cannabis) with the loss of control over Y (say meth or heroin) works best on the segments of society with the least education.  If a Saudi woman is allowed to drive a car, what are the chances my subjugated wife is going to demand the same?  Who is that a risk to?  Not the professional class.

Most often today and in recent history, the subjugated are women.  But whenever a strong economy or technology (and economies can inflame and inflate in just a couple of generations) comes into contact with a less developed society, the pattern of subjugation can be applied to something else.  Race works really well. Religion has organized dressings, against the teachings of the prophets, in order to create identifiers which leverage the social power of the religion.

I studied Nazi Germany, and the art of singling out a minority (Jews or gays or cripples) and going totally bananas Tarantino violent upon them.  It sends a signal of fear to everyone, and the fear is then statistically meted by the knowledge that "I'm not X".  Non-Jews are terrified by the Nazis, but at the same time sleep at night telling themselves that they are statistically less prone to be tortured.

I'm an optimist.  I don't think that the answer to this dynamic is to reduce interactions between classes, races, castes, or "OECD-classified" people.  I think the answer is to open the doors to women, to minorities, and to subjugated majorities.

[wikipedia 2012.10.03] The Cultural cognition of risk, sometimes called simply cultural cognition, refers to the hypothesized tendency of persons to form perceptions of risk and related facts that cohere with their self-defining values. Research examining this phenomenon draws on a variety of social science disciplines including psychology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and communications. The stated objectives of this research are both to understand how values shape political conflict over facts (like whether climate change exists, whether gun control increases crime, whether vaccination of school girls for HPV threatens their health) and to promote effective deliberative strategies for resolving such conflicts consistent with sound empirical data.

I believe that integrating "lesser developed nations" into OECD commerce is akin to allowing interracial football, baseball, or basketball.   The weak who will sew fear (if you let Jackie Robinson play baseball, X will occur, if you teach slaves to read the Bible, you risk your daughters uteri even more than if they travel 30 miles per hour by train).

Moderation of exploitation will not occur if the moderates are excluded.  Prohibition and religious guilt to scare moderates in Islam from supporting women drivers.  It will intimidate moderates in the South from teaching book learning to blacks. It will hold back moderates in Salem from standing up for outspoken women accused as witches.  And I have learned that being a liberal environmentalist does not make me immune to the same dynamics of subjugation through regulation of exploitation.   Moderates in recycling from entering into fair and transparent contracts with geeks of color.

My partners and I exploit one another.  I let them exploit my plate of food when they are hungry.  The let me exploit their plate of food when I am hungry.  I let them exploit my umbrella when it rains.  Subjugation is thrown around less than the word "exploitation".  Exploitation has become the "uterus word", the senstivity button which creates a kind of liberal clitoridectomy, shame in the pleasure I feel when I trade with someone who gains so much from the used computer which I value so little.

ex·ploi·ta·tion

   [ek-sploi-tey-shuhn] noun

1.

use or utilization, especially for profit: the exploitation ofnewly discovered oil fields.

2.

selfish utilization: He got ahead through the exploitation of hisfriends.

3.

the combined, often varied, use of public-relations andadvertising techniques to promote a person, movie, product,etc.

I married a strong, liberated, hard-headed woman.  As a consequence, my children speak 3 languages.  As a consequence, I was able to re-invest more of my business earnings back into the business, growing the business.   I've also partnered with people in "e-waste" in other countries.  As a consequence, I don't have a pile of shredded toxic CRT glass to ask permission to dump in a California landfill, and as a consequence, dictators are having to cope with a much, much better informed subjugated population.

One big advantage the United States of America has over the rest of the world is:  we can be shocked by what we used to be shocked by.   Women's rights, emancipation, removing the color barrier in sports, interracial marriage... when we look at fear-shaking-snake-handling-righteous-acting finger waggers, they look familiar, and we are not so prone to strapping bombs to ourselves... though we are not immune.

E-Stewards, anti-globalists, and trade protectionists will ask you to strap an anti-reuse bomb to your recycling business.  Psst... don't do it.

See:  E-Waste Ghana Hoax... used PCs at African city dump mis-identified as recent imports.  African accused of "80%" waste, arrested.  Chicago recycling company claims defamation.  CBS doesn't "follow the trail", does NOT go to where CRT monitors are sent in China.  Mike Daisey does NOT visit the places he said he witnessed in Foxconn.  The libel of women, Jews, gays, techs, and castes has to be held to a higher standard, or our ignorance and lack of education will be continuously exploited.  Your good intentions, green or Christian or Islamic, do not protect you...  You must tell the truth or you will damage the entire e-waste industry, as no one will know what to believe anymore, and chaos will result.