Give Up
Flee, Escape, and Give Up as liberatory practices
Everyone, at their core, wants to be free.
We want to be happy to be free of emotions that drag us down. We want a new job to be free to do the work we love. We want success to be free of shame, and money to be free to do what we want, go where we want, and have what we want.
Underneath everything we desire is the desire to be free.
So flee.
Oppression’s job is to make the consequences of non-participation so severe that we comply. In German there is a word for an attack so sudden, terrifying, and overwhelming that people simply give up: Blitzkrieg.
Oppressive societies also use shock, terror, and overwhelm for psychological and physical domination. Oppressive societies use socialization as blitzkrieg.
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” - bell hooks
The process of socialization teaches us the norms of our culture, including what respect and kindness must entail, or not entail, to be clearly communicated to those around us. Socialization teaches us how to communicate love and how to understand when others are communicating love to us. Socialization is important in a world where we are interdependent because it teaches us how to be a “good neighbor.”
Socialization also violently teaches us what attitudes, characteristics, or items we are not allowed to have according to our society’s rules for our social identities.
We can choose to live within these constraints, or we can escape.
Oppression will tell you, in the somatics of woke/ness that it's a privileged act to escape from oppression. So, Oppression will say, we can’t say freedom is possible because people who are really oppressed are helpless in the face of their oppression.
But I ask you to name a single human revolution that was led by privileged people. It is ALWAYS those who have been deprived who rise up to demand more. It is not billionaires on yachts who plot how to overthrow an oppressive government that supports their yacht addiction. And the middle class will put up with systems that are predatory, but manageable for them. Those who set fire to the streets are those who have been so deprived for so long that the only safe path is revolution.
How dare oppression tell us we are too oppressed to stop being oppressed.
Oppression says that if we were less oppressed, we would have the power to free ourselves and escape our nightmare. But sadly, we are too oppressed to be any more free. Shucks. I guess we’ll just toil away and take fewer vacation days than a medieval peasant.
Give up.
Escape is a pathway we can access once we give up trying to change systems of oppression and accept that these systems are working as designed and they would need to be transformed, not simply changed. Worse still, a system functions by maintaining its structure, not by transforming into a new structure. Systems and structures, by their very nature, resist change and do not transform. If you want a transformed system, you must design a new system from scratch.
This is not an easy path.
Traveling the underground railroad was not easy. Creating communities of escapees where the free could thrive was not easy. But I reject the modern idea that perpetual ease in this life is achievable. If we refuse hardship, all we do is transfer the dis-ease elsewhere; to a sweatshop, a clear-cut forest, or a vulnerable population.
Escape becomes our pathway to freedom when we have nothing left to lose but we can choose liberation before we lose any more.
I recommend the practice of dignity; the radical non-participation in oppression as an act of radical responsibility for our (interdependent) wellbeing. We exercise our power to experience that we are powerful. We rest rather than fight for the right to rest. We deal with the consequences of resting rather than the consequences of not resting. We hold the awareness that our freedom impacts others because we are, down to the cellular level, interconnected and interdependent. If we believe in physics or spirituality we know that interaction, even at the level of observation, impacts those around us.
My current Dignity Practices of Non-Participation in internalized oppression:
Crying when I feel like I need to cry
Asking for help, even when it makes me feel physically nauseated to be so vulnerable
Resting anytime it feels like r--- or abuse to force my body to do something it does not want to do
Laughing in between the crying
Expanding when fear tells me to contract: standing extra tall, posting on social media
Speaking the truth to myself over and over to drown out the lies of oppression
Speaking loving words to myself in spite of what my internalized oppression says about my worth and safety
Resting: because picking a fight with oppression by resting is audacious, scary, and tiring
I trust that my non-participation in the lies in our collective consciousness benefits you, too. I trust that if you care for yourself in a world that tells you to hate yourself your self-love benefits me, too. I trust that every time you believe in yourself in a world that tells you to doubt yourself, your courage benefits me, too. Thank you for your contribution to our interdependent wellbeing.
If any of us is oppressed, none of us is free.
Flee. Escape. Give up.
Join me on the shore of a liberation we cannot yet see.
I’ll see you there.
Photo credit Photo by Sebastian Pociecha on Unsplash