Member-only story
Oppression, examined
Why the left’s stance against oppression is more disingenuous than it seems
In pursuit of justice
According to Google, the word oppression has three similar but distinct meanings. The first is the act of prolonged cruelty and unjust behavior. The second is the state of being subjugated to this treatment. And the third is the affect associated with this treatment: mental pressure or duress.
This multiplicity of meanings leads to some ambiguity. Is there a person or organization behind our suffering? Whether the answer is yes or no, it still falls under the term oppression. In other words, when a person says they’re being oppressed, it’s not immediately clear whether somebody’s to blame.
In leftist politics today, oppression is used overwhelmingly in the first or second sense of a motivated action. Every instance of oppression presupposes an other, a subject who is doing the oppressing. Political goals are framed as a struggle against this nefarious agent: big corporations, an autocrat, and more recently, a tyrannical government.
But of course, according to our definition, there are also forms of oppression that exist spontaneously. Someone might feel oppressed because they are poor, or unattractive, or hopelessly introverted. The mental duress associated with these are no less real than organized forms of oppression, although they are simply conditions of birth.
The conservative author Thomas Sowell argues that attempts at so-called social justice — pursuits to alleviate supposed injustices in the social and political spheres — are today just veiled attempts at cosmic justice, seeking to eliminate the natural phenomenon of spontaneous oppression. Whereas the civil rights movement could point to a clear oppressor, contemporary movements which claim to follow in their spirit are simply targeting cosmic injustices without knowing it.
Perhaps this is how we should read the fringe phenomenon of ‘fat-acceptance’: overweight individuals who rally against a perceived social order that marginalizes them. All sorts of enemies are presupposed in their quest against oppression — advertising companies, fashion lines, and even the medical industry — and their rhetoric vilifies them with…
