{"id":760,"date":"2022-11-05T21:29:21-04:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-06T01:29:21+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/?p=760"},"modified":"2022-11-05T21:29:21-04:00","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T01:29:21+00:00","slug":"existential-aggression-the-connective-tissue-of-bigotry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/2022\/11\/existential-aggression-the-connective-tissue-of-bigotry\/","title":{"rendered":"Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>(reposted from 2018)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of <strong>existential aggression<\/strong>. Existential aggression is <strong>behaviour that indicates that people don\u2019t deserve to live, or who live under a permanent subaltern status, by virtue of what they are<\/strong>. Note that I said <em>what<\/em> they are, rather than <em>who<\/em> they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Existential aggression is a term I\u2019ve coined to refer to patterns I\u2019ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don\u2019t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims\u2019 self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Existential aggression is rooted in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Essentialism\">essentialist<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/rationalwiki.org\/wiki\/Essentialism\">thinking<\/a>. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve\u2026or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Manichaeism\">Manichaean<\/a> worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people\u2019s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I\u2019ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/the-problem-with-closed-systems\/\">The Problems with Closed Systems<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\t<li>Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use<\/li>\n\t<li>Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as \u2018aliens\u2019 or \u2018illegal aliens\u2019, in casual speech <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\t<li>Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people\u2019s identities or relationships with other consenting adults <\/li>\n\t<li>Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability  <\/li>\n\t<li>Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws <\/li>\n\t<li>Eugenics, especially <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eugenicsarchive.org\/html\/eugenics\/essay2text.html\">negative eugenics<\/a><\/li>\n\t<li>Genocide <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics\u2019 fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men\u2019s rights activists\u2019 rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists\u2019 ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it\u2019s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it\u2019s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of \u2018weird\u2019 subcultures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I\u2019ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are <em>essentially<\/em> bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn\u2019t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn\u2019t make you automatically more credible or \u2018woke\u2019, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it\u2019s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people\u2019s behaviour and feelings. I\u2019ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn\u2019t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn\u2019t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn\u2019t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn\u2019t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I\u2019ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn\u2019t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O\u2019Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don\u2019t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they\u2019re still traps worth avoiding. People\u2019s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may <em>sense<\/em> that they\u2019re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don\u2019t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct \u2018woke\u2019 language <em>du jour<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people\u2019s presence rather than their treatment of others. <em>Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is.<\/em> Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works. <\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(reposted from 2018) Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don\u2019t deserve to live, or who live under a permanent subaltern status, by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","venue_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-760","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorised","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expectedly.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}