From “The Free Thought Project”
A riot is nothing compared to day-to-day life in this dystopia.
(Vibe Shift) This piece is adapted from my latest video, which you can watch at the bottom of the page.
I’ve been watching the discourse about the protests in France, and I’m seeing all the typical propaganda about violence and property damage.
This is one of those cases where people really don’t understand their own beliefs, because if violence was really their problem, then they would be just as outraged about police brutality, war and even the less obvious ways that society hurts and kills many people. I think what they are actually mad about is the fact that the violence they approve of, the violence they think makes society work, is being challenged. And it’s being challenged in a way that they think threatens the natural order of things.
Riots and Revolutions
There’s a whole other conversation to be had about agent provocateurs and how the police instigate violence so they have a pretense to crack down on the protests. But most people aren’t really thinking about it that deeply. They just see the news and they don’t really fill in the rest of the pieces. They see protests turning into a riot, and they’re afraid that a riot might turn into a revolution, and they’re afraid of how that might change their lives.
To some extent that makes sense, because a riot is really like the threat of a revolution. It is a show of force that says we have the power in our numbers to reset this entire system. It’s kind of like a way of bargaining with the establishment.
Still, I don’t personally think this is a situation that will turn into a revolution. I think this is going to be very similar to the kind of movements we’ve seen in the past. I remember the time of the Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring, and many of us at the time thought this was going to sweep across the world and become a global revolution that was really going to change things.
There were also protests in Europe, especially in Greece, in response to the financial crisis and how it was handled, and we had Occupy Wall Street in the US. So I was optimistic about a revolution then, but then everything was co-opted and just fizzled out, and people didn’t have any kind of plan for what comes next.
This is one of the reasons I think that we’re not capable of a revolution at this point, especially here in the US. The people who are most organized, and I feel most prepared and most armed for a revolution, are not people I would want anywhere near power. It’s the crazy right-wingers.
Remembering the French Revolution
Since these current protests are happening in France, they’ve sparked new conversations about the French Revolution. The mainstream sources always point to the brutality and the irrationality of the mob at the time. But again, it’s hard for me to get that upset about a few beheadings when I know how brutal day-to-day life was for most of the people living in that society.
The thing that actually upsets people about the French Revolution wasn’t the brutality, because more brutal things were happening on a regular basis at that time in history. What they’re mad about is who was on the receiving end of that brutality. Most people will not say this out loud, but it’s very obvious when you see which deaths they get mad about and which ones they don’t. It really shows you whose lives people think have value.
Social Murder
Of course, this is very obvious with things like Palestine, where there’s mass murder happening in front of our eyes, but it’s much less obvious with something like healthcare, which falls under the category of social murder and is invisible to most people. Think about it this way. Your life expectancy is heavily correlated with the zip code you were born in.
The suffering that exists in our society is not random. It might not be one person pulling the trigger, like what allegedly happened with everybody’s favorite Super Mario Brother, but people are responsible for the way society is, and they work really hard to keep it that way. A lot of effort is put into maintaining these hierarchies that keep society under control in a way that causes a lot of people to suffer and die so a few people can benefit.
And the people who benefit know how much suffering they’re causing others, and they don’t care, because they don’t look at us as the same species. They think they are special God people whose lives have more value, and that they’re entitled to a better life at the cost of other people. That is literally what they believe, even if they don’t say it out loud. And a lot of times they do say it out loud.
Police Protect Hierarchies…Not You
In the case of these protests in France, this all started because the kids in schools in the poor neighborhoods there were dealing with terrible conditions. There were rat infestations and cockroach infestations. The water was making them sick. The bathrooms didn’t work.
So when a bunch of kids went out to protest peacefully, the police cracked down on them like they were American cops. Usually the cops in Europe are a little bit more restrained in most cases. That is, until the structure of society is threatened, because that’s how the system maintains control. The whole purpose of cops is to protect the hierarchies that exist in our society. It’s not to protect you.
The institutional violence inflicted on these kids in France, even before the police brutality started, is way more serious than a historic building getting burned down. These buildings are not as special as everybody thinks they are. They are not more special than human lives. People would rather have a dumb building and people living in poverty than not have that dumb building.
I’m not going to shed a tear for some opulent historical building when people are starving and can’t get a decent education and there are rats in their schools.
Justified Violence
People only care about things they think will come back on them. Any other violence that happens in society is justified as far as they’re concerned, especially if they think it protects them or somehow enriches them. A lot of people are conned into thinking that these rules elevate them, and they don’t.
This is the same way that patriarchy operates.
Patriarchy is extremely harmful to men, and so many of us do not realize that. We will fight to maintain patriarchy even though it destroys our lives too, because so many of us have been conned into believing that it benefits us. Of course, this runs very deep in the class structure as well, and it works the same way with the immigration debate.
So many people think they will personally benefit from fascist immigration policies when in reality those policies are very harmful to the economy, as we can see.
People really need to examine their visceral reactions to things like this a little more deeply.