“Hey, wait a minute, fuckass,” some of you might be thinking right now. “So we all are a part of the kyriarchy. But the kyriarchy as a social system doesn’t work well for anyone! Okay, maybe there’s an upper-class cis straight white gender-conforming abled conventionally attractive Protestant couple in Ohio somewhere for whom the whole system works really well, but under the kyriarchy about 99.99% of humanity is oppressed! Why the hell do we all participate in it?”
The Typical Mind Fallacy
It should not be a surprise to anyone that human beings are really, really bad at figuring out what those other people who are not like us are going on about. For instance, I remain continually puzzled that other people seem to legitimately prefer getting drunk on Friday night to gaming. I mean, there’s Arkham Horror! And Magic: the Gathering! And Illuminati! Why the hell would you willingly choose to go to parties instead? I mean, there are costumes sometimes, those are fun, and dancing, but some people don’t dance or wear costumes and they still prefer the whole getting drunk thing. I do not understand it.
My confusion over people’s lack of interest in Arkham Horror has pretty negligible effects on the world. Unfortunately, this stops some people from realizing that members of marginalized groups are even marginalized. My favorite example comes from when I was in high school. A friend of mine got a Lexus for his birthday. I said I was jealous of how rich he was. He said, “Oh, my family’s not rich. I got a used Lexus.”
It’s not like my friend was a bad person. It’s just that he was rich, and all his friends were rich, and the only times he really talked to poor people is when they asked him to move so they could vacuum under where he was sitting. Poor people were strictly theoretical for him.
…Which worked out really well when he decided that homeless shelters coddled homeless people, who ought to just all get jobs, dammit.
Ignorance is an extremely common cause of kyriarchal shit. No one means to make the meeting inaccessible to people in wheelchairs. They just had the meeting up two flights of stairs without ramps and, well, it never occurred to them that some people might have problems with that. Why would it? They’re not in wheelchairs, it’s never been an issue for them.
Tribalism
Human beings are social animals. We like creating groups. In fact, literally assigning people to random groups is enough to get them to (a) create opposing in-groups and (b) make them hate each other.
So I am a member of Group White. The subconscious parts of my brain want me to advance Group White at the expense of the various People of Color Groups, because they are “like me” and part of my group. (My brain also wants me to advance Group Upper-Middle-Class, Group Able-bodied, Group Mental Health Issues, Group Queer, Group Gender Egalitarian, Group Geek and Group Manboobz Regular.) I don’t necessarily intend to; it’s not like I woke up one morning and said “hey, I’m going to help out the white people today, for lo, my skin is white.” I just feel more comfortable around them. They’re “like me.” They’re “my kind of people.”
If I, say, preferentially hire Group Geek, that’s unlikely to be a social-justice issue, because someone else is preferentially hiring Group Jock over there and it evens out. However, Group White has historically been in charge of all the things, so if I preferentially hire members of Group White, who are like me, then suddenly members of Group Black and Group Asian and Group Hispanic will find themselves less likely to be hired. And that is a serious problem.
Power Corrupts
The old cliche is that power corrupts. The kyriarchy gives a large number of fallible human beings power over other human beings. One can imagine that this is not going to end well.
Which is to say: it ends in people arguing about why they ought to have the power, and how those other groups are just inherently less awesome than they are, and they don’t have that much power anyway, and you ought to give them some more power because they clearly know what to do with it.
Stereotyping
A heuristic is a quick shortcut to thinking. For instance, if you say “the aliens from the planet Googolplex are controlling my brain,” my heuristic suggests that that’s absurd so I shan’t examine it further. On the other hand, heuristics can go wrong– for instance, if I decide your statement that humans evolved from monkeys is absurd so I shan’t examine it further. Stereotypes are a subtype of heuristic– the assumption that people in Group X all have Trait Y.
Stereotypes are not bad. If you stereotype geeks as mostly Star Wars fans, or Dirty Hippie College students as mostly pot-smoking liberals, it’s just a cognitive shortcut that makes it easier to predict the behavior of a random geek or Dirty Hippie College student. Problems happen when your stereotype heuristic suggests, upon seeing a Muslim person, that said Muslim person is probably a terrorist.
Stereotypes can go wrong lots of ways. There’s the availability heuristic: because you can think of more Muslim terrorists than you can think of Muslim non-terrorists, you assume Muslims are mostly terrorists, even though this is not actually the case. There’s confirmation bias: once you think Muslims are terrorists, you look for more information that supports the idea that Muslims are terrorists; the Christian who blows up a building is an extremist, the Muslim who blows up a building is proof. There’s stereotypes that don’t carve reality at its joints: a stereotype about “black people” includes a recent immigrant to America from Haiti, an African American who is mostly white by ancestry, a Brazilian who doesn’t even identify as black, an urbanized Kenyan, a Somali pirate and a South African farmer; it is very difficult to figure out what all these groups have in common beyond some quantity of melanin. And so on and so forth; a full list of the ways human beings are irrational would fill up several books.
These inaccurate stereotypes can lead to a lot of really awful behavior. For instance, profiling all Muslims at airports would be a sensible countermeasure if Muslims were Always Chaotic Evil like orcs; since they aren’t, it’s Islamophobic. The overwhelming likelihood is that the nice Muslim family who moved in down the street are not al-Qaeda members, so you shouldn’t treat them like al-Qaeda members.
There’s also the way stereotypes influence the behavior of people actually in the group, but this post has gone on for long enough and that plays a huge enough role in gender (remember? What this blog is actually about?) that I think it is deserving of its own post.
(Digression: some people have complained the kyriarchy’s definition is too broad. How does “the set of all ways some groups sapient lifeforms are unjustly harmed specifically because of their membership in a particular group” sound as a definition? Lots of worthy causes are mostly unrelated to the kyriarchy, such as environmentalism, civil liberties, fighting corruption in government and ending Nickelback’s musical career.)
I would have to say that given those two choices, I would describe it as more of the latter. But I don’t know, because the line between those things seems very blurry. Good question, though, it made me think. I think that there is a civic concept of a person that serves to define our human rights and civil rights, just as you said, and these concepts are on the same level as Adam Smith’s social contract and competing ideas such as collectivism. But there is also the ethos of the rugged frontiersman and I think this is a downright… Read more »
dungone, When you say that “Openess to new ideas is the opposite of individualism” are you describing a philosophy(for lack of a better word) or are you describing people who think they are individualists? For my part, individualism is a moral and political stance that an individual has an existence apart from his/her membership in the group/society, and has a value(again, for lack of a better word) apart from his/her usefulness to the group/society, that an individual is not simply a subordinate unit of society. Some of the more communitarian-minded want to deny(or prefer to ignore) this basic liberty(better word?)… Read more »
Orphan, You’re presenting a false dichotomy in asserting that the only alternative to exhibiting rational behaviour is being a mindless animal. While it’s clear that humans are capable of rational thought, it’s also clear that humans don’t consistently behave rationally. Rational thought is just one of type of mental process that can determine human behaviour. It’s possible to exploit the non-rational mental processes and cause another person to act in a way contrary to the way a self-interested rational human would behave. There’s the whole field of science called psychology dedicated to understanding more about the complex and often non-rational… Read more »
Orphan: Do not insult other commenters. This is Rule #1 of good-faith debating. Don’t make me spamfilter you again.
Orphan? You don’t regard a personal attack to be an ad hominem because it is an insult? My vocabulary? Okay then. Whether or not I’m an arrogant arse has no relevance on my claim that people use heuristics to perceive value that backfire in irrational ways. Disclosure – I have a degree in economics, so some people would say I am an arrogant arse. But it’s a well established fact in behavioral economics and psychology. Are we as mindless as animals? Here’s an interesting Ted talk by that shows exactly that: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/laurie_santos.html And here’s a similarly fascinating Ted talk by… Read more »
Knowledge is Power
Power Corrupts
Study Hard
Be Evil
“@Jim, I hope you did not see my earlier allegory as advocating for philosopher kings. ”
I did. Thanks for the correction.
“Money is the most subjective value of all; it is subjective value made incarnate.”
Money is a social convention.
@Orphan, at this point I think you’ve made your third comment where I feel that you are derailing and trying to muddy the waters with silly remarks. Money is the incarnate of subjective? You don’t say… but I can buy a gallon of milk with money and I can’t buy a gallon of milk with my sheer contentedness because someone gave me a nice marble. Money is a measurable metric, so we can actually talk about it in a way that makes sense. Your second point is an ad-hominem attacking my vocabulary and I feel strongly that you really don’t… Read more »
@Jim, I hope you did not see my earlier allegory as advocating for philosopher kings. My point was to say that there is a deliberate socialization process (i.e. the “teacher”) that guides all of us to adopt a certain point of view based on our innate abilities and social standing. Not very controversial, IMO. My observation is that when a geek/gamer talks about other people going out to have fun in a social setting, she interprets that as getting shitfaced and doesn’t get it. But it was a long process of being socially ostracized that leads to many of them… Read more »
dungone –
Money is the most subjective value of all; it is subjective value made incarnate.
Your explanation of human behavior as “irrational” lacks imagination and insight; it is the utter lack of an explanation, couched in terms of intellectual superiority. I’ll refer you to signaling theory. Get back to me when you can show human beings a modicum of respect.
Going back to the Stanford Prison Experiment, usually I find myself referencing it as a counterpoint to people whose black and white thinking leads them to believe that bad things happen because of evil people. It gave me a slight chuckle to have someone who ostensibly believes that power is evil reference that experiment back to me. What that experiment actually showed is that moral superiority and smugness is not sufficient to prevent people from acting in bad ways. What the experiment did was to take ivy league students who were amateurs and put them in a situation of moral… Read more »
“Like QRG said, the “Power” quote is a bastardization of a longer Focault quote. The deeper meaning behind it (I imagine) is a statement on the proper state-of-mind a power-wielder must have to avoid being corrupted by the power.” This is theme of the Bhagavad Gita. The first chapters are explicitly about a dealing with the spiritual and ethical challenges of wielding the ultimate power. It says basically what QRG says abot yielding power as the only ethical thing to do with it and calls that “renunciation, but goes to add soem refinements. For instance it says that rejecting power… Read more »
Fnord: “And there are even times when the geek/jock thing is tied into the big social issues of the kyriarchy. Geek cultural identification has certainly interfered with efforts to combat sexism in the geek community and geek cultural touchstones at times.” Yes, it has. And racial cultural identification has interfered with efforts to combat sexism within disadvantaged races. (Wasn’t that what The Color Purple was about?) Gender cultural identification has interfered with efforts to combat homophobia and transphobia. What’s your point? It seems like what you’re implying is that the existing intra-gender hierarchy, which the crude “geek/jock” terminology is often… Read more »
Ok, I’ll drop the shorthand. Power (of the social or political sort) is not the same as choices or opportunity. Power can create choices and opportunities – but having choices (or opportunities) does not necessarily create more power for yourself or your group. Like QRG said, the “Power” quote is a bastardization of a longer Focault quote. The deeper meaning behind it (I imagine) is a statement on the proper state-of-mind a power-wielder must have to avoid being corrupted by the power. It’s the same concept that Tolkein played at in the great saga – Frodo had responsibility for the… Read more »
I see. Power when it’s “bad”, opportunity and choices when it’s “good”. Other than that, do you have an actual definition of power beyond, “Power is baaaad, mmmkay?”
More on the Stanford Prison Experiment later (have to get to work).
Don’t get me wrong, I could sit here and explain to you the mechanism of comparative advantage and give you an example where we can use mathematical proof to show that both sides end up wealthier after they perform a trade. If that’s what you really want. Your own example, while assumed to be valid, cannot be used in a simple proof without some additional information. As in, maybe each boy might know a third party on the other side of the playground who is willing to pay a higher price for the other boy’s type of marble. And there… Read more »
dungone – If that which is merely psychological has no real-world value, what are you doing in this blog? Subjective value is the only value that exists. And yes. Reason has more potency than violence. That doesn’t change the moral status of either reason or violence, the distinction of which is the root of individualism; in order to argue that individualism has no meaning you’re going to have to go farther than “People can be convinced of things” and arrive somewhere around “Convincing somebody of something is no different from forcing them to do it by threat or act of… Read more »
@orphan, thanks for your response but I feel that the distinction between “power” and “social influence” as one of force and violence is a very old strawman. That very distinction is, in fact, why “power” is a dysphemism and “social influence” is not a word, but a rather coyly put together phrase. I feel that your use of the word “voluntary” is a fallacy of definition, because “volunteerism” is a close enough synonym to “individuality,” and while we’re at it, “free will,” that all these concepts can be used fairly interchangeably. The problem with “voluntary” is exactly the same as… Read more »
noah:
I’m sure those who want to reduce everything to individual cases so as to ignore the existence of patterns…
No more than people who want to depend on patterns to ignore the existence of individual cases. Yeah why bother with individual merits when you just choose to listen/ignore based on some characteristic?
I “deny patterns” inasfar as they are to be used to treat people like monsters just because of the race or gender that they were born with. So yes, if the “seeing of patterns” is meant to facilitate the (ab)use of the “privilege” argument, then I will deny them to the ends of the earth.
dungone – All of which only makes sense if you don’t make a distinction between power and social influences which are derived from violence or threat thereof and those which are derived from voluntary relationships. Individualism isn’t about denying society’s influence. It’s about denying society’s right to inflict that influence by force or threat thereof. Billy Beck uses an example to illustrate the nature of capitalism – when two boys in a playground exchange marbles, value is created; both are better off, because they both have something they value more than what they traded. The world is that much richer.… Read more »
@AnonymousDog, thanks for asking the very questions I was hoping someone would ask. 🙂 If you were able to impose your vision on the world, would the smart kids be leading and the soulful kids building because they wanted to, or because your new system forced them to? Would you be eliminating social injustice? My rather simplistic allegory was intended to convey that individualism is a myth. What I mean by that is that many of the qualities with which we so strongly self-identify as members of a society are themselves a product of a socialization process that shapes our… Read more »
I don’t want to bother with a long reply to dungone, so here it is.
Opportunity, choices don’t corrupt.
Stanford Prison Experiment.
Power corrupts.
Give it up.
That’s all.
After reading this blogpost and the comments, I think I’ll try to rephrase my observations from the last blogpost as a question and see what the community thinks. Why do we need the concept and surrounding language of Kyriarchy? As defined and explained by Ozymandias42, the Kyriarchy is comprised entirely by sociological and social psychological principles. Concepts of “power” and “societal oppression” can be reduced to stereotyping, in-group/out-group (tribalism), attribution (explicit or implicit), and the “choices” made by individuals based upon all the above problems. So, put another way, why not just use the language (and data as it evolves/changes)… Read more »
Desipis, you just wrote what I should have if I had been smarter about what I was writing.
Props to you, mate.
I’m sure those who want to reduce everything to individual cases so as to ignore the existence of patterns Noah, it’s not about ignoring the existence of patterns. It’s about realising that these patterns are observations of correlation, and that issues of ethics or social justice need to look at causation. As the saying goes, “correlation does not imply causation”. Patterns might be strong indicators of problems in society but they are not problems in and of themselves. We need to look deeper than just seeing patterns to uncover the causative nature of the problem; if we just try to… Read more »
Daisy, please try to comment more constructively. Comments like “Well, aren’t we superior?” are antagonistic and do not contribute, especially since there is no evidence of my supposed superiority, and there is no evidence of my trying to preach about the local politics of your area. You seem to be determined to stir up a fight, when I am pointing out these, very simple facts: 1. You say what you see in your local area. I don’t have experience of your local area, so I can neither confirm nor deny this, and nor do I attempt to. 2. I live… Read more »