In 2000, when I sent the completed manuscript of my “Restorative Justice: Healing the Foundations of Our Everyday Lives” — written with long-time friend and colleague Larry Tifft — to publisher/editor Rich Allinson of Willow Tree Press, he said he was ready to go to press but still had a question about a phrase we used several times: “the political economy of relationship.”
It’s not the time here to explicate our full response to his query; suffice it to say for now that it refers to the governing principle that defines one person’s relationship to another, the conceptions of value he has of the other — whether it be a person, group, or nation — and the principle is deeply embedded in the psyche.
Such conceptions are part of a mental framework whereby we classify others, and devise rewards and punishments for behaviors that jibe with the directives of our ordained hierarchy; it’s a gestalt of sorts and a measure of a person’s moral depth.
When the framework is warped or tilted or off kilter, the assessor’s behavior tends toward the evil part of the good-evil spectrum, manifesting itself in words and behaviors that dismiss, demean, minimize, or otherwise mock the value of the other.
Those who prescribe to such — shall we say — evil, try to obfuscate by couching their words and actions in a propaganda that affords them (the appearance of) cover while shooting salvos at any person, group, or nation they define as inferior and unworthy of human consideration.
The end goal of the evil-minded soul is to tie up, confine, hem in, enslave the other for self-aggrandizement, and the payoff can come in a variety of ways: money, prestige, sex, and any other variable that helps solidify the power complex of the evil-minded soul.
In our Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, the disagreement was over whether white people had the right to own Black people, use them as slaves on plantations without rights, pay, dignity, or a future of value. In the case of Black women so enslaved, it meant the owner of a plantation had sexual dibs on them anytime he wanted.
The most talked-about example of such enslavement today is Jeffrey Epstein and his accessory to the crime — Ghislaine Maxwell — of operating a plantation for enslaved teenage girls and young women for their sexual pleasure and the sexual pleasure of a cadre of rich and powerful clients who contributed to the finances of their empire. On that plantation, no sugar cane or cotton or coffee was harvested but orgasms (limitless).
Keep in mind that “conceptions of other” is structural and why they have such a powerful effect on behavior; and why so many people went nutso over the Black Lives Matter movement because its main focus was not the working conditions of the Black porter in the galley of an Amtrak train but the underlying structural framework of racism, the steel that defines the structure of one’s ethical framework.
Thus, in the hierarchical ordering of races and ethnicities white people assign greater value to themselves than to people of color, a disease diagnosed as white supremacy.
Women are well versed in how value is assigned to genders and sexes because historically men with power and money, who control access to reward systems, assign greater value to themselves than to women — as is happening right now as sexually-straight (white) men enforce a value system that assigns greater worth to themselves than to their lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender, and queer neighbors.
In his 2018 manifesto “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the veteran journalist Anand Giridharadas challenged whether those in “the corridors of political power, should be allowed to continue their conquest of social change and of the pursuit of greater equality.”
He assured us, “The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.”
When efforts are made to question or dismiss or minimize the reality of someone else’s pain and suffering, define it as fake news, then Orwell’s 1984 has come.
As a Great and Powerful Wizard was exposed as a fraud when Toto pulled back the curtain in the throne room of Oz, so now the current President of the United States is bereft of any redeeming psychological, philosophical, or religious value having supported Nazi-like ideologues like David Duke and Nick Fuentes, and after taking away the life-supporting aid the U.S. Department of Agriculture made available to the poor through its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Then there’s the gasoline he kept pouring on the flames of “birtherism” accusing Barack Obama, running for president, of being an alien. How he gloated in 2010 when Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily filled a 14 x 48 foot highway billboard in South Gate, California displaying his hidden hate in giant capital letters: WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?
In her memoir “Unhinged,” Omarosa Manigault Newman, a White House adviser to Trump said, when he hosted the TV show “Celebrity Apprentice,” he frequently used the N-word and that tapes of the show have proof.
And, though she says she herself never heard him say it, she knew “Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African-Americans as a whole.”
The current president could not shake the fact that someone he would use the N-word to describe, with degrees from Columbia and Harvard Law, who ran the “Harvard Law Review” was going to be a president of our United States.
Which gets us to the point of all this. Last Thursday, Mr. Trump through his propaganda machine shot into the stratosphere images of the former president, Mr. Obama, and his wife, Michelle, as apes, gorillas, niggers, while the once popular song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background of gorilladom.
It was the KKK in a 21st-Century disguise shrugging off the pain of anyone hurt by it as “Fake Outrage.”
As a country unhinged by current civil-war-like conditions — incessantly fueled by Mr. Trump — far too many ordinary citizens, just regular folk, fail to realize that everyone in a nation so besieged must engage in deep self-analysis. In her 1942 classic “Self-Analysis,” the great psychoanalyst Doctor Karen Horney offered a method whereby people can face up to their complicity in, shall we say, evil.
An article in the Oct. 10, 2024 issue of “The Conversation” drew attention to “Why Trump accuses people of wrongdoing he himself committed — an explanation of projection.” And projection, as we know, is a neurotic affliction whereby a weak person unconsciously attributes his own unacceptable feelings, thoughts, or traits (like jealousy, insecurity, or anger) onto someone else — persons or groups — instead of self-analyzing where the governing principle of such fascism resides.
In a fraud case against Trump University in San Diego in 2016 the aforementioned Mr. Trump said the presiding judge, Gonzalo Curiel, hated him: “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater” because Curiel was “Hispanic,” a “Mexican.”
His conceptual gestalt had Judge Curiel in a corral with all the other Mexican rapists just as he had classified the Obamas and every African American on earth as an ape or gorilla.
Occam’s razor in cutting to the chase of logic says a swamp cannot drain itself. If you were put on the stand in a courtroom right now and were asked to describe the governing principle you live by and how that came about, who would you describe as unworthy of human consideration?
