(1) "To crush or burden by abuse of power or authority"
(2) "To burden spiritually or mentally : weigh heavily upon"
-- Definitions of "oppress" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary
" To deprive (someone or something) of human qualities, personality, or dignity: such as...to address or portray (someone) in a way that obscures or demeans that person's humanity or individuality"
-- Definitions of "dehumanize" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary
Imagine that you had a skin color that was uncommon where you lived, and you were part of a racist society. Imagine you had been taught in school that people with your skin color "aren't quite fully human" or "are not as evolved as regular people" or "are kind of like animals." You would be a victim of oppressive dehumanization. Dehumanization is the depiction of any human beings as less than fully human, or anything that tends to make people treat or regard other humans as less than fully human. If you had been exposed to such oppressive dehumanization throughout your life, you might not even notice that it was occurring. If such oppressive dehumanization permeated the teachings of your society, you might believe the oppressive nonsense you were taught, and not even notice how badly you were being oppressed.
A large fraction of us are like such a person, regardless of what skin color we have. This is because the information mainstream constantly oppresses us all and dehumanizes us all, by depicting all humans as being far less than what they are. Such oppressive dehumanization is part of the curriculum people are taught in high school, the curriculum people are taught in college, and the doctrines constantly propagated in mainstream information sources such as Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Scientific American and the BBC. Oppressive dehumanization teachings are such a common part of mainstream teachings that a large fraction of those suffering from such abuse fail to notice how badly they are being oppressed and abused.
Before explaining such statements, I must delve into the question: what are human beings? I can give a little list that may shed a little light on this topic.
(1) Humans are minds with a host of abilities not possessed by any animals. From a mental standpoint the gulf between humans and animals is like the difference between a mountain and a mole hill or the difference between a palm-sized "Hot Wheels" toy car and an expensive functional automobile. Humans do things such as write books, perform scientific experiments and scientific analysis, compose symphonies and write screenplays, develop novel philosophical systems and novel theories of nature, create very complex inventions, and build enormously organized structures such as Grand Central Terminal. Animals do no such things.
(2) Humans are minds with a host of normal abilities and characteristics not explained by material science. Humans have many daily-observed mental characteristics and abilities that material science is not able to credibly explain. It has become ever more common for scientists to confess that science has no explanation for the basic phenomenon of consciousness. Scientists also have no credible explanation for the basic fact of selfhood. There is no reason why billions of chemical reactions and electrical impulses in a brain should ever add up to any things such as a feeling and experience of selfhood, in which you end up convinced you are a single unified mind rather than some heap of chemical and electrical events. Scientists have no credible explanation for the human ability to create abstract ideas. Very long ago Thomas Huxley said that for a human brain to produce abstract ideas is no more explicable than a genie rising up from the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp; and such an arising of abstract ideas is no more neurally explicable today. Even the most basic abilities of human memory cannot credibly be explained by scientists. Scientists have no credible tale to tell of how very complex learned knowledge and episodic experiences could ever be translated into neural states. Scientists have no credible account to give of how a human could instantly form a new complex memory, or how you could instantly recall the details of some obscure person's life after merely hearing his name, or how memories could persist in a brain for decades despite constant molecular turnover and constant synapse remodeling and synapse instability.
(3) Humans are minds having a host of paranormal experiences not explained by material science. Humans have many unusual experiences utterly beyond the explanation of material science. One such experience is extrasensory perception (ESP). We have almost two centuries of systematically gathered evidence for different forms of ESP, reported by esteemed authorities such as scientists and physicians. Such evidence has been steadily reported ever since the 1831 report of the Royal Academy of Medicine in France, which came out resoundingly in favor of the reality of clairvoyance. Written observational evidence of ESP and other paranormal anomalies in subjects under hypnosis was extremely abundant in the nineteenth century, and such evidence can also be abundantly found in twentieth century literature. During the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, there has accumulated extremely abundant laboratory experimental evidence in favor of ESP, particularly in well-replicated experimental protocols such as the ganzfeld protocol. First appearing in the nineteenth century or earlier, reports of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences have abundantly occurred, particularly since 1975. Humans have abundantly reported sightings of apparitions, very often reporting seeing the apparition of someone who recently died but whose death was not suspected when the apparition was seen. In many cases multiple humans will report seeing the same apparition. The sighting of apparitions of deceased loved ones is extremely common among dying people, with such deathbed visions occurring to as many as about 25% of those who die. Such phenomena are not credibly explained by material science.
(4) Physically humans are dynamic states of enormously organized complexity with bodies beyond the explanation of material science. The physical body of a human is a state of very great hierarchical organization. Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which (along with a skeletal system and other systems) are organized into the human body. The physical arising of all this organization from the simplicity of a simple one-cell zygote is a miracle of origination 100 miles over the heads of today's scientists. The only accounts scientists have to explain such an origination are ivory tower "old wives' tales," such as the often-told but utterly fictional claim that the organization of a human body comes from the reading of a blueprint in DNA. DNA contains no blueprint specifying anatomical structures, but merely a database of low-level chemical information. The gigantic level of organization in a human body is also not explained by Darwinian evolution, which is a mere theory of accumulation rather than a theory of organization.
The paragraphs above are a very crude sketch of what a human being is, but they may at least suggest how gigantic is the physical and spiritual reality of a human being. But how is it that mainstream authorities depict human beings? As something vastly less than what humans are.
Biologists dehumanize us all when they make the groundless claim that human beings are animals. Such a claim is contrary to all human experience, including the reality that humans have many important capabilities that animals do not have. You do not justify the claim that humans are animals by pointing out that biologists refer to an animal kingdom and a plant kingdom, and place humans in the animal kingdom. Such a classification scheme is an arbitrary speech custom, and makes no sense. An intelligent way to have classified organisms would be to say that there are four kingdoms (a microbe kingdom, a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom and a human kingdom), and to place humans in their own kingdom.
Biologists have never credibly explained how humans minds (with so many unique capabilities) could have arisen from animal predecessors through any natural process. This shortfall was brought into focus by one of the two originators of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. In his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection As Applied to Man," Wallace said that natural selection was incapable of explaining the human mind. To try to reduce this embarrassing shortfall contradicting their boasts of understanding human origins, biologists have long resorted to a tactic of speaking as if there was little difference between animals and humans. Every time they use this tactic, our biologists are agents of oppressive dehumanization. The biologist who tells you that you're not much more than a chimp is doing the same type of thing that war criminals of the 20th century did when they claimed that certain people they wished to exterminate were not much more than vermin.
Darwin's strategy of dehumanization has been followed by very many of his disciples. Part of that strategy involves a suppression and censorship of observational reports of hard-to-explain unique human abilities and unique human experiences. Humans very often see things and have experiences suggesting that humans are closer to angels than apes: uniquely human experiences that animals don't have. Such observations and experiences are profoundly embarrassing to all thinkers trying to advance a claim that we are little more than apes. The way such thinkers deal with such a problem is to try to suppress, censor and belittle many such observations and the people who have them.
So when mainstream academia authorities write textbooks or articles about human psychology or the human mind, they conveniently avoid mentioning innumerable reliable accounts humans have reported of paranormal human experiences. Another tactic is do defame and disparage anyone reporting such experiences. Of course, the person who does not hesitate to pull out a "you're little more than an ape" claim will tend to have few qualms about pulling out an "if you saw this, you must be crazy" claim. Once a person gets used to the "steel jack boot on your head" oppression of depicting humans as being soulless animals, he will easily migrate to the "steel jack boot on your head" oppression of gaslighting reliable witnesses of things such a person cannot explain. Some of the attempts in the world of scientific academia to suppress inconvenient observations are documented in Etzel Cardena's paper "The Unbearable Fear of Psi: On Scientific Suppression in the 21st Century."
As the British Empire was growing, some men in Philadelphia in 1776 produced a document declaring that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Back then the British wanted people to regard themselves as something much less: just obedient subjects of their king. So they tried to make sure that as few people as possible heard about the Declaration of Independence by America. If someone did hear about it, and asked about it, they were told that the authors of such a statement were crazy or scoundrels. That was oppression. Similarly, the doctrinal lords of mainstream media want as few people as possible to hear about evidence and observations suggesting that you were endowed by a Creator with an immortal soul. And if someone hears about such evidence and observations, and inquires about such things, the mainstream tells them that the accounts come from crazy people or scoundrels. That also is oppression.
The oppressive British Empire has now faded away as a political empire, being eclipsed by other empires that sometimes seemed more oppressive. But a kind of ideological British Empire persists around the world, and the biology departments of universities are its oppressive outposts. Such outposts of ideological colonialism are dedicated to making us all subjects not of the British monarch, but kind of mental minions of a nineteenth century British man, Charles Darwin, and also intellectual subjects of his devotees in institutions such as the Royal Society. Dehumanization is a long-practiced specialty of that organization, whose members are prone to be portraying humans as so much less than they are. A tiny elitist organization consisting of some 1700 members, mostly old white men, the Royal Society has a "for show only" slogan of "Nullus in Verba," which means "take nobody's word for it." Ever since it became essentially a Church of Darwinism, the Royal Society has acted as if its operating principle is "Always take Darwin's word for it."
A scientific study (discussed here) showed how Darwinist ideas bring people to the brink of dehumanizing their fellow humans. People were given an interface showing the "Ascent of Man" visual that is an icon of Darwinist propaganda. Below the icon was an interface referring to seven nationalities. People were encouraged to use the interface to specify "how evolved" they thought seven groups of people are (Americans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans, Mexican Immigrants, Muslims and South Koreans). The respondents tended to specify some of these groups as being significantly "less evolved" than others. In this context "less evolved" means basically "less human." We should not be surprised by the results. Being constantly mixed with dehumanization rhetoric, Darwinism brings people to the brink of dehumanizing their fellow humans through racist thinking. Never be surprised when some Darwinist thinker starts spouting racist rubbish against some other group of humans, claiming that such people are "less evolved."
A nadir of dehumanization comes when materialists preach the toxic nonsense of determinism, the claim that humans are "lumbering robots" that lack free will. This poisonous absurdity has been taught by some of the leading figures of materialism. Thankfully this ruinous doctrine has not yet made it into the mainstream. Another nadir of dehumanization is an equally poisonous absurdity taught by some figures of materialism: the nonsensical and groundless theory of some infinity of parallel universes in which there are infinite copies of you. All who teach this nonsense would dehumanize you by trying to get you to disbelieve in the uniqueness of your individual mind. Then there are many other materialists who attempt to dehumanize you by getting you to suspect that you are merely some bits bouncing around in some computer simulation produced by extraterrestrials.
All of those who told us these toxic absurdities have been guilty of abuse of power and abuse of authority. Such people have typically held positions of power and authority that caused people to trust that they would be teaching truth and paying fair attention to all relevant evidence. When such people practiced oppressive dehumanization, by depicting humans as so much less than they are, such authorities were betraying the public trust and abusing their power.
Know which people have been mankind's oppressors. Such oppressors have been not merely those who eroded freedom and human rights and arranged laws so that the richest keep getting richer at the expense of people with lower incomes who keep getting economically oppressed. Mankind's oppressors have also been those who attempt to dehumanize you by depicting you as some ape-like animal or "lumbering robot" very much less than what you are. Trying to drain us of the lifeblood of human dignity, such dehumanizing oppressors exist abundantly in the outposts of intellectual colonialism to be found in the shiny new buildings of the media and the old ivy-covered towers of academia.
Very well pointed. Many thanks!
ReplyDelete