one of the more frustrating aspects of supremacy is that when explained in isolation, practically all individuals will see why supremacy of any kind is unethical but there is cognitive dissonance when confronted with how it manifests in everyday life. as an example, most white people will agree that white supremacy is wrong but will have a 2 hour ted talk about why their behaviors don’t make them racist despite their actions being textbook racism. i’m going to deliberately ignore the ones who have willfully identified with a supremacist ideology because they need a type of help that i can’t offer.

the same applies to homophobia, transphobia, nationalism, and just about every other flavor of supremacy which is commonly discussed. i want to believe this is because everyone wants to be a “good person” but whatever values underpin their ethical understanding (plus how they define their in-group) prevent them from being able to accept their behaviors which align with supremacy. as an aside, i hate the “good person / bad person” framing of supremacy and toxic behaviors. none of us want to be hateful but we perform hate regularly because it’s invisible to us – identifying those behaviors require us to separate action from intent. it’s much easier to correct behavior when it’s not attached to your (for lack of a better word) personhood.

to anyone who has done any amount of reading on fascism or supremacy, none of this is news. many of us are familiar with fascist tactics like dehumanization in order to exclude certain groups from the common in-group so that they can be routinely exterminated without much resistance, even from the “good ones.” however, one thing i’ve noticed which doesn’t get talked about as much is that most of us hold some type of supremacist belief (and more commonly, many types). i don’t think many would protest to the extermination of all mosquitoes, for example. most of us don’t view mosquitoes as having intrinsic value and the moment their existence causes any inconvenience to human life (which does have intrinsic value) it’s time for them to go. we don’t hate mosquitoes, they’re completely fine when they’re not a personal inconvenience! i certainly haven’t identified with a movement about the extermination of mosquitoes or any other insect.

this isn’t a post about fighting for the right to exist for mosquitoes (well, mostly), but i think it’s important to recognize that the mechanisms for supremacy are deeply baked into our experiences. if we can relate a person, for example, to the same (lack of) intrinsic value of something like a mosquito, the implications are clear. common forms of supremacy i see which are often unquestioned by average people are anthropocentrism and ageism. it’s not hard to explain why depriving children of autonomy is a bad thing, but make sure you’re ready to hear a battery of reasons why that’s exactly what we should do “for their own good.” equally fascinating to me are the justifications of pet ownership (as distinct from conservation efforts): “i love my pet so much, that’s why i made sure to get a designer breed which is prone to significant quality of life and health issues, dont prioritize their accessibility to healthcare, and only fulfill their social needs when its convenient for me.”

minorities tend to be more sensitive to these things because we’re often otherized, moreso when at the intersection of multiple minority identities. they’re forced to acknowledge these things early in life which (i believe) make them less prone to this type of thinking. obviously this is not a universal truth: there are many severely oppressed minorities which hold abhorrent beliefs. i just find that privileged folk tend to have less impetus to introspect about these things.

apologies for this post not adequately covering the nuance of racism, either. the experiences of, for example, black folk in america can’t be neatly summed up by this kind of analysis – and even if it could, i wouldn’t be the one capable of doing it. i’ve approached it generally which is unfair to all who suffer from specific forms of oppression. i highly recommend reading about each one in specific to even begin to understand how they work and the experience of those who deal with it on a regular basis.

the point of this post was to explore the idea that supremacy exists in multiple levels which can be used to justify other forms of supremacy.

anyway i will be happy when compassion for others isnt contingent on identifying with them

@rowan agreed, totally. not to bring everything back to recent events, but a slightly under-appreciated reason the media has been so friendly to the white supremacist; as much as they may have ostensibly disagreed with his rhetoric, he was a real person to them, the countless victims of his hate are abstract concepts to the protected classes.

@rowan my brother is fond of pointing out that we are animals in fancy pants, and we should remember that when we make careless war on the natural world that sustains us.

@thegarbagebird oh that’s an extremely good observation and i think i completely agree. kirk has (had?) a face that one can look at and mourn but it’s much harder to identify those he has hurt.

@rowan it is infuriating to me that we were forced into a parasocial relationship with this abuser, whose supposed legitimacy was entirely funded by the fucken heartland groups specifically to launder fascism.
i had to make space in my brain for this fuck, and now i have to read about how much ezra fucking klein respects the movement he built.
who knows what mental connections i had to forego to fit this bullshit in my long term memory. i could have been thinking about how slime mould is neither an animal nor a plant and yet can manage optimal pathfinding.

@rowan this is such an insightful post

I keep wanting to mentally separate supremacy from {a lack of empathy and moral concern for a group} - as if it’s a mistake to conflate the two - but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that as soon as we feel superior to a group, we automatically lose at least some amount of our empathy and moral concern for members of that group. I don’t think that a feeling of superiority of any kind towards another person/creature/thing can exist without the implicit understanding that the target of this supremacy has a less valuable life than one’s ingroup

even for beloved pets, the average American is not going to spend thousands of dollars in cancer treatments to save them from death. but they would for a family member. instead they’re going to “put them down” in order to save money. it’s telling that human euthanasia is illegal in the US due to moral concerns, but completely normalized for pets

I don’t think that it is a contradiction at all to be able to honestly say “I love my pet dog so much. they’re one of the most important things in the world to me. but if they get sick and the treatment is more expensive than I want to pay I will choose to kill them in order to save money”. I think that human neurology is perfectly capable of deeply loving a thinking creature while also valuing its life this little

and that’s something that I want to emphasize, that Rowan alluded to in its post: it is entirely possible to believe - with no malice or anger whatsoever - “the lives of [outgroup] hold no value and they must all be exterminated, because their existence harms [ingroup]”. if this doesn’t make sense to you, try mentally replacing [outgroup] and [ingroup] with “mosquitoes” and “humans” respectively. now try mentally replacing them with “immigrants” and “white Americans”

I think it is so important to be able to understand this flaw in human empathy, that allows atrocities to happen. we can’t just dehumanize supremacists into cartoon villains, because that is implicitly denying that we have the same capacity to do and think like they do: that supremacy comes as naturally to us as it does to them. and that is exactly why we still have fascists

@rowan one of the things that I find both fascinating and chilling about Human Domestication Guide is how it unflinchingly explores this moral gap between “I love my pet” and “I don’t especially value my pet’s life, wellbeing, or consent when compared to my ingroup” - by flipping the script and making humans the pets

obviously HDG sexualizes the whole thing but I still find it a deeply unsettling and very thought-provoking concept - to explore how an entire species can be simultaneously loved and horrifically abused, and how these two facts can coexist without the pet owners feeling any kind of cognitive dissonance or needing to lie to themselves

I think this exact dynamic might be what HDG is meant to explore in the first place, though I don’t know it well enough to say for sure