Survival Lesson # 5: Create random acts of kindness to counter systematic dehumanization
Survival Lessons to save the Surviving Class
I start each of these Survival Lessons with a reference to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel. The Ruling Class in the novel not only sought complete control over its subjects. It also sought to dehumanize them and destroy their human spirits. Subjects with no human spirit are ever pliable to whimsical Ruling Class needs. Subjects with a destroyed human spirit will never be a challenge to the authority of the Ruling Class.
Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books including Brave New World about a fictional authoritative dystopia. Huxley said…
Aldous Huxley
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
Over the past decade the Ruling Class has been purposeful in propagandizing tribalism among Surviving and Enabling Class citizens for the purpose of engendering fear, animosities and even hatred among the communities. The Ruling Class creates this dehumanizing environment so that it can establish itself as the solution, thereby justifying greater societal power and control to implement its solutions. Here is a rough sampling of language in common use in this dehumanizing propaganda. Statistics are simple Google search results as sampled on August 13, 2021. No sampling of Twitter or Facebook social media are included.
Toxic dehumanizing signals
• Racist or racism 160,000,000 results
• Supremacist: 13,800,000 results
• Bigot or bigoted: 42,200,000 results
• Deplorable or irredeemable or decency: 4,790,000 results
• Insurrectionist: 2,810,000 results
• Fascism or Nazi: 153,000,000 results
The above statistics are symptoms of great wells of societal poison designed to dehumanize some of us, and to tear us apart.
The survival lesson is to counteract this societal poison with random acts of kindness thereby reminding strangers that we can be human to each other.
I have a personal story that describes this survival lesson. Ann was my wife for 34 years. She had a way of making anyone she met feel special with her kindness and sincere interest in them. After she died, I would take up the routine patterns that she once performed – shipping store, post office, grocery store, plumbing supply, paint store, hardware store, etc. (Ann was a designer who interacted with many building trades in her career.) On many occasions when a sales clerk would recognize my last name as the same as Ann’s, their eyes would well up with gratitude that Ann was a fleeting part of their lives. She was that kindness that would randomly and briefly walk into their lives. There was no toxic energy about her. They all felt more human because of her kindness.
I imagine a healthier Surviving Class that can be reminded of its human spirit with such acts of kindness. I also imagine an Enabling Class that rejects the toxic energy from the Ruling Class that is justifying that some of us are less than human.