I: Symbolic Violence
Society has conditioned everyone to have a symbolic Ideal of what is dominant/strong and what is dominated/weak! It is infinite but we all share it unconsciously! It changes over time too
Society has conditioned everyone to have a symbolic Ideal of what is dominant/strong and what is dominated/weak! It is infinite but we all share it unconsciously! It changes over time too
The picture of the dominant is drawn with infinite traits:
Signs of wealth (Rolex)
Conformant cloth (Suits)
Being White Cis Het Male Abled (Hi!)
Being From “rich” countries
Specific forms of diction
The luxury of calmness
the signals we take for "intelligence"
Extroversion
Etc.
Signs of wealth (Rolex)
Conformant cloth (Suits)
Being White Cis Het Male Abled (Hi!)
Being From “rich” countries
Specific forms of diction
The luxury of calmness
the signals we take for "intelligence"
Extroversion
Etc.
We all share that picture, the more someone has traits from that Picture, the More the person is subconsciously seen as a “Dominant” by everyone this is a millennia-long programming, generations after generations conditioning the next one
Unconsciously you “score” each person around you, a note of how “dominant-like” the person is, and everyone “scores” you, this is a minute to minute, cloth to cloth, posture to posture, dynamic and instant thing
And you are conditioned to yield power to people with ”higher scores”, this IS the main catch of Symbolic Violence! 'tis *not* done by the dominant! Is something we all do *to* ourselves, we are programmed to do that!
The dominant is not even tired with the burden of exerting the violence!
The dominant has the luxury of not seeing it at all!
The society we created trained/conditioned all to do it on ourselves!
The dominant has the luxury of not seeing it at all!
The society we created trained/conditioned all to do it on ourselves!
The dominant just merely has to be/wear/employ/identify with the symbols for the system to work, is like if everyone saw albinos as gods: just by being albino everyone else would yield power to you and you benefit a little from the system
Now, as all sociology, this is way more complex of course: the powers given by Symbolic Violence are just one amongst several others and you can use them, and reverse them an is not because you have them that you have dominated society
You can be WhiteCisHetMale and still be in the bottom, Symbolic Violence is but one bonus, not the whole story, but is there everywhere, on the whole society in every interaction, just by adding a single more trait you wield it a tiny more
UP until you don't anymore! there is a limit where you can Wield those traits believably! You have to be trained (usually since infancy) to know how to Wield that or else it is “just bling” (ex: a trained eye can easily spot someone that is not confortable wearing suits)
So it is very easy for someone to wield a trait clumsily and have the opposite effect of doing Symbolic Violence, turning into a caricature and some people do This on purpose (Hi 👋!) , others not so much: 
As usual the (really fucking good) @existentialcoms has a comic on this that explores the issue with humour existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Pi…
A really good question at this moment is: how did we do that? how do we maintain that constructed shared illusion of the dominant and why does that construction has this effect of making us yield power even if we consciously know it exists?
And maybe I should add some pictures to illustrate here or maybe this is already too long a thread so I'll probably stop this part one now, if you arrived here by other means: you have just finished part I of this meta thread :
