Cruel to be kind?

A Facebook friend shared an animation from RSA Comment entitled First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Go watch it first.

By Slavoj Zizek, the renowned critical theorist, the critique was interesting and largely accurate. How we buy a Starbucks coffee as redemption in the consumerist act, for example.

However, I was struck by a comment from “Nathan”. I suggest reading it in full too.

Much disagreement occurs because the arguments are about different things. “Foolish critical-theoretical nonsense.” says Nathan. No it isn’t, says someone else, and off the argument goes, completely missing each other’s points, arguing from a position of ego, not humility towads understanding the other’s position.

So let’s be specific. Zizek says “the worst slaveholders were kind to their slaves”. Why? If slaveowners were all cruel to their slaves, raping and beating them, the moral position would be clear. One the one side, the good guys, against slavery. On the other, the bad guys, the rapists and the beaters. Nice, neat, utopian, but completely ungrounded in reality. Taking his argument further, he is then claiming that beating a slave is better than not, as it helps bring down the immoral system more quickly.

How comforting for the slave. How disconnected from human reality. It’s this thinking in abstractions, far from the human realm, that Nathan seems to criticise, validly. Zizek says that “the real aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible”. Absolutely. As Krishnamurti said “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” It’s a wonderful vision, and alerts us to the trap of acting with compassion, but misguidedly, in a way that strengthens the current immoral systems. But to attempt to do so, disconnected from human compassion is a trap many have fallen into.

Systems don’t change on their own, or solely because of the leverings of a few elite thinkers. They change because people change – their humanity shaped and fertilised by their experiences. By a slave who, perhaps through playing with the owner’s child, realising that her owner is not a being far above, rather a person, like her, which encourages and empowers her to stand up against the injustice.

By a slaveowner, again perhaps through playing with a slave as a child, realising that their slave is human, like them, and changing their actions. For some, the actions will be partial. A bigger pen to sleep in. An adjustment from one-eighth to one-quarter the master’s food helping.

But for others the action may go further – releasing their slaves, working towards breaking down the slave system entirely.

Trying to create a black and white “Lord of the Rings” style utopia isn’t helpful if that’s the only level we work on. Change does not only come out of a preconceived abstraction, but out of human compassion, human experience, and human consciousness.

There can be no perfect systems with flawed human consciousness. The level to work on is that of human consciousness. It’s a two-way dance, the system, the individual, breaking down the boundaries between both. As we do that, we develop our compassion, and change our actions towards others. We develop our awareness, and see the machinations of the existing systems. We realise we are not the property of anyone else, that we are not just workers to be used as puppets by global capital. And step towards our full human potential.