All oppression is born of the same mindset
This one mindset is the spark for all pathological behaviour
*contains movie spoilers*
I recently watched a movie called “ i am ALL GIRLS” on Netflix. It was one of those docudrama types which was excruciatingly painful to watch. The protagonist is a female detective working in a team whose main mission is to find a bunch of kidnapped girls in Johannesburg, Africa.
Right after the very first mission in the movie, where she fails to catch the suspect shes pursuing, her boss can be seen getting a firing on the phone from his higher ups for not solving case. He then goes on to reprimand her for the same. Then they both get inside the meeting room where the boss announces, “no funding, and this whole operation gets shut down”.
What does this tell us about the way our society works?
He implies that they will receive funding for the operation to continue only if they show results, i.e, finding a few of the girls. The girls are not Body lotion or perfume, for whom budgets have to be allocated or “funding” has to be done. Correct me if I’m wrong, but her team should get the funding regardless of how many busts they’ve made. This is a human rights issue!
And please! No minimum wage job makes you get out of bed in the morning and rush to the office. Those jobs are done out of desperation and despondence. Whether its child trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, pedophile rings, animal cruelty, murder, the trade in narcotics and other illegal substances, the flesh trade, or anything else, all of them are just downstream effects of one section of people choosing to make money off the rest, leaving them distracted, desperate, and perpetually in search of purpose. Since everyone aspires to live the 1% life, it seems that they will go to any extent possible to get it.
Because, for the government to give to one set of people luxuries, they have to take from the others. That’s exactly how the economy works. Alexandria Ocassio Cortez, a prominent politician in the U.S. once said:
“No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.” — Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez
And rightly so, as she goes on to explain how billionaires made that money off of undocumented migrants, black Americans, brown people, and those willing to settle for less than minimum wage. This in itself is an epidemic in developed and developing countries. The refugee crisis, the arms trade, the proxy wars between India and Pakistan, right down to the narrative in the media.
Everything is controlled by the global elite.
Did pakistan really cross the LOC and start a gun fight with the Indian army on the other side? Did the Indian army really get inside their territory and gun down terrorists? No one can objectively verify this, other than the soldiers themselves. Its all smoke and mirrors. That’s why its called a proxy war! If a few soldiers or civilians have to pay a price for it, then so be it.
Later on in the movie, there’s a scene where a black underage girl can be seen leaving a room from what appears to be the house of a pedophile ring, just as a new set of girls go marching inside. The next cut shows the black girl being bundled into the back of a pick up truck, as a guard standing in the doorway tells the driver in a kind of morose tone “that one has been used up”, which, as per the narration in the beginning of the movie, implies that shes going to be killed.
That is all that the girl means to them. A piece of meat, to be used and discarded. I’m not going to draw parallels between speciesism and the flesh trade, for fear of comparing humans to animals.
But that’s exactly whats happening here!
Both these patterns of thinking are products of the very same pathological mindset, an opportunistic frame of mind where everything, living and non-living on the planet and has value only if it has some utilitarian value to the capitalistic system.
One where women are just “pleasure toys” to satisfy the lust of men, while animals are just bred to be “food” on someones plate, regardless of the fact that they, in fact, very much possess individual traits and personalities just like humans do. Moreover, in a study titled People change their moral values to benefit themselves over others, research has proven that, strikingly,
“People seek not only to benefit themselves but also to persuade other people that they are morally right in doing so.”
Another study shockingly concludes:
“Across all seven studies, the general pattern we find is that as a person’s social class increases, his or her tendency to behave unethically also increases”
By looking at current trends, it’s easy to paint a grim and dismal picture of what the future holds. As an increasing number of billionaires get added to the planet every year, we are going to see an exponential increase in pathological behaviour across the world.
There’s nothing new about it. It’s already reached frightening levels in some countries, where the only way to survive is by seeking asylum in safer countries. Again, this is a vicious cycle, as more refugees contribute to increased competition for everything, in turn leading to more crime. The only ones who are left unscathed and unperturbed by all the madness in this blood bath are the ones orchestrating it all, the billionaires and elites of the world.
In fact, not only are they untouched by the horrors that they inflict upon the rest of the world. They are busy gallivanting along in their private jets, sailing around the globe in billion dollar yachts as the uninhibited free flow of alcohol, women, and drugs keep their minds well occupied, numbed to the suffering in the world.
After going through all this research, it seems that being a pathological psychopath is a textbook method of maintaining your elite status, or probably even achieving it. How else can a single person earn enough fortunes to last a 100 lifetimes?
At another point in ‘I am All Girls’, the boss tells the detective to go to the ‘health and wellness’ dept of the unit as he believes she is suffering from PTSD. He tells her “this job gets to all of us” (again insinuating that this is a “job” in the traditional sense) to which she shoots a very pungent and poignant reply, which reaffirms my sentiment of this not being a typical “job”:
“ It’s supposed to get to us, otherwise what the **** are we doing?”
The very fact that she says “it’s supposed to get to us” implies that she doesn't think of this as a run of the mill job, with budgets and targets, rather she is dedicated to ridding humanity of this scourge, to put an end to human trafficking for good.
Little does she know that she’s just a pawn on a chess board, all the while being moved by the very same set of hands that’s orchestrating the violence. People get paid to look the other way every single day. How else can such large scale operations go on without getting noticed by law enforcement and other agencies?
Conclusion
I could care less whether you consume meat or not. The crux of the issue is that when you pay someone to numb their senses for the purpose of obtaining nutrition, you also make them numb to other kinds of suffering that exist in the world. You might not be an obstinate meat eater or even consume meat at all, which is good. Just don’t fuel the very same system that sells drugs, deals in women and children, and manufactures proxy wars.
And if you think correlation doesn’t equals causation, show me one vegan drug cartel, child trafficker, prostitution ring or illegal arms dealers. I’ll wait.
