Lets say you have a nation/culture with two groups. One group is dominant, the other group is exploited and mistreated. Its not hard to find examples, but the dominant group is going to become afraid the subjugated group will fight back. This incentivizes them to become more abusive, draconian and cruel in the hopes of quashing any rebellions. They would probably continue to become cruel until the subjugated people have totally given up hopes of having a better life. Any attempt at resistant, retaliation, stepping out of line or above their station by the subjugated group is going to result in very draconian abuse by the dominant group.
So the question is, what is this phenomena called and are there identifiable steps to it and a common outcome? For example, in the south (where historically 30-50% of the population consisted of minorities) there seems to be a stronger trend towards authoritarianism, religious belief and social conservatism. Is that seen in other areas like South Africa, or Myanmar? How much is cause and affect? I know Bob Altemeyer has written about the connections between authoritarianism, conservatism and religious fundamentalism, and people like that are more likely to subscribe to social hierarchies but how much is cause and effect (how much is people are religious and authoritarian because they oppress vs they oppress because they are authoritarian)?
I don’t know, but I trhink the question falls apart with nations like India and South Korea where the oppressors have departed/been overthrown and the formerly oppressed have built societies that are “reasonably” free and tolerant by Western standards but maintain some of the cultural hierarchies and religious traditions they’ve always had.
It could tend to degrade the oppressors, morally, because of their own need to justify their actions by degrading the oppressed classes.
Slave-owners tend to have a huge blind-spot in their morals, and this makes them less competent as moral philosophers. “All men are created equal…oh, except for the slave class.” Embracing a contradiction in one’s foundational beliefs is not mentally healthy.
I agree that the South tends to lean more heavily this way, but there’s always that tricky correlation-isn’t-causation thing to worry about. It could be that these are cultural manifestations of oppression, but it could just as easily be that these were factors that promoted the oppression in the first place. Like, perhaps if the South hadn’t been so religious, the Bible wouldn’t have been used to justify slavery, people wouldn’t have been afraid to question the practice, and it wouldn’t have lasted so long.
We also have to remember that the South has different cultural origins from the Northeast and the West. They were colonized by different peoples. How do we know that the South is more religious not because of oppression, but because Southerners just happen to be descended from super religious folk?
My guess is that oppressive societies in general have a very black-and-white, make it or fail type of attitude. Think of ancient Sparta, the prototypical fascist state and by any measure extremely oppressive. To an extent they didn’t have any half-measures; every person was either us or them. This culture surely encourages many people to shape up and be all they can be; to this end, it probably improves life for most of the people in the privileged class. But for those that can’t shape up, the falling out is catastrophic and much worse than it would be in a more tolerant society.
I don’t think any group ever gives up hope of a better life. Individuals may do so, but not everyone. Every civilization that ever used slavery, from ancient Rome to medieval Arabia to the Southern USA, had to use constant savage violence to keep the slaves in slavery. No enslaved people ever passively accepted slavery.
That said, many oppressors have managed to act entirely unaware of the people at the bottom. When we read stuff written by the Romans or Greeks or Arabs, they rarely mention the existence of their slaves, even though the entire economy of those civilizations depended on slavery.
So they weren’t newsworthy, and yet it would be foolish to believe that a culture not only content with owing people but thriving financially from it wouldn’t have a powerful influence on a member of the oppressing classes sense of morality and ethics.
Well, I think it’s similar to some of the effects of massive wealth inequality in general. The wealthy distance themselves from the underclass because they view them with fear and contempt. That distance exacerbates those feelings and it becomes a vicious cycle.
I don’t think the “oppressors” become more violent and draconian. Let me put it a different way. The oppressors typically have some sort of security apparatus in place who actually gets their hands dirty. And they can be violent and draconian. But the average oppressor citizen is probably largely complacent (maybe even ignorant) and content to live a relatively soft and comfortable life off the backs of the oppressed, who are largely out of sight.
Most South African Afrikaner whites are Protestants of a non-fundamentalist type (Calvinist, mostly), but otherwise the society is strongly authoritarian and patriarchal, and socially conservative. English Whites a bit less so (tendency to being Anglican, slightly bit less authoritarian but still quite a bit)
But I don’t think most of that comes from being oppressors - Afrikaners were like that before they ran the country, and the English - well, SA was no different than the rest of their Empire in that regard.
It seems to me this is something of a chicken and egg question. It seems that in order to become oppressive there must already be a strong streak of authoritarianism present, and the oppression is later sparked by somthing real or imagined.
True - also remember that in South Africa, Whites were very much in the minority. They were hugely outnumbered by the people they oppressed, unlike in the Deep South. So some paranoia was justified - I mean, their original leader was treacherously murdered by the Zulus just after signing a land deal with them.
I think some degree of authouritarianism is going to be present in almost all societies. Look at modern Western culture, you’d be hard pressed to say that it isn’t one of the most permissive societies in the history of human civilization, but you still run up against it here and there.
A factor that hasn’t been mentioned is opportunity cost. Some of those oppressed individuals would have had the potential to do things that would have benefited society in general if they had lived in a more equitable system.