Abuse Writ Large

What Happens When the Violent Abuser is Seizes Power Over an Entire People

Lately, as I watch the global news, I have been considering abuse as a collective phenomenon. The understanding of abuse in individuals and families has been advanced a great deal by modern psychology. We understand battered women and elder abuse. Most have some understanding of the different types of abuse, such as physical, emotional, financial, psychological, etc.

But I contend that there is also large scale institutional abuse that functions in very similar ways. The racial violence against BIPOC peoples is both physical abuse and psychological abuse.

The institutional misogyny that appears whenever a women in politics goes for a higher office, or that creates a toxic work culture, or that allows rape victims to be trashed, are all form of abuse.

But I would go further. We know that when a child or spouse has to deal with a malignant narcissist or sociopath for a partner, parent, or sibling, that private abuse is taking place.

I contend that when such a person is put in high office, from county sheriff to POTUS, everyone in that sick person’s domain becomes a victim of institutional abuse.

That is why we all feel so battered right now. We have been the collective battered spouse to a malignant sociopath over the course of ten years. And we are collectively showing the signs of that abuse every day.

When the MAGA seized power this time, we reached a turning point. There are different levels of abuse. Now it is not just overbearing. It even goes beyond the violent. What we are witnessing is at the level of sex traffickers and slavers whose intent is not just to vent rage, but to break the spirit, generally by breaking the body. It is cold, calculated, and brutal beyond understanding. And it is done wholesale.

The individual victim of a trafficker means nothing to them. A few are SUPPOSED to die, to instill terror in the rest. In like manner, the individuals that get scooped up by this latter day Gestapo are not important at all as individuals. They must ALL be broken, and we must see it.

I would like to go deeper to gain full understanding of how we got here.

There is another, deeper level of collective abuse — predatory capitalism. It is the dominant system on the planet today, and it abuses almost all of us on several levels. Financially of course as it beggars all but the top 1%.

But also psychologically as it blames the failure to thrive on the victims. Even many liberals feel that if they and others can’t “make it” there must be something wrong with the individual, not the system. The ethos of predatory capitalism has colonized our internal space so thoroughly that we can’t place the locus of control where it belongs, on the capitalists and the system they both control and benefit from.

Predatory capitalism also dispenses physical abuse as the middle and lower classes go without medical care, without proper food, and increasingly without shelter. This is killing us.

And finally there is the greatest institutional abuser of all — the patriarchy. It has infected at least 300 generations. It seeps into our subconscious and seems as natural as breathing. And it feeds all of these lesser forms of institutional abuse.

Some of us speak of smashing the patriarchy, but find it not so easy. It is not always a wall. Sometimes it is more like an ocean or a blanket. It can have multiple arms like an octopus. Or pop up in multiple places if you cut it, like the brooms in the Magician’s Apprentice.

But most of all, it has deep roots WITHIN us. And that is the place to begin. Identify and dispense with every inner thought or attitude planted by being born into and growing up in the patriarchy. Work on the inner abuse. Then, as we heal, we can systematically deal with all the other forms as a collective.

Our mother the Earth is depending on our ability to do that. It has become vastly more difficult to do this. It is also the greatest emergency the world has yet seen. The house is on fire and we must regain our center if we are to put that fire out.

I have updated this essay, first published in 2020. Some things have changed and most remain the same. The matters discussed herein have not budged. Since the MAGA forces have seized power in the November election it is important to understand this dynamic.