Tricky modern terms

The implicit argument contained within these common group terms is that the position of certain groups (for example, the homeless) is the result of a deliberate act of force and manipulation of outcomes on the part of someone else. Absent such intervention, those people would have retained their “franchise”, they would have stayed in the center, not at the margins. Their franchise is, in fact their birthright and the natural consequences of whatever their identifying characteristics are. But someone has deliberate subverted that natural process and stolen those results. And so, presumably, they need to be stolen back.

But these sorts questions just aren’t as simple or settled as terms like “disenfranchised” and “marginalized” would like to convince us they are. In fact they may even be counterproductive, if you want to truly understand and help these people, which despite the loaded nature of these terms, many of the “franchised” and “mainstrean” do.

You need to understand a problem and its causes without apriori prejudices and ideological blame already assigned in your starting terms. If you actually want to make a diagnosis and understand a difficult, complex human problem, that is. If you just want to sling around a lot of mud and judgment and demands, then loaded terms are very useful.

This is an example of the kind of problems that arise when you try to control the terms of a discussion by controlling the language. By building the argument and its conclusion into your starting terms, you preclude any meaningful or complex analysis of the issue. You’ve preempted the very questions you should be asking.

I don’t think the lesson is that such terms are wrong, per se, but we need to be very careful about how we use language. Especially we need to be careful that we don’t use it to prevent ourselves from having the very discussions we should be having, or to settle questions that aren’t settled, or to simplify problems that aren’t so simple. Concept creep is always a danger with terms that have proved to be morally and ideologically powerful.

The assumption latent in these particular terms is that external manipulation is the primary problem. That, absent the deliberate prejudicial sidelining leveraged against a group, they would be doing just as well as any other group. That’s the main causal and moral locus of the tacit ideology contained in these terms, the key difference in how it interprets the common data.

Often, there is not so much dispute about facts as there is about what they mean. What words we use to talk about the facts reveals our assumptions about what assigned meanings we are willing to allow. But often the very thing that needs to be discussed is, in fact, what the available facts actually mean.

And there are more explanations available than arbitrary oppression for marginalization. This analysis ignores, among many things, the inheritances and positions assigned to people by chance, that are not anyone’s fault in particular. It also ignores any elements of inequality that may actually be a function of nature, either variability in the natural world or in the outcomes of certain strategies and actions taken within it. Neither of these factors are covered by the assumptions of these terms, and yet the struggle against nature itself makes up a large part of the total human experience, and which is entirely impersonal and cannot be blamed on anyone’s special efforts.

This ideology also ignores any elements of personal responsibility or agency in someone’s experience. And that is an enormous part, or should be, of any analysis of ourselves or any personal development we seek to engage in. Instead, this ideology defines the results of very difficult, complex situations purely as the result of arbitrary and malicious acts by an oppressor class. And the world just isn’t that simple. There are very robust theories and valuable discussions to be had that are being preempted by the reductive, conclusive, judgemental tone of terms like “marginalized” and “disenfranchised” being slung around all too casually.

It certainly is the case that some, even many, people are marginalized and disenfranchised. And a large part of the problem with thesw terms isn’t the words themselves, but how we use them and what we mean by them today. Some words have a totemic kind of power. They’re loaded. They mean something special within a certain ideological context. They tell you exactly what you need to know, if you’re inside the group. They tell you what the situation is, how it happened, who is to blame, and who you should side with. And that’s a little too much work being done by a single word.

I’m not overstating the problem. If anything, I might be understating it. The number of ideological assumptions that go into how we use a single, popularly meaningful word are often just the tip of a very large iceberg of how people see and interpret the world.

To elaborate, apart from the fact that it’s extremely reductive to assume so much about the oppressor class, that they’re all working so hard to prevent the marginalized from reaching the good results they would otherwise be expecting, it’s also a lot to assume that all members of the oppressed class are not acting in any ways that might naturally affect their results. Both kinds of actions, actions against others and on behalf of oneself, carry a cost, and apart from the investment necessary to achieve such broad results, it’s strange to assume that the efforts of one class should be so universally effective (for no essential or necessary reason) and the efforts of another class should be so universally ineffective (for no essential or necessary reason). If there is no other natural basis for the differences in their outcomes.

As well, this theory places an unfair burden upon all humans by demanding of them that they all produce similar results from differing inputs, equality of outcome, or risk being judged as either malicious oppressors or helpless victims. Is that really a reasonable thing to expect from people, or society, or nature, or the world? For all situations and actions to yield the same, even identical, results? Is there anything in nature or in our experience that leads us to believe the world works like that?

As if someone struggling with severe alcohol or drug dependency or dealing with severe mental health problems like schizophrenia can be expected to produce the same results from the same system as someone without them. As if someone who decided not to invest in obeying traffic laws should expect to have the same sort of journey with the same risks and results as someone who follows them carefully? As if a person born into a migratory, desert-living culture should expect to enjoy the same standards of living as a sedentary tropical-dwelling culture, or cosmopolitan urban culture, or tribalistic mountain culture?

Only the ignorant travel to other lands and towns and expect them to have the very same things as where they have come from. If you visit my hometown on the rural plains, you cannot expect the same amenities, attitudes, or skill sets as Vienna, Austria. They aren’t the same, and you shouldnt expect them to be. But that isn’t anyone’s fault. Unique and specific situations produce unique and specific outcomes.

Some might argue that this is a case of blaming the victim. But the victim of what, and of whom? And to what degree does locating all the causes of a situation, and all power to change it, only in the hands of one kind of person (often not even an actual flesh and blood person but an abstraction, the proverbial “them”) take away the “marginalized’s” agency and potential and uniqueness? How limiting and conspiratorial and disempowering is such a view of life?

And if you wish to be more than a rabbit or a pawn, how does this ideology help you stand up? How does it help you take hold of reins of your own life and develop the kind of belief in your ability to control your destiny that is necessary to grow beyond such limits? Even were your circumstances to improve, would you not still be but a captive of those circumstances, as dependent for your freedom on their favorability as you were trapped in slavery by their unfavorability?

The great teachers of the past showed how even in deepest oppression and imprisonment and slavery, a man could still master himself, and a women herself. That mastery over the self is the foundation of freedom and choice and destiny. That no external force can overcome someone who decides to take responsibility for their own heart. That is the essential franchise of mankind. All else is contingent.

Are people marginalized and disenfranchised? By deliberate effort? Unfairly and arbitrarily? Of course they are. But that’s not the only thing that explains differences in outcomes or negative outcomes, in the way that simply labeling people in their identity as “marginalized” or “disenfranchised” or “victimized” people does.

Furthermore, doing so deprives them of all the other possible ways of understanding and even remedying their situation that are available to them. They might be victims of chance or inherent challenges of nature, or there might be something they simply don’t know that they could learn that would make an enormous difference. There might be some skill that could be mastered, some knowledge that might be acquired, some adaptation that could be adopted, and make all the difference.

Depriving people of the ability to be more than their victimized identity isn’t kindness. And assigning all blame for differences to assumed oppressors who may simply be in the position of possessing some freely available solution isn’t kindness either. You might be dealing with oppressed and oppressors, you don’t know, because the range of possible options for both is much larger than just that one binary option. And if you really want to help people, you can’t start with terms that assume you’ve already got all the answers.

The true “franchise” of mankind, as I said before, isn’t victimhood at the hands of random and impersonal forces. It is learning, deciding, adapting, growing, and choosing. Despite our hardships, despite the challenges that other people and nature and even ourselves set in our way. We are beset with enemies. To be marginalized, to be victimized, to be disenfranchised, that is our default and natural state, the state of all life. It is through our strength and agency and character and wisdom that we overcome it and move toward the stable center. That is our franchise. And it is not possessed by nature and lost by manipulation. It is not gained through casting blame for a loss of something we never had a right to. It is hard won through rising above our challenges. And it is lost through not respecting how others who led us to it earned and fought for it.