Briefly on systemic oppression, interpersonal predation & parenting. This is one page of gathered thought, bookmarked so that I can better perform my duty of thought.

The link between interpersonal predation and systemic oppression is wildly underplayed.

As long as parents, siblings, lovers, and friends unwittingly or knowingly function predatorily in these primary relationships – there will be a reproduction of violence upon the psyche, spirit, and wider society. A complex violence cultivated over years and generations which obscures empathic, self-aware, self-effacing and ultimately communally altruistic and beneficial orientations toward each other and the collective groups in which we find belonging.

Capitalism needs us emotionally underdeveloped, unskilled, and repressed - ungrounded in who we are, our inherent value and our unencumbered desires. Capitalism needs us potently insecure, defensive, doubting our worth and thus eager to prove it at every opportunity. Capitalism benefits from our isolation, consumer-based coping mechanisms and void-filing habits when we produce long-lasting emotional and psychological harm in our relationships.

Interpersonal predation and resulting societal predation are in a sick positive feedback loop with systemic oppression.

We can’t get half of what we want without examining how interpersonal psychosocial violence is both a desired product of capitalism and a colossal obstacle to the level of genuine communal trust and cohesion we’ll need for lasting transformations toward universal justice.

Inherited patterns of interpersonal violence which enable everyday dehumanization and predation, which feed into systemic frameworks of oppression, must be broken.

I believe that parenting is critical to the reproductive cycle of social predation and ultimately, systemic predation.

“[Children] are the true victims of intimate terrorism in that they have no collective voice and no rights. They remain the property of parenting adults to do with as they will.”

- all about love, bell hooks

It could be helpful for the parental role to be critically understood as a microcosm of systemic oppression. In some families, the conditions in which children are reared are a precursor to their lives surviving and contributing to systemic oppression. The familial home can be a training ground on how to bear oppression and how to oppress. In a relationship with such overwhelming power differential –it is important that we not miss the oppressive and liberatory opportunities & implications of parenthood.

New parenting styles reflect awareness of this connection, deconstructing generational patterns which make us all vulnerable to oppression, and share in common themes including

1. Self-actualization (which capitalist patriarchal hegemonies undermine to maintain a vulnerable working class)

2. Processes of healing (denied some through cultural genocide generations earlier and others through the economic and social conditions of injustice) and,

3. Education about familial histories, social histories, and the nature of the systems which frame their lives. One must fight for education as an adult, re-learning truths occluded within formal educational institutions.

It is a kind of privilege to become this type of parent, to attempt to model and live new patterns of interaction with children. In a world where people are capital and non-fungible assets, I think on this word from bell hooks:

“When we love children we acknowledge by our very action that they are not property, that they have rights- that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice, there can be no love.”

- all about love, bell hooks