The Emergence Of Oppressive Societies

5443 words; 35-minute read.

Last updated 25/04/26 07:04

Introduction

This article follows on from my article ‘The Relationship between “Oppressor Material” and “Unbearable” Feelings’, Present Time January 2023, p23). It presents some thoughts on how some very common distress recordings might make ‘fully-human’ (i.e. not oppressive) societies vulnerable to becoming oppressive societies, without anyone intending it.

This might not seem important compared to the big problems we humans face at this point in our history. But I think it allows new perspectives on those problems, and so allows new insights on how we might address them.

Simplified descriptions of reality

This article describes a model of a part of reality. All models, including RC theory*, are simplified descriptions of reality, that we construct to help us as we try to understand and explore how reality works. We can be more confident in a model if it repeatedly describes reality accurately, under many different conditions, and if it is logically consistent internally.

[*See The Nature of Theory, The Upward Trend page 75. Also page 155, subheading ‘Concepts Arise from Reality’.]

This article focuses on the situation before oppressive societies arose – the conditions that led to them arising. It does not focus on the situation in today’s world.

By proposing this model, I am not saying ‘this is what happened’. I am describing some minimum conditions for oppression to arise (and persist) from situations where no oppression had been present before, as I think this might help us think about the situation we face now.

Like all models, it is tentative – that is, it is subject to change if new observations or more thorough checking of the logic show that it is faulty.

Simple mechanisms

I will describe a number of simple mechanisms that arise from some very common distress recordings. I describe them individually, but they all happen concurrently, and they interact with each other. Their interaction is an important part of the overall ‘story’.

I’ve numbered the mechanisms as it may be useful to refer to them by number; the numbering doesn’t indicate order or importance.

1: The ‘distress recording’ mechanism

Children love learning about the world. They take every opportunity to throw themselves into contact with reality. They are learning about the world – it’s like they are building a ‘map’ of the world in their minds, and the more direct contact they can get with reality, the more detail they can put into their map. That map in their minds helps them navigate the world with increasing confidence, sophistication and elegance.

[Every child builds their own unique ‘map’. It is different to every other child’s (or adult’s) map, even though it might map the same reality.]

But sometimes a child is overwhelmed by things that are too much for their young mind to handle. When a child’s mind gets overwhelmed, it seems that the learning, ‘map making’ part of their mind shuts down. Instead, it seems that everything that was in their mind during the shutdown is recorded, but with no understanding. This ‘recording’ includes every detail of the overwhelming experience that came in via their senses, as well as all the horrible feelings and panicked thoughts that were in their mind. This happened to all of us.

These recordings of overwhelming experiences can ‘play back’ in our minds, and when they do it can feel just as horrible as the original situation, so we often try to push them out of our minds and forget about them. But they are still there. When the recordings play back it can be very confusing. The recorded feelings from the past seem to be about the present, maybe because we’ve ‘forgotten’ the original situation.

It is possible for a child (or an adult) to recover from the effects of an overwhelming experience, using the discharge process. Then, the recorded-but-not-understood experience becomes useful experience to be learned from. But, if the discharge processes are suppressed in a society, then every adult is left with large amounts of recorded pain and confusion in their minds.

[This confusion – of past with present – interferes with a person’s ability to navigate the world. If learning can be thought of as building an accurate map of the world, distress recordings are like errors in the map. Distress recordings are not learning, and so they can’t be unlearned – they can only be discharged.]

2. All distress recordings logically contain certain elements

Every recording of a distressing experience is unique, but there are some important common elements that I want to focus on because they play a very significant role in the world. These elements are:

• Feeling small
• Feeling powerless
• Feeling alone

Logically, these elements become part of every distress recording:

• When we were first hurt we were children, and therefore physically small. This simple truth – small – becomes part of the recording.
• If we had been powerful then our minds wouldn’t have been overwhelmed. So recordings only happened when we were powerless. So powerless is part of every recording.
• If anyone had been able to help us – either by stopping the overwhelming thing happening or by helping us recover fully afterwards – then we wouldn’t have the recording in our minds. Therefore, every recording left in our minds is of a time when no one did help. What seems to get recorded is ‘nobody can think about me’, ‘nobody cares’, ‘I’m on my own’ – which might be summarised as alone.

So every experience of distress, no matter what kind, leaves a distress recording – that is, a false perception – of being small, powerless and alone.

I speculate that all distress recordings also contain something that feels ‘unbearable’. By definition, a recording only happens when our minds stop functioning because something was too much for our minds to handle. So recordings are always of an experience that actually was unbearable in some way.

From what I can see, if we don’t have easy access to discharge, it seems that we will do almost anything to avoid feeling an ‘unbearable’ feeling. That is, there may be no limit to the level of irrationality that people may engage in, in trying to avoid ‘unbearable’ feelings.

3. A vulnerability to mistreat others

When these very common recordings play back in our minds, we may sometimes be able to act humanly, despite the recordings. That is important. But it’s clear that we often act on the distress. If we do, it seems we can have two ‘opposite’ distress-based reactions:

1. We feel small and powerless and alone. Because the feelings seem like reality, we act small and powerless and alone. For example, we find it hard to stand against bad things that happen.
2. Because the feelings feel unbearable, we may try to avoid them by trying to feel ‘big and powerful’ instead – often by trying to be ‘bigger’ or ‘more powerful’ than someone else by dominating them, or mistreating them in some other way.

These two reactions both play a very significant role in the spontaneous formation of oppressive societies. They are not mutually exclusive. We all do both of them, sometimes at the same time! Which of these reactions we ‘choose’ in any particular situation seems to depend on which feels ‘safer’ (or least unbearable) in that situation. Most of the time it seems that we make this choice without awareness.

We are often completely unaware that we mistreat people because it feels like we are the victim*. I think we are always feeling like a victim (awarely or unawarely) when we are dominating someone – that’s the reason why we are dominating them.

[*Feeling small and powerless and alone feels like being a victim.]

In order for someone to consider not acting out mistreatment or domination, they have to face the feelings they have been trying to avoid. These feelings always seem to feel ‘unbearable’, which explains why it has been hard for people to choose not to mistreat or dominate others.

[In today’s world, this recorded feeling of being small, powerless and alone leaves us vulnerable to manipulation through being offered the appearance of ‘winning’ over others, or the threat of ‘losing’ to others. A large part of all political manipulation is on this basis. It also leaves us feeling insecure, and therefore vulnerable to feeling that we need more security, more money, more stuff, no matter how much we already have, and so leads to the formation of societies based on over consumption. These societies have reached the point where they are destroying the ecological basis upon which all life, including human life, depends.]

4. Mistreatment becomes contagious

If there isn’t sufficient emotional recovery [discharge] in a society then this vulnerability to mistreat others becomes ‘contagious’. If a child doesn’t recover from overwhelming experiences then they become vulnerable to mistreating others as they get older. If other children experience or witness* this mistreatment, it overwhelms their young minds and so they too become vulnerable to mistreating others. So this vulnerability passes from person to person, and down to each new generation, until everyone becomes ‘infected’. That is, everyone in the society becomes vulnerable to mistreating others.

[*It seems that human connection is such an important part of our nature that experiencing mistreatment, or simply witnessing one person mistreating another, is enough to overwhelm a young human mind. Also, any human would want to prevent another being mistreated. If a child is not able to do this, it leaves them feeling small, powerless and alone.]

5. Mistreatment leads to disconnection and separation

When one person, or group, repeatedly mistreats or dominates another, it damages their connection with each other. Eventually, it breaks their relationships and it breaks the trust between them. Individuals disconnect and separate from others, physically and emotionally. Similarly, whole groups of people disconnect and separate from whole other groups.

6. Forming groups for safety

People come together for many good reasons: close connection with others is part of our deep human nature; working together is often much more effective than working as separate individuals; there are situations in the natural world where being part of a group is safer than being alone.

But there may also be pulls to come together that are driven by distresses. In situations of widespread mistreatment and disconnection (see all of the mechanisms above) there may be good, rational reasons to join a group, for safety and connection. Also, if people feel small, powerless and alone, they may feel a strong pull to join a group in order to feel less alone and more powerful.

These groups form more easily from people who naturally spend time together* because day-to-day contact and shared understandings allow relatively more trust to develop between them. This means that groups tend to form around commonalities: man, woman, hunter, farmer… Every individual has more than one role in their society, so they have more than one commonality and so belong to more than one group.

[*For example, they do the same kind of work.]

These groups are formed of people who all feel small, powerless and alone, and so they are vulnerable to dominating and mistreating others. This happens in different ways:

1. People mistreat others within their own group. I will say more about this in 7. Groups divide internally.
2. The group mistreats isolated individuals outside the group. If these individuals can conform or assimilate into the group, and if they can accept the mistreatment that happens inside the group, they may join the group. If not, they may form a separate group for their own protection. So, when one group forms it causes other groups to form in response*.
   [*This is an example of a self-reinforcing loop: something happening causes even more of that same thing to happen. Self-reinforcing loops are an important concept in understanding systems, whether natural, social or technological.]
3. The group (as a whole) mistreats, dominates and seeks advantage over other whole groups. The disconnection and mistrust this produces between groups leads people to see others as either ‘us’ or ‘them’.

7. Groups divide internally

The mistreatment that happens within a group means that people in the group are often not very connected to (or trusting of) each other, but the pull to separate is not enough to overcome the pull to remain in the group.

This internal mistreatment causes subgroups to form, by the same mechanism as in 6. Forming groups for safety. This means the subgroups form around the other commonalities that people have. So most groups are divided internally into subgroups based on their members’ other commonalities or identities.

The end result is a population divided into many intersecting groups, where Group A is a subgroup of Group B, and at the same time, Group B is a subgroup of Group A*.

[*For example in the world today, if you take the group working class, they are divided into many subgroups, e.g. female, male and many others. And if you take the group male, they are divided into many subgroups, e.g. working class, middle class and many others.]

As societies evolve over time, this forming of groups which are also divided internally happens at many different scales: friendship groups, families, gangs, clans, tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires, and so on. The same pattern appears at all these scales because the same mechanism is driving it at all these scales: a pull to group together for security, at the same time as a pull to separate through internal domination and mistreatment. Much of this grouping and division happens without awareness.

8. Self-reinforcing loops amplify small differences

Or: The spontaneous formation of inequality and hierarchy

If you feel small, powerless and alone, and your relationships are broken and you can’t trust many people, you are likely to feel very insecure. There can be a strong pull to make sure you ‘get enough’ (e.g. by grabbing material resources – for example, food) because you can’t be sure that anyone else will care about you, and it’s hard to fully care about others when you feel so scared and alone. In this situation, if, purely by accident*, one person or group happens to grab slightly more than others, then that extra resource gives them an ability to grab even more. The more you grab, the more advantage you have to grab even more.

[*This is not always pure accident – for example, some people might start out physically stronger than others – but I want to emphasise that pre-existing advantages are not necessary: advantage can develop spontaneously through this mechanism.]

This is a self-reinforcing loop. Self-reinforcing loops tend to amplify small differences. In this case, it can lead to some people’s ownership or control of material resources growing much larger than other people’s, leading to a very unequal society.

As societies develop, this happens at every scale: there’s a struggle for power and resources at the level of individuals, families, gangs, tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires… At each of these scales, one individual or group ends up at the ‘top’, and others end up further down. Who actually ends up at the top is almost accidental* – they are not special. If it wasn’t those people it would be someone else.

[*I am talking here about situations when oppression first arose. As oppression becomes more established, who occupies the top positions becomes less accidental.]

Thus, inequality and hierarchy can arise spontaneously out of recordings of small, powerless and alone, without anyone intending it.

9. Clinging onto and consolidating advantage

After the inequalities and hierarchies form (see above), everyone still feels small, powerless and alone, no matter how much material resource they have: this is not about present material reality, but past recordings from childhood. They may also feel insecure because, in this kind of society, others may try to grab their wealth. So everyone tries to cling on to whatever advantage they managed to gain, using whatever power that advantage gives them. For example, the people at the top might invent property law, so that protection of their wealth is built into the rules of the society. They might also call for and fund a police force to enforce that law. The people who become the police force do so because it gives them a way to avoid feeling so small, powerless and alone.

As each group clings onto and consolidates the advantage they gained, this advantage becomes entrenched. Over time this comes to seem ‘normal’ or ‘the natural order of things’. People in a group start to see membership of that group as ‘who they are’, and that they are different from those not in the group. So group membership becomes identity.

This may be how the predecessors of present-day oppressions got started: in a struggle for advantage, some groups came out ‘on top of’ others [ended up with more power and resource] and then used that power to consolidate and entrench their position*. Their position of advantage then became part of the ‘shape’ of the society, for example: classism, sexism, oppression of young people…

[*Sometimes there wasn’t much of a struggle needed to gain advantage, for example the oppression of very young people.]

Again, it’s not just the people who ended up at ‘the top’ of the hierarchy who cling on to their advantages – everyone is doing it, in different ways. But if you cling on to advantages that other people can’t have then it makes it almost impossible for them to want to unite with you. So individuals and groups clinging onto and consolidating advantage leads to division, disconnection and separation at every level within a population.

Oppression can be understood as organised mistreatment. The organisation of the mistreatment first arises unintentionally, as a result of many individuals gaining different advantages over others as they all seek relief from feelings of small, powerless and alone. Later, a small part* of the organisation of the mistreatment becomes intentional as people with greater advantage find they can use it to further consolidate their advantage.

[*See the next mechanism for why it’s only a small part.]

10. Divide and be ruled

One way to cling onto one’s advantage is to exploit divisions between the people who have less advantage – to turn them against each other so they can’t unite and use their combined power.

Advantaged groups don’t do most of the actual dividing of people. It would not be possible for them to create divisions, or a vulnerability to be divided, in a large group of unhurt and deeply connected people. They can only exploit or magnify divisions or vulnerabilities that are already present in the less-advantaged groups. Most of the division – or vulnerability to being divided – has already happened spontaneously through people mistreating each other (see 3. A vulnerability to mistreat others, 7. Groups divide internally, 9. Clinging onto and consolidating advantage and other places).

Today, people sometimes say ‘they are dividing us’ or ‘don’t let them divide us’. I think it’s more useful to ask ourselves ‘why are we so vulnerable to being divided?’

As with the most of the other mechanisms detailed here, this happens at every scale.

11. Blaming oppressors locks oppression in place

To overcome the mechanism 10. Divide and be ruled, people may try to organise some less-advantaged people into some kind of united force. In doing this, they often try to unite people around feelings of anger, hatred or blame of an oppressor group. This oppressor group may be the one with the most advantage, or it may be a group that is more visible, easier to blame or seems less dangerous.

The problem is, in an unfair economic system almost everyone ends up having something that someone else can’t have, or benefiting in some way at someone else’s expense, whether this be a material benefit or a feeling of security or superiority.  So when any particular group is blamed for benefiting at the expense of others, almost everyone else gets scared that they might be the next target, as they too benefit in some way at the expense of others. This pulls people to deny the unfairness of the system and their part in it, and to target others in order to divert attention away from themselves – rather than joining with others to face the whole system and dismantle it together. It maintains a deep sense of insecurity, disunity and fear in the whole population and ends up locking the harmful system more firmly in place.

12. Exploiting others seems preferable to transforming the system

When everyone has acquired a vulnerability to mistreat others (see 3. A vulnerability to mistreat others and 4. Mistreatment becomes contagious), everyone becomes untrustworthy to some extent, so it’s hard for anyone to trust anyone else. When you can’t trust anyone, it appears that security lies in focusing on your own narrow self interest (which means you become even more untrustworthy, which leads to yet more mistrust… another self-reinforcing loop!)

Under those conditions, it seems impossible to transform the society into one where everyone benefits from mutual aid and cooperation, as it seems you would be standing against the whole system alone and no one would stand with you. So it may seem like the best choice is to cling on to a position where you benefit from the exploitation of other people, even though you may be exploited yourself. You may see the society as ‘good’, because it helps you maintain a position where at least you are not as oppressed as some others.

Emergence

The mechanisms I have described above are all quite simple, but they interact with each other. Many of these interactions form loops of cause and effect where, for example, ‘A’ causes ‘B’, and ‘B’ causes ‘A’. Over time, these interactions produce the complex and varied oppressive systems and societies we see today.

This is an example of emergence. Emergence is where new, complex structures or behaviours arise through the interactions of simpler components that do not have these structures or behaviours by themselves. Emergence is central to systems theory, science and philosophy. It describes how systems become greater than the sum of their parts. Emergent phenomena are qualitatively different from their components. They arise only when those components act together, for example: biological life arising from inanimate molecules within a cell, or the ‘wetness’ of water emerging from individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Emergence is very common in nature. You could say that nature is mostly emergence.

Common distress recordings

All these mechanisms arise from distress recordings containing the elements small, powerless and alone. These elements are logically part of every distress recording, no matter what hurtful or overwhelming situation caused it (see 2. All distress recordings logically contain certain elements). This is an important part of the model I am presenting here because it provides a mechanism whereby mistreatment can arise from incidents of distress that don’t involve any mistreatment – accidents, for example. Without a mechanism like this, oppression could never arise from situations without oppression, so oppression could never get started.

So this analysis shows how oppressive societies might arise spontaneously out of ordinary, ‘everyday’, or accidental hurts, when there is not enough access to discharge*.

[*I think there are plausible explanations for why there might not be enough access to discharge in a non-oppressive society, but I will leave that to another article.]

We are all human

At the same time as these mechanisms are operating, which are based on distress recordings, we are also doing our best to act against the distresses, in ourselves and in others. Sometimes our humanness can hold against the distress, but sometimes the distress wins, and once these mechanisms dominate too much (enough for a self-reinforcing loop to get started) then they can run out of control.

Cultural guardrails

Some societies – maybe all – develop laws, customs, traditions or cultures, that provide some defence against these mechanisms running out of control, even though they might not fully understand distress recordings or discharge. However, the people in these societies still carry the common distress recordings that underlie these mechanisms. This means the society is vulnerable to accelerating towards extreme oppression if the cultural ‘guard rails’ are not strong enough to prevent a self-reinforcing loop getting started.

Thought experiment: Stability and instability

We could conduct a thought experiment: Let us imagine we have a fully equal society, where everyone has exactly the same access to material resource, and everyone has exactly the same distress recordings (of small, powerless and alone). Because of the mechanisms outlined above, this society is vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into a hierarchical society, organised around oppression and exploitation, without anyone intending it.

That is, a fully equal society where everyone has these distresses is not stable. The stable state of a society with these distresses is unfair and hierarchical. Conversely, if you have a society where people don’t have these distresses, then the stable state is fair and equal.

Archaeological evidence

The book The Dawn of Everything* presents archaeological evidence that suggests this:

Many times in pre-history, societies transformed from ‘fully human’ and fair, to oppressive and hierarchical.

But it also suggests the reverse happened too:

Many times in pre-history, societies transformed from oppressive and hierarchical, to ‘fully human’ and fair.

This is hopeful. It could be very useful for us to know how this happened, but there are no surviving records of what allowed these transformations to happen.

[*I found this book very interesting because of the large amount of new historical and archaeological information it presents. For example, before this book, the emergence of oppressive societies was widely seen as a consequence of the invention of agriculture. This book shows that this is not true: there have been agricultural societies that were not oppressive and hunter-gather societies that were oppressive.]

We all play a part

This analysis implies that, in thinking about the oppressive societies we see today, it’s not useful or accurate to assign cause, agency or blame to any one set of people, for example, the owning class. Oppressive societies can be understood as systems that arose spontaneously out of interactions between all of the people, who all carried similar (and very ordinary) distress recordings.

When we try to think about understanding or changing oppressive societies today, we are often pulled to focus on the people who have ended up at ‘the top’ of the economic system – ‘the elites’, ‘the 1%’, the owning class. It is useful to notice them, but we can mislead ourselves by attributing to them a power or importance that they don’t have.

On the one hand, they are the major beneficiaries of the economic exploitation that characterises our current societies – and the mechanisms outlined here lead to them becoming richer and richer. They benefit from the mutual oppression and resulting divisions between everyone else, and promote these deliberately in order to maintain their position.

On the other hand they are just human beings. The mechanisms outlined here ensure that a small group of people will always end up at the top. If it wasn’t these particular individuals then it would be others. If these people were removed another set would take their place, as has happened many times throughout history. They are not special.

These people appear very powerful. But they, personally, have no more power than any of us. All of their power is enacted by other people. Today, this is politicians, the army, the police, lawyers, managers and many other groups with intermediate levels of advantage. In fact we all play a part in this: the only ‘security’ offered by the hierarchical system is a position where you benefit from the exploitation of other people even though you may be exploited yourself. Fear of losing what ‘little’ we have makes us feel we have to cling on to these positions of false security, and in doing so we unwittingly become agents of the overall system.

This top group also have a kind of pseudo-power that is simply the absence of our own power. That is, how thoroughly divided, scared and confused we are in the face of making big social changes – how we feel there is almost no one we can trust fully to stand with us, and how powerless each of us feels as an isolated individual.

So ‘the elites’, ‘the 1%’, the owning class are not our problem.

Our problem is our inability to collectively understand and act against simple distress recordings that lead to the spontaneous creation of oppressive systems in which we all play a part.

It’s not enough to end individual oppressions

This analysis implies that the elimination of individual oppressions, like racism, classism and so on, are desirable outcomes but, as individual (or even combined) efforts, they don’t address the root cause of the problem.

Also, these efforts, by their nature, focus on how one particular group of humans mistreat another group of humans. This focus, without the kind of deeper and wider understanding presented here, can end up maintaining or even furthering blame and division, which then function to lock the oppressive systems more firmly in place.

The present-day oppressions we see are just ‘symptoms’ of underlying mechanisms. Looking back over the millennia, many forms of oppression have existed. They were all different in detail but similar in their general form. As the oppressions of one historical period became unworkable, new forms arose to take their place, leading to a new historical period. If we don’t address the deeper underlying mechanisms, then no matter what individual oppressions we might eliminate, the society remains vulnerable to new forms of oppression or oppressive systems arising, even if no one intends it.

Creating conditions for change

The analysis presented here suggests that oppressive societies arose spontaneously out of large numbers of people reacting to common distress recordings as if they were real.

Creating conditions where people can discharge these common distress recordings will be very important. However, I have found that simply understanding the mechanisms outlined here made a big difference to my effectiveness in changing the world, as well as in my personal relationships.

We have also had feedback, from people who attended our non-RC workshops*, that spending a few hours considering this perspective was enough to deeply affect their outlook on the world. (A significant number of people later told us ‘that workshop changed my life’.)

[*For more about these workshops, see How I came to write this article, below]

How much of what is happening in the world today can be understood more deeply using the perspective set out in this article? What does this then suggest we might do differently as we try to change things for the better?

What conditions will accelerate humans towards a non-oppressive society? How can we create these conditions?

How I came to write this article

These thoughts have been developing in my mind over the last 15 years. I first started thinking about this because I wanted to prevent the self-destruction that we humans are currently heading towards. I wanted to understand why this was happening so I could explain it to others.

Learning from Harvey Jackins, I started writing down my thoughts, and then carefully checking them for logical consistency and consistency with observed reality. I found that this was a reliable way to move my thinking forward and reach a new understanding. Each time I did this I was pleased with my new understanding. But, after a year or two, I would notice inconsistencies in my understanding and so I had to go through this process again, repeatedly.

Writing was very useful for me, but reading my articles didn’t seem to help people outside RC understand the ideas deeply, or to spread that understanding to others. So, in 2019 I created a three-hour workshop where people heard about the ideas and also experienced them. My assistant and I took a strategic decision to not ‘push’ this workshop on people [not urge them to do it], but instead rely on attendees to tell their friends about it. This worked very well. The workshop became very successful: attendee numbers grew exponentially during the first year. To date, we’ve run this three-hour workshop 193 times, reaching 2,000 people from 48 countries. We began by offering the workshop within the climate movement but now we’re reaching other groups. We also ran a four-hour version of this workshop 30 times for the international RC communities, with a total of 500 RCers attending.

Writing didn’t work well to spread these ideas, but writing might be useful for people who want to explore them in more detail and think carefully about their implications. That is the purpose of this article.