The Emergence Of Oppressive Societies

Updated 12/04/26 06:59

5,000 words; 30-minute read.

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 non-oppressive human societies vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into oppressive societies.

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.

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. That meant I had to understand for myself why this was happening and then communicate that understanding to others, both inside and outside of RC. Like Harvey Jackins, I found that writing, together with repeatedly checking for logical consistency and consistency with observed reality, was a reliable way to move my thinking forward. As I did this, again and again I found that my understanding of oppression and class societies wasn’t consistent, and so I had to keep revising my thoughts and my writing.

Writing was very useful, but I found that writing about these ideas didn’t work well to communicate them. 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 192 times, reaching 2,000 people from 48 countries. Additionally, we ran this workshop 30 times for the international RC communities, with 500 RCers attending. We began by offering the workshop within the climate movement but now we’re reaching other groups.

Even though writing didn’t seem to communicate these ideas very well, writing might be useful for people who are interested in exploring the ideas in more detail and thinking carefully about their implications. One way to write about them is to describe a set of simple mechanisms, and how those mechanisms interact. There may be better ways.

A model

This article describes a model of part of reality. All models (including RC theory*) are simplified descriptions of reality.

[*See The Upward Trend page 155, first few paragraphs]

This model describes the situation before oppressive societies arose – the conditions that led to them arising. It is not describing 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 it might help us think about the situation we face now.

This model is intended to be completely consistent with fundamental RC theory. I am eager to hear about any inconsistencies.

Everything in this model is tentative – that is, it is subject to change as more information becomes available, or more exploration and checking of the logic is done.

Simple mechanisms

I will describe a number of simple mechanisms that arise from some very common distress recordings. I will describe these mechanisms 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. 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 at the time. 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 our 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 distress incident, no matter what kind*, leaves a distress recording – i.e. a false perception – of being small, powerless and alone.

[*This provides a mechanism by which mistreatment and oppression can arise in non-oppressive societies.]

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 to handle. So recordings are always of an experience that was literally 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, for example by dominating them.

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.

[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 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.]

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.

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.

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. Feeling insecure leads to formation of groups

People want to come together because that’s part of our deep human nature. But there may also be pulls to come together that are driven by distresses:

If we feel small, powerless and alone – which feels very insecure – we may feel a strong pull to become part of a group, in order to feel more secure and less alone. These groups form more easily from people who naturally spend time together – for example, they do the same kind of work – as 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.

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

1. People mistreat others in their own group. I will say more about this in Grouping and separating at the same time, below.
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 try to join the group. If not, they may form a separate group for their own protection. [This is a positive feedback loop – one group forming causes other groups to form.]
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’.]

Grouping and separating at the same time

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. Feeling insecure leads to formation of groups. 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.]

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 (perceived) security, at the same time as a pull to separate through internal domination and mistreatment. Much of this grouping and division happens without awareness.

7. Positive feedback amplifies small differences

This mechanism leads to the spontaneous formation of inequalities and hierarchies.

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 the ability to grab even more [for example, food.] The more you get, the more advantage you have to grab even more.

This is a positive feedback loop. Positive feedback loops amplify small differences. They often result in an exponential increase, until a natural limit is reached. In this case, it can very quickly lead to some people’s ownership or control of material resources increasing exponentially, leading to a very unequal society.

As with other mechanisms, this happens at every scale: there’s a struggle for power and resources at the level of individuals, of families, gangs, tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires… At each of these scales, one 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 about situations before oppression first arose. Once oppression has started it’s often not accidental.]

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

8. Clinging on to 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 isn’t about material reality, but 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 onto 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 managed to get, this advantage becomes entrenched. After a few generations it 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 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 things 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 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.]

9. Divide and be ruled

One way to cling on to 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 the 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, Grouping and separating at the same time, 8. Clinging on to 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.

10. Uniting against oppressors

To overcome mechanism 9. Divide and be ruled, people may try to organise the 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 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 their oppressor position, everyone gets scared that they might be the next target, as they too benefit from their own oppressor position. This pulls people to deny the unfairness of the system and their part in it, and to target others to divert attention from themselves – rather than coming together 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.

11. 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 leads to yet more mistrust – another positive feedback 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 seems 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 end up viewing the society as ‘good’, because it helps you maintain a position where at least you are not as oppressed as some others.

Emergence

All of these mechanisms are happening at the same time, and they all interact with each other. Over time, the interactions of these relatively simple mechanisms produce the complex oppressive systems and societies we see today.

This is an example of emergence. Emergence is the process whereby new, complex structures or behaviours arise from the interactions of simpler, individual components that do not have these properties 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 when components act together, such as 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 that caused it. So this analysis shows how oppressive societies might arise spontaneously out of very common, ‘ordinary’ distress recordings.

We are all human

At the same time as these mechanisms are operating, which are based on our distress recordings, we are also doing our best to be human – to act against the distresses, in ourselves and others. Sometimes our humanness can hold against the distress, but sometimes the distress wins, and once these mechanisms dominate too much (enough for a positive feedback 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 positive feedback 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 that, many times in pre-history, societies transformed from ‘fully human’ and fair, to oppressive and hierarchical. But it also suggests that, many times in pre-history, societies transformed from oppressive and hierarchical, to ‘fully human’ and fair. It is very important for us to know that this happened, but there are no surviving records of what allowed these transformations to happen.

[*I found this to be a very interesting book because of the large amount of new historical and archaeological information it contains. 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 oppressive societies, 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 arise spontaneously out of interactions between all of the people, who all carry similar (and very ordinary) distress recordings.

When we try to think about understanding or changing oppressive societies, 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 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 it 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 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 one particular group of humans mistreating another group of humans. This focus, without the kind of deeper understanding presented here, can end up maintaining or even furthering division, which then functions 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.

Discharge vs. understanding

I have done some discharging of the distresses I describe above (see ‘The Relationship between “Oppressor Material” and “Unbearable” Feelings’, Present Time January 2023, p23). I can see that I have a lot more discharging to do. However, simply having an understanding of the mechanisms outlined here, both in my personal relationships and in the wider world, has made a big difference to my effectiveness in changing the world. We have also had feedback from some of the thousands of people who have attended our 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’.) So I have a question: how much discharge, verses how much exposure to a useful perspective, will be necessary in order to create conditions that will accelerate humans towards a non-oppressive society?

What can we do differently?

What does this perspective suggest we might do differently as we try to change things for the better?