Let the Playing Field Level the Playing Field

By Dennis Joiner

Imagine a time in the future when science has developed the means to allow the political socioeconomic playing field to level itself, giving everyone adequate food, shelter, clothing, health care, and sufficient education, and outlawing warfare. It may not happen tomorrow, but the age of abundance may be waiting in the future, where man has evolved to become gnostic human beings to fully understand what it means to be human in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, and to be free from every grief and pain that comes from evil.

At the moment, all humanity is unaware of what the future will bring. However, nature's providential intent for social justice, communal growth and development, and the humanization of man will remain unaltered through the dynamic transformative social epiphenomena of the playing field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636921280

Dennis Joiner

Dennis Joiner studied mathematics and computer science at the Southern Illinois University and shares his "system thinking" critique of American society and his vision of a future, where humans have evolved to become gnostic beings free from every grief and pain that comes from evil. He had a computer systems and information technology career in innovative information technology (IT) research and development.Since his retirement in 2016, he has been able to devote more time to writing and expanding his knowledge by reading social commentary books. Dennis is a critical system thinker and seeks to explain away a world of illusions.

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Let the Playing Field Level the Playing Field

Dennis Joiner

Copyright © 2020 Dennis Joiner

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-63692-127-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-128-0 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Neo-Dark Age Racial Prison

American Sociocultural Field

Language

Philosophy-Religion

Ethics-Law

Science

Fine Art

Identity

A Level Playing Field

Beyond Want and Suffering

I dedicate this book to my grandmother who inspired and helped me to be more and to my grandchildren in the hope that it inspires them to do more.

Prologue: A Game-Changing Playbook

A Game-Changing Playbook

Let the Playing Field Level the Playing Field

Is this the answer to a level playing field? To the race problem? This is an inherently racist question, which inherently would elicit a racist answer from both sides, black and white. A racist answer would also inherently be fallacious as it assumes that all constituents of a group are the same without any variations or exceptions. It draws upon the notion that differences of skin color and physical attributes and, in some cases, of language, nationality, and religion can be used to categorize people with the aim of justifying their exploitation or extinction. Attributing race to an individual or a population amounts to applying a social and cultural label that lacks scientific consensus or supporting empirical evidence (data). The concept of race is a social construct that provides neither a valid means to categorize human beings or explanations for specific aspects of biological diversity.

Regardless, the idea of race has come to play such a large role in American society, politics, and policy-making that there is no room for any open-mindedness, and it is maintained and perpetuated from generation to generation through cultural learning. For example, degrading stereotypes of blacks such as being lazy, stupid, foolish, cowardly, submissive, irresponsible, childish, violent, subhuman, and animal-like are reinforced and enhanced by the negative portrayal of blacks in the media and entertainment industries. So once these stereotypes and misconceptions become ingrained in the psyche of American children, they become self-perpetuating, creating a racist environment that is every bit as hostile to blacks as Jim Crow America and the segregated South. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If a situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Thus, how one defines a situation depends on how one perceives it. And blacks have been defined effectively and detrimentally by negative stereotypes. So if black Americans, Hispanics, and other devalued people are defined as lazy, incompetent, unintelligent, culturally deficient, and lacking leadership skills, they will be relegated to a secondary status in society and not given the opportunity to freely advance, resulting in reifying consequences that justify the ascribed definition of their personality.

Racism in American society is both pernicious and pervasive. It is a determinant of who is who and who is not, who belongs and who does not, who deserves what and who does not, and who is capable of what and who is not. Legalized discrimination against blacks began immediately after the emancipation proclamation on January 1, 1863. And no particular changes in political, economic, and/or social life will eliminate it. The Black culture—criminality, sex obsession, drug use/addiction, failed family function, and failed preparation for the job market—argument for why blacks are much poorer than whites is wrong because it’s the wrong culture. The culture responsible for black inferiority is the American sociopolitical culture that establishes authority schemes that substitute racist dogma for reason and truth, so that despite professing acceptance of diversity, racism and bigotry is deeply ingrained into the sociopolitical culture of America.

However, racism is dying. It will not, however, disappear tomorrow, or in a few months or even in in a few years. But its demise will take place as a historic process that could lead to the end of America’s sociopolitical evolution and Western democracy as the ultimate form of human government—or to a new kind of collectivist and authoritarian society, where realizing a level playing would be impossible since it must emerge in a society that is not capitalist or socialist but something in between, with elements of both. A level playing field can not be achieved by capitalism, communism, socialism or any other ISM, but by eliminating the dishonesty, selfishness, and greed in whatever system you are living in.

Regardless, the ruling class tilts the playing field in their favor with their wealth and power. They have and will continue to create phony (manmade) health, economic, social, and political crises, and shocks to the national conscious—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, pathogenic diseases—to induce a fear response in a disoriented public. Moreover, if you could follow the money trail you would see the puppet strings of the person or group who has true control or a great influence behind world-changing crises, wars, and radical pro-corporate policies.

Worse of all, despite having the scientifically and technologically feasible capabilities, a powerful, secretive global elite prevents a higher than ever before standard of living which would mean an ever healthier; ever better informed and comprehensively educated; and an ever more mutually trusting and considerate world people. It threatens the submission of world people to the elite and world bankers by making freedom the pretext of inequality, and inequality the pretext of submission. Only an intervention of Providence can shuffle off (get rid of) the mortal coil of world strife and suffering (natural disasters, plagues, famine, injustice, inhumanity, falsehoods) imposed by neo-feudal policies of governance, economy, and public life such as unequal rights and legal protections for the common people and a pseudo nobility.

So that being said, let the playing field level the playing field. That is, only the conditions and circumstances of American sociocultural game-changing epiphenomena—scientific discoveries, innovations and inventions, political upheavals, and ideas that change the trajectory or course of American society—can level the playing field. Human progress will eliminate racism through natural growth, technological development, and human evolution, and transformative social epiphenomena. Even though its ideological belief has been slow in dying, the time has come for its coup de grace, the final blow to kill a doomed doctrine of oppression and exploitation and its raison d’etre—classism.

For this reason, I have written this book to reveal the only sure way of bringing to light the pertinacious, fossilized racist assumptions which remain uncritically challenged in the unconscious id of the American psychosocial personality and expose their power to subjugate and exploit world people. Nowhere in America is there a serious examination of the black problem, and yet an understanding of this problem is the basic prerequisite for understanding the putrescence of American society and neutralizing its decay. It is this prerequisite that has motivated the writing of this book.

The following chapters provide some specific answers to some very specific questions regarding American society. They also outline how human suffering is primarily due to malefic conditions facilitated by white instituted authority schemes and pleasure systems. These authority schemes and pleasure systems are part of a complex white supremacy power system that are totally biased toward nonwhites. It is also based on lies about what whites are capable of doing and about what they may be disposed to do. Consequently, this pons asinorum of white authority schemes and pleasure systems has become a Gordian knot to progress, and I think the only way to obliterate the knot is to expose the lies and render white authority schemes and pleasure systems irrelevant so that no adjustments will have any real positive result at all.

There is a story of a group of ten fools who, after crossing a stream, wanted to make sure that all of them had, in fact, safely crossed the stream. One of the ten began to count but, while counting the others, left himself out. I see only nine. We have lost one. Who can it be? he said.

Did you count correctly? asked another and did the counting himself. But he too counted only nine. One after the other, each one who did the counting ended up with only a total of nine as they all made the mistake of not counting themselves.

We are only nine, they all agreed, but who is the missing one? they asked themselves. Every effort they made to discover the missing individual failed.

Whoever he is has drowned, said the most empathetic of the ten fools. We have lost him. He burst into tears, and the rest of the nine also began to cry.

Fools are always sure of themselves, which is a necessary precondition for being fooled by others. It is easier to be fooled than to be convinced that you are being fooled.

Finally, a sympathetic wayfarer, seeing them weeping on the riverbank, inquired for the cause. They related what had happened and said that even after counting themselves several times, they could find no more than nine. On hearing the story, but seeing all the ten before him, the wayfarer guessed what had happened. In order to make them know for themselves that they were really ten and that all of them had come safely across the stream, he told them, "Let each of you count for himself but one after the other serially—one, two, three, and so on—while I shall give you each a blow so that all of you may be sure of having been included in the count and included only once. The tenth missing man will then be found."

Hearing this, they rejoiced at the prospect of finding their lost comrade and accepted the method suggested by the wayfarer. While the wayfarer gave a blow to each of the ten in turn, each one that got the blow counted himself aloud. Ten, said the last man as he got the last blow on his turn. Bewildered, they looked at one another.

We are ten, they said with one voice and thanked the wayfarer for having removed their grief.

Each fool corresponds to a specific type of fool (vulnerable, perverse, prurient, arrogant, pious, ignoramus, moron, idiot, stooge, and buffoon) with prevailing dispositions, such as: precariously immature or extremely gullible; strongly dislike or treat with scorn what is expected or desired; unrestrained by any kind of authority; express sociopathic-narcissistic scorn through derisive attitudes, behavior, and speech; obstinate hypocritical display of virtue; utterly ignorant; express unwise, imprudent, or retarded behavior; lacking normal intelligence or common sense to make sound judgments; easily controlled or influenced; and express ridiculous, amusing, or clownish behavior.

Consequently, the cause of their grief was not the real loss of any one of the ten; it was their own ignorance and stupidity. Such is the case with blacks and most other Americans who are suffering. Truly, there is no cause today for blacks and others to be miserable and unhappy. Particularly, if you learn to perceive the characteristics of a vulnerable, perverse, prurient, arrogant, or pious fool—an ignoramus, a moron, an idiot, a stooge, or a buffoon—you will be able to identify and respond to such fools with discernment, good judgment, understanding, and insight, which is necessary for an effective cultural schema to identify threats of harm and opportunities for success.

However, blacks impose limitations on themselves, their self-actualization, and then complain, moan, cry, beg, and hold hands and sing, We shall overcome. If years of court cases and civil rights legislation have failed to provide the answer to the race problem, it is because they deal with a narrow perspective of the problem’s symptoms. To solve problems, you should begin with the thinking process. However, problems cannot be solved with the thinking that created them. So as long as court cases and civil rights legislation focus on a contrived black culture, which is only an imaginary part of a whole, they are not likely to yield the answer. You must widen the perspective and focus on American society, which is the whole, and then the answer will come. Let the playing field level the playing field.

I hope to share with you in this book the epiphany that comes from asking of few key questions about the pathology of race and racism in American society and the dynamics of transformative social epiphenomenon.

I. Introducing the Playing Field

1

Neo-Dark Age Racial Prison

A system is no better than its sensory organs. To those within the American political sociocultural system, outside reality tends to fade and disappear. For them, the real world is simply what their mass media says it is (the information that Americans get to see, hear, and read is their perception of reality, the scope of what they can take into their minds and their situation awareness), and that is what they focus and concentrate on or direct their attention to and where they expend their mental and emotional energies. Reality competes with positive feedback, and the higher the positive feedback, the larger the quantity of reality that fails to reach their attention and the higher their coefficient of fiction.

Each person is born into a social and cultural setting—family, community, social class, language, religion—and eventually develops many social connections. The characteristics of a child’s social setting affect how he or she learns to think and behave by means of instruction, rewards and punishment, and example. This setting includes home, school, neighborhood, and most certainly a few religious edifices and law enforcement. Then, there are also the child’s mostly informal interactions with friends, other peers, relatives, and the entertainment industry and news media. How individuals will respond to all these influences or even which influence will have the most impact tends not to be predictable. There is, however, some substantial similarity in how individuals respond to the same pattern of influences; that is, to being raised in the same culture. Furthermore, culturally induced behavior patterns of speech, action, emotional response, body language, and humor become so deeply ingrained in the human mind that they are often done without the individuals themselves being fully aware of them.

Today, most Americans are in a mental or spiritual prison, which theoretically is the same as a concrete prison. What is extraordinary about this prison is that people willingly lock themselves up in this prison of ignorance, superstition, repression, and fear reminiscent of the Dark Ages of Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire. This Neo-Dark Ages prison has no iron bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by fear and built of misinformation and legal mortar. Imprisoned in this dark dungeon of confusion and fear, most are caught up in a plethora of conditioned psycho-emotional reflexes driven by the basic human instincts of selfishness, cruelty, and greed; the prison warden wishes to prevent white genetic annihilation while the prisoners attempt ineptly to survive.

You are a prisoner of your own ignorant, arrogant, racist, and disturbed mind.

The rational mind must demand to know how such insanity and delusions can persist. However, it is quite simple: glittering words, fuzzy phases, and verbal confusion produced by a corporate-controlled media; vacuously corrupt politicians; and complicit others (political pundits/wonks, media talking heads and reporters, and various infotainment people) deftly reduce information to activated ignorance, mind-control pablum for the infantile minds of the American people that they have systematically dumbed down and mentally stunted. Thus, Americans live in an infantilized culture where they are treated like children that are easily manipulated and controlled and have little discernment about when they are being lied to or the extent of corruption in their government. Thinking critically and analytically demands that you peel away the veneer of mendacity and let the truth emerge.

Incredibly, as we move more into the twenty-first century, racism—the most intractable and persistent social problem in America and in the world today—is on the rise in increasing ways. Whether we are talking about ethnic cleansings, group hatred, or retraction of remediation laws under the guise that these laws are unfair, the underlying issue is the same.

Whites, threatened by a perceived loss of power to non-whites, exercise their social, economic and political advantage to retain that power by restructuring social constructs (e.g., public education, corporate employment, housing, government, bank lending, etc.) which sustains and perpetuates the marginalization of non-whites. Such actions and efforts call for an understanding of the basic concepts of prejudice and racism and how to lessen their destructive effect.

There are two root causes: prejudice and racial hatred at the individual level, discriminatory policies at the social and political level, and violence at both levels. Historical roots (e.g., slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.) only characterized prejudice and hatred and fueled their growth. They are not the true cause of hatred and prejudice so much as the result of the real causative agents.

At the heart of prejudice and racism lie two concepts: ignorance and fear, the deeper roots of prejudice and hatred. Everyone tends to have prejudicial attitudes toward others. Prejudice or prejudgment is based on ignorance or activated ignorance. It is a self-aware response to racial, social, sexual, and other forms of differences, because all human beings tend to prejudge others on the basis of limited knowledge, especially if they are perceived different from themselves. However, morality, a term that refers to the creation of and adherence to rules that govern human behavior on the basis of some idea of right and wrong, may provide a better way to understand prejudice. Whatever your concept of morality, it must address the human capacity to identify and choose between right and wrong. Nobody willingly chooses to do wrong since doing wrong always harms the wrongdoer, and nobody would want to cause harm to themselves. Therefore, all wrongdoing is the result of some degree of ignorance; otherwise, self-interest would prevent them from doing so.

Yet, it is true that people can choose to do things they know other people think are wrong and it is true that people can choose to do things that they believe are wrong for others while trying to benefit themselves. However, people do not choose to do things that they perceive to be wrong (harmful) for themselves, which would conflict with their instinct for benefiting themselves. Whatever the action, their goal is to seek the end they believe will benefit them. It is the sense of well-being that causes one to choose to do or have a compulsion to do a particular wrong even when that wrongdoing will potentially harm them. Basically, the choices, right or wrong, serve the ends that the chooser seeks to obtain and not the means through which the ends are realized.

Questions:

Do you believe prejudiced behavior is immoral behavior, i.e. that it is wrong?

Is wrongdoing the result of ignorance?

If you answered yes to the above questions, then you accept the idea that people choose to be prejudiced and that they do not perceive that it will bring harm to themselves. To the extent that they simply obey their instincts to benefit themselves, they are not willing to harm themselves. They seek to benefit themselves and are not trying to do wrong. They do not act for the sake of the wrong but for the sake of obtaining the perceived good with which they are trying to benefit from.

So there is no motive for committing actions that are right or wrong, which brings no perceived benefit. If you keep the distinction between the ends and means clear, you see that nobody commits an act for the sake of the wrong involved but with a view to obtaining the perceived benefit or good, which results from the action. Even when the benefit of horrendous acts defies your understanding, the individual wrongdoers usually still have a conscious motive to benefit themselves. We see it is that some people can commit horrible acts with seemingly no sensible benefit. In such circumstances, either the benefit of the action is only perceptible to such individual’s own distorted sense of well-being or such individuals are aware of acting out of an uncontrollable compulsion. In the latter case, they are unable to make real choices and are thus removed from moral judgment altogether. To the extent that they are unable to choose, they are unable to be moral.

If you answered no to one or both of the questions above, then you believe that some people have a powerful instinct to use prejudice to benefit them. This instinct is their natural morality. It is their nature to see what they perceive to benefit them as being good and right. It is also their nature to see that which harms them as being bad and wrong. They may objectively see that some particular circumstance may harm them. However, deciding that such harm is morally wrong can only be imposed by a self-aware self-interested person. There is no such thing as moral or ethical right or wrong until there exists self-aware self-interest.

Right and wrong in the perception of the individual are defined by the ends that the individual’s natural instinct of self-interest dictates. The ends that they seek are always defined in the context of their self-interest, and moral choices are always expressed in light of the ends they seek. Morality is not self-interest nor are the structures of moral or ethical reasoning synonymous with self-interested reasoning or motivation. However, the structures of moral or ethical reasoning are independent of the phenomenon of self-interest. It is only by responding to self-interest that people embrace morality or ethics and only by virtue of self-interest has any thought on morality or ethics ever been developed. So it is that any thoughtfulness about moral right and wrong is brought forth by and embraced through self-interest. Consequently, self-interest is the foundation of the capacity to be moral and our instinct to benefit ourselves makes our moral choices possible.

Now, this instinct for self-interest may assert itself in self-oblivious minds with personality disorders that are ignorant, confused, demented, or totally unable to know what is truly good is a separate issue that does not negate the fundamental truth that people never willingly harm themselves. Altogether, action based on ignorance may have the motive (needs and sentiments) of benefiting the individual but lacks the knowledge to be self-aware of that motive.

Question:

Do you believe that wrongdoing is a product of moral weakness rather than ignorance?

If your answer is yes, given that no sane normal person ever willingly does wrong and that there is such a thing as moral weakness, where people know what is wrong but lack the intestinal fortitude or strength to do right are not mutually exclusive, then in cases of moral weakness, the lack of strength to benefit one’s self without wrongdoing is a form of ignorance. It is an ignorance of what is most important and beneficial. It does not matter if ignorance is constructed out of an actual lack of knowledge or just the lack of restraint; your prevailing beliefs and priorities will either coalesce with your knowledge or ignorance. Moreover, when moral weakness reinforces a set of priorities that contradicts or prevents better knowledge, ignorance is propagated not through a lack of knowledge but through a lack of intestinal fortitude that forces the individual to embrace inferior priorities and see wrongdoing neutrally or positively.

The end result is that the morally weak person really believes that some things, which may be bad, are more important for them than others and therefore lives accordingly. Either the priorities are true and coalesce with knowledge to bring benefit to the individual or they are false and coalesce with ignorance, resulting in a type of moral degradation or delusions of moral weakness. So it does not matter if the wrongdoing is the result of pure ignorance or was a product of moral weakness, embracing; and believing in wrongdoing is a failure to live a better life in accordance with some set of moral beliefs that are ultimately a form of ignorance. Thus, ignorance is the basis of all wrongdoing.

The other factor is fear, and this one goes much deeper than ignorance, for it strikes at the root of racism, the issue of hatred, privilege, and power. What makes racial prejudice so sinister is not just the act of prejudging a person or a group, but that prejudice is an inflexible, rational attitude that often in a disguised manner defends privilege, and even after evidence to the contrary will not change so that the post-judgment is the same as the prejudgment where the indictment is greater for the post-judgment than for the prejudgment. This is because racial prejudice is the refusal to change one’s attitude even after evidence to the contrary so that one will continue to post-judge people the same way one prejudged them.

This is due to the fear of losing the power of privilege. And through prejudice, racist people are basically defending their position of privilege and the emotional, cultural, social, and economic benefits they stand to gain from an attitude of prejudice toward others. Whenever white people sense that these privileges are threatened, they become fearful of the other and react. A person cannot be convinced against their prejudiced beliefs or opinions.

Prejudice thus becomes the mental framework to protect from any unknown and unwanted change, thereby safeguarding a position of social advantage and privilege over others defined as different and, therefore, undeserving and devalued. White people find great social and economic benefit from being prejudiced. And as long as these benefits or gains are forthcoming, they will continue to maintain their prejudice in spite of evidence to the contrary, for prejudice is more visceral than cerebral.

So when you speak of racial prejudice, you must add the element of fear as a cause of harmful racist behaviors. Moreover, fear is a manifestation of ignorance. Fear grows to have a powerful life and influence of its own. This is particularly true when you must choose to be moral in the most problematic circumstances. The recognition of white racial prejudice is usually misunderstood in the minds of most people. Prejudice in itself is not racism; we all have prejudices and false beliefs about other groups of people. However, if a person has prejudice and possesses the power to discriminate against, harass, exploit, marginalize, or commit a socially sanction act of violence against a group of racially labelled people, then that person is perpetrating an act of racism.

Consequently, white racism is usually viewed in terms of its harmful effect without regard to understanding its nature. This is a categorical error. If you went to a doctor with a pain, and the doctor just gave you aspirin but failed to discover the cause of the pain, we would say that doctor was incompetent or negligent. The problem is not the pain, which is just a symptom; it is the cause of the pain.

So in the same way, the essence of white racism is in the cause of racist behavior that is harmful, not in the harm itself. From this perspective, the origin of harmful racist behavior that we consider to be immoral or wrong, is found in fear and ignorance.

No matter if the harmful effect is slight or great, the presence of fear and ignorance as the origin of harmful racist behavior is what constitutes a profound immorality. Only the originating fear and ignorance of racist behavior can offer an explanation of the resulting immorality. So this immorality of racist behavior is proportional to the relative magnitude of its harmful effect. This perspective maintains that racist behavior is immoral because its accoucheur is fear and ignorance, not because of the relative measure of its harm. This begs the question of behaviors that are grounded in fear and ignorance yet happen to have a good effect that is not harmful. Measuring immortality by its results is a categorical fallacy since behavior that is grounded in fear and ignorance always has the character of immortality regardless of its results.

Question:

Who is better off? Is it the lucky person, where ignorance does good? Or is it the person who knows what is good and does good with full intention?

The latter. The only real good is associated with knowledge. Physical harm in itself is not immoral nor truly harmful; only the wrongdoing caused by ignorance (and fear) is immoral to the extent that it brings the harm of wrongdoing upon the ignorant (and fearful) wrongdoer and always contradicts or prevents activated knowledge. No good man does evil. The only harm is harm to character. Even when fear and ignorance happens to result in a non-harmful behavior, fear and ignorance represent a character liability that must be overcome with knowledge and courage. Behaviors that have their origin in fear and ignorance are not good, just because they happen to not cause harm.

The nature of white racism does not rest in the mythic explanations of its wrongdoing. It cannot be assessed on the measure of the harmfulness of racist behavior. The essence or nature of white racism is found in the origin of racist behavior. That origin is misguided self-preservation and self-interest instinct mired in ignorance and fear. Even when racists lack courage or knowledge, they are still being guided by their simple self-preservation and self-interest instinct to benefit themselves. No matter how brutal and terrifying their capacity to destroy, exploit, or deprive the other, they are trying to find some goodness for themselves. In all of their moral choosing, there is the constant expression of this natural instinct to benefit them. In this perspective, fear and ignorance make up the nature of white racism.

Questions:

What is the face of white racism? Is it the face of a monster? Is it the face of the devil?

No, the face of white racism is the face of a lost and frightened child. It is the face of an infantile adult under stress. The situation is best explained metaphorically by the monkey trap metaphor.

Monkey hunters use a box with an opening at the top, big enough for the monkey to slide its hand in. Inside the box are bananas. The monkey grabs the banana and tries to get its hand out, but the opening is only big enough for the hand to slide in but too small for his fist to come out with the banana. Now the monkey has a choice, either to let go of the banana and be free forever or hang on to the banana and get caught.

Guess what it does every time? You guessed it. He hangs on to the banana and gets caught. Because of his greed, he won’t allow himself to let go of the banana and take out his hand. The monkey remains trapped, a victim of his own greed, until he is captured, forever a captive of his greed. The monkey cannot see that freedom without the banana is more valuable than being captured with it.

The American Monkey Trap

Most Americans both, black and white, are caught in psychological monkey traps of their own making, victims of their ignorance and fears! Trapped by their self-serving beliefs and ideologies, they are caught in a monkey trap of organized hatred, group madness, an illusionary self, and quests for enemies and the invention of adversaries.

Monkeys are trapped not by anything physical but by their own rigid base instincts to grab food wherever they find it. People hold to their compensatory ideologies so tenaciously as monkeys hold to the food in the bottle. And so only the food has changed with time; the inner monkey is still the same. Don’t be trapped like a monkey. You can let go of the ignorant ego banana. It’s a trap!

The monkey trap, i.e. the neo-dark ages racial prision, is the belief that human beings can be racially classified like insects, and that whole groups (millions or tens of millions) of people can be confidently labelled and stereotyped as good or bad. But more importantly, identifying one’s self with a single nation or political entity, placing it beyond any sense of morality of good and evil and recognizing no moral duty than that of advancing its interests, creating and maintaining a subhuman class of nonwhites to secure the privileges and advantages of white people while subordinating nonwhites, to achieve this purpose, there is a need to perpetuate ignorance and to misinterpret this world reality and have it validated by some white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular. White ignorance, accordingly, works to protect white interests.

Racism has always been, and continues to be, connected to the social-conceptual-framework that allows whites to subjectively interpret their social world-orientation toward a certain political authority scheme and cultural single-mindedness; a framework for the glorification of white history and culture, which is never critically questioned. As a social and immoral ideology, racism establishes a racist pattern of speech, though, and emotional reactions whose essence lies in a sclerotic and insular political sociocultural system. Moreover, racism sustains white priviledge and immoral sensibilities that make them egocentric narcissists without regard for the feelings or desires of others, ignorant or uninterested in cultures, ideas, or people outside their own culture or ethnic group.

Questions:

Why are white people so racist? Why do they persistently do wrong racist things while believing they are doing the right thing?

The questions ask what the cause might be. They are vague in their meaning yet clear in their intent since the concentration or investment of white mental energy and emotional anger and angst on black people is clear; but what is not clear is the proclivity toward such antimodernist sociocultural attitudes and practices as irrational reasoning and behavior, racial/gender inequality, and social injustice. However, to find the answer, you must go back to the second half of the nineteenth century when racism increasingly became ideological, doctrinal, and merged with nationalism and imperialism.

Specifically, there was talk about manifest destiny and the white man’s burden. Although there was no teleological or biological basis for racial differentiation or justification for assuming that one race was superior to another, whites assumed that special capablities and aptitudes were inherent in their phylogeny, which was extended to justify actions that create inequality and injustice. They were at the apex, the civilized champions of social progress while people of color were savages and would fare better under their direction. This overly positive and arrogant dogma advanced partially because of the impact of Social Darwinism and also because of some emotional reactions to the threat of white genetic annihilation, which capitalized on the idea of white identity and the myths and ideologies of racial hierarchy/racial stratification, which were intrinsically tied to the development and expansion of the system of black chattel slavery.

The legacy of those ideas lived on and continues to live on long after slavery in the Americas had ended. In the first half of the nineteenth century, America was full of racists who maintained the ideas of a white race and who firmly believed in the inherent superiority of the white race over nonwhites, i.e. that whites were more fit in the struggle for survival. If you conflate racial identity with not only legal status but social status, then black identity was attached to enslavement, slavery-related stigma, opprobrium, and defamation whereas white identity was attached to free and civilized men. Black and white became polar constructs, which is important to remember when understanding the social construction of American society.

In fact, all forms of racism (representational sterotypes; ideological white superiority dogma; discursive racial slurs and hate speech; interactional verbal and physical assault, discrimination, and profiling; institutional policies and laws; and structural/systemic combinations of all the other forms) are compatible with the ideas of a white race and the myths and ideologies of racial hierarchy/racial stratification. In addition, as a kind of para-ideology, racism has proven to be adaptable to all principal modern ideologies, namely nationalism, imperalism, and conservatism, which makes racism a vague phenomenon of modern politics and culture.

However, at the same time, it would be an unforgivable mistake to detach racism from the political environment and the concrete machinery of the government in which it operates.

Racial stereotypes have to do with the discovery of revelations about self that are unfamiliar and threatening and have to do with fear and hatred (in most cases, it is self-hatred). They appear as a kind of defensive mechanism, a world perspective which is caused by a moral myopia, a distortion of moral judgment against the shocking discovery of so many hitherto unknown revelations about self. Stereotyping is likely to originate in your myopic moral imagination as some sort of safe and comforting weltstanschauung categorization of the world. In fact, a great deal of our mental universe—our image of the world and of other people and our reactions to them, our ideas and emotions experienced—is made up of or caused by stereotypes.

Moreover, stereotypes do not exist independently of our subjective experience which, once established in your mind, are almost impossible to modify in the light of contradictory experience. Stereotypes are indispensable to your mental well-being because they make you feel safer with them than without them, and discarding them would impose a permanent state of mental uncertainty and disarray. Such is life for whites in the American monkey trap.

Furthermore, Americans have the stupefying ability to hold two contradictory beliefs or irreconcilable attitudes with regard to killing and violence, which are generally deprecated. However, violence ceases to be violence, and so does the mass killing of innocent people if it occurs to the other or an adversary. This is not normal stereotyping, which allows one to call others inferior or feeble-minded and their adversaries single-minded homicidal fanatics, while characterizing themselves as patriots and heroes and those who are, on their side, righteous