Understandably, liberal progressives are feeling a little sore and touchy these days. Our values are being thoroughly trounced in nations across the globe, all while forces very much opposed to our values are, in general, on the ascent.
Adding insult to injury, our signature political move—to root for the underdog, support the victim’s perspective, fight for the marginalized and oppressed—has been cleverly co-opted by our political opponents:
“Americans are victims of lesser nations profiting off of unfair globalist policies, Trump a victim of his relentless enemies; white South Africans are the real underdogs of their society; expressions of white and straight pride are marginalized, sometimes violently; our citizens are being oppressed by the effects and actions of immigrants; our law enforcement officers are being abused by domestic terrorists.”
Don’t you hear our intellectual pride ringing in the bones of these claims?
Truth has ceased to be a universally shared social category for modern humans, owing in part to the overdetermination of concepts. Every concept of significance in our social sphere has had attached to it so many perspectives, each shared by enough of a minority to ground its validity in ‘lived experience,’ that the same concept can mean something different to everyone in the room. How it is possible to effectively communicate under these conditions remains a mystery of language, but we have at least convinced ourselves that we are doing it successfully, most of the time.
Suffering is evidently one of those concepts that we feel might not be completely overdetermined, yet. It feels hard, resistant to fragmentation, and so we ever-resourceful progressives offered the suffering of the oppressed as a justification for our values. “You cannot ignore this pain forever!”
We underestimated the seductive force of these justifications, missing that the concept of suffering is, by definition, overdetermined, owing to its ultimately perspectival quality. The lion hunts the lamb, but who is suffering? The lamb, for the threat of being eaten, or the lion, for the threat of losing its dinner, its pride? The answer, perhaps frustratingly for us progressives, always comes down to the perspective of the one doing the questioning. Suffering is personal, for Steve Biko as it is for Donald Trump.
In the fight for the recognition of pain, the one who can overcome their own suffering gets disqualified.