A culture of domination depends on addiction to lying and denial

Evidence

These days, I am compelled to consider what forces keep us from moving forward, from having that revolution of values that would enable us to live differently. King taught us to understand that if “we are to have peace one Earth ” that “our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.” Long before the word “multiculturalism ” became fashionable, he encouraged us to “develop a world perspective.” Yet, what we are witnessing today in our everyday life is not an eagerness on the part of neighbors and strangers to develop a world perspective but a return to narrow nationalism, isolationisms, and xenophobia. These shifts are usually explained in New Right and neoconservative terms as attempts to bring order to the chaos, to return to an (idealized) past. The notion of family evoked in these discussions is one in which sexist roles are up held as stabilizing traditions. Nor surprisingly, this vision of family life is coupled with a notion of security that suggests we are always most safe with people of our same group, race, class, religion, and so on. No matter how many statistics on domestic violence, homicide, rape, and child abuse indicate that, in fact, the idealized patriarchal family is not a “safe” space, that those of us who experience any form of assault are more likely to be victimized by those who are like us rather than by some mysterious strange outsiders, these conservative myths persist. It is apparent that one of the primary reasons we have not experienced a revolution of values is that a culture of domination necessarily promotes addiction to lying and denial. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 69

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the conservative ‘safe family/own group’ myth persists against hard data because domination itself requires denial is a genuinely dense causal insight with broad application beyond race.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School claim that ideology persists because it serves power, and Adorno’s analysis of how reified ideology resists empirical refutation. — connects to: Contemporary political crises stem from denial of systemic truths more than ignorance — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 70; Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 845; Exploitive manipulative dishonesty correlates with dominance but not authoritarianism — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1028 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation #contradicts (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 845
• Dependence on the subordinated coexisted with total denial of their humanity. #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1556
• Exploitive manipulative dishonesty correlates with dominance but not authoritarianism #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1028
• Social systems can be structured to institutionalize self-deception among officials #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 705
• Administered needs cause individuals to identify with and submit to domination #corroborates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 39
• Dominant powers benefit from engineering their subjects’ inability to trust #corroborates (0.70)