Cultivation and repression both rest on inherited class violence.

Evidence

This behavior, this way of understanding the world and people (which necessarily makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime) is explained by their experience as a dominant class. Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it—oppressors and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in this situation, and both bear the marks of oppression. Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence—initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness—possessive of the world and of men and women. Apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world and of people, the oppressor consciousness could not understand itself—could not even exist. Fromm said of this consciousness that, without such possession, “it would lose contact with the world.” The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140 (#expands, via linked claim)

Oppression, he notices, doesn’t make people saintly, it makes them potential killers; all victims are dangerous. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737 (#expands, via linked claim)

John Keane suggests that the eighteenth-century assumption at work here, that violence is antithetical to civil(ized) society (because normatively reflective of (leftover) antique barbarisms), remains the silent assumption marking almost all theories of civil society. Violence, Keane insists, chronically persists within all extant civil societies. This is surely right, though he fails to comprehend what so many other commentators deny, not that violence persists, which is still to assume that civilization is the purging from society of violence, if only we could get it right. Rather, the more difficult recognition is that modern societies aren’t just marked by violence but constitutively founded upon and committed to incorporating and (not quite) covering over the various expressions of violence, civil and state(d). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Past class violence persists as an objective situation inherited by later generations. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 560; Oppression begins in an act of violence and shapes both oppressors and oppressed alike — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140; Negative sanctions and repression typically precede and provoke collective political violence — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4357 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Oppression begins in an act of violence and shapes both oppressors and oppressed alike #expands (0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 140
• Oppression does not confer virtue but breeds potential violence in victims #expands (0.85) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737
• Cultural homogeneity is purchased through severe repression and invites its own resistance #exemplifies (0.80)
• Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236
• Negative sanctions and repression typically precede and provoke collective political violence #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4357
• Caste hierarchy is maintained by ubiquitous violence rather than consent. #qualifies (0.75) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 302
• An underprivileged mob can create a lower class through sheer violence #exemplifies (0.75)