Paternalism governs long-term inequalities through social rewards rather than force

Evidence

In long-term expropriative relations structured with frequent one-onone contact across group lines (as in contemporary gender relations, and in race relations in America in the antebellum South and Jim Crow South), social distance mechanisms prevail and dominant group members exploit their close access to subordinates’ daily lives to establish a paternalistic regime ( Jackman, 1994). Dominants define the needs and interests of subordinates in relation to their position in the status hierarchy and division of labor, and then claim to supply those needs. Subordinates are praised and rewarded for manifesting the attributes that have been categorically assigned to them, and punished for lapsing into behaviors deemed inappropriate. The rewards and punishments are primarily social: compliant subordinates are rewarded with social inclusion, admiration, friendship, affection, or even love, while subordinates who flaunt the rules face social exclusion, ridicule, humiliation, or stigmatization. Human self-interest, sociability, and rationality ensure that most subordinates comply readily with expectations. The costs of noncompliance are bitter, while compliance offers individuals their best prospects for social success. Under these crushing constraints, the vast majority of subordinates take it upon themselves to meet or exceed the demands made by dominants, even competing with each other to excel in their designated duties and attributes. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 671

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The genuinely counterintuitive core here — that subordinates rationally self-police and even compete to excel within their own subordination, and that love/affection are the disciplinary tools — reframes how we understand consent and complicity in stratified systems.
• SEED: Angle: “The carrot of love as a mechanism of subordination” — how affection, inclusion, and admiration function as the most effective tools for sustaining hierarchy, more binding than any coercion.
• FICTION: A character who genuinely believes they are beloved and special within a subordinated role, unaware that the affection is the mechanism of their containment.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ piece: both describe how love and voluntary compliance are the glue of stratified systems, and here specifically how the dominant ‘supply the needs’ they themselves defined.
• XREF: connects to: Social software can promote inequality rather than counter it. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 19; Neoliberal selfhood reframes reward and punishment as risk outcomes, not justice — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 273; Welfare functions as social control by giving workers something to lose — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1661 (+2 more)