Therapeutic knowledge has become the humiliation of others by privilege

Evidence

Apathy appears at those turning points of bourgeois history (even in ancient times) when the sovereign historical tendency makes the pauci beati aware of their own impotence. Apathy indicates the reversion of individual human spontaneity into the private world which was thereby established as the bourgeois life-form proper. Stoicism (which is the bourgeois philosophy) makes it easier for the privileged, confronted with the suffering of others, to steel themselves to their own threats. It confirms the general by elevating private existence, as a protection from the generality, to the condition of a principle. The bourgeois’ private sphere is upper-class cultural material that has lost its status. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

But familiarity, the idiom would have it, similarly breeds contempt. Contempt in this case, we might ask, for whom? And to what end(s)? For those thrown together with one in some way by circumstance – by the very demands of social constitution, if I am right – and whom one accordingly presumes to know, in character and habit, condition and behavior, prospect and limit. In short, ethnoracially. It is the presumption of knowledge, the fabrication of character for those one knows at best partially, in both senses of the term, which both bears and bares the stigma of race in these instances. The end(s), of course, are varied – exploitation or extermination, use and abuse, assertion and order. In short, violence and property, profit, and power, instrumentally but also for their own sakes. Race feeds, fuels, and funnels violence, property, profit, and power, but can also be their modes of expression, the forms in which they manifest. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 71 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer.; Presumed knowledge of others fabricated by race enables exploitation and violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 71; Stoic apathy lets the privileged steel themselves against others’ suffering — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer. #expands (0.75)
• Stoic apathy lets the privileged steel themselves against others’ suffering #corroborates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83
• Presumed knowledge of others fabricated by race enables exploitation and violence #complicates (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 71