Peaceful Revolution: How We can Create the Future Needed for Humanity's Survival by Paul K. Chappell

Author:Paul K. Chappell [Chappell, Paul K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935212751
Publisher: Easton Studio Press, LLC
Published: 2012-02-27T23:00:00+00:00

Conditioned Inequality

As I explained in the last section, our large brains give us a heightened capacity to recognize differences in fairness. If you and I are living in a tribe and I am hoarding food while everyone else is hungry, this creates a kind of tension I refer to as resentment. When people are mistreated, resentment is the discontent that results. A person filled with resentment yearns for fairness.

In a small community, it is natural for people to resent someone who hoards food at the expense of everyone else. But what happens when fairness is not restored and resentment increases? The buildup of resentment is similar to pressure building up in a pipe. If resentment continues to increase and the pressure is not relieved through peaceful means the pipe can explode. Sometimes an explosion of resentment results in a bully’s skull getting crushed with a rock; sometimes it leads to violent revolt.

One of the biggest explosions of resentment in history occurred during the first century BC, when Spartacus led a slave revolt against Rome. A slave and a gladiator, Spartacus helped plot an escape from the gladiator school where he was imprisoned. During the escape he and around seventy others fought for freedom using kitchen utensils as weapons. Within a few years after the successful prison break, Spartacus gathered enough slaves and people oppressed by the Romans to form an army of nearly 100,000 soldiers. His rebellion, known as the Third Servile War, ended when he was killed and his army was destroyed in a climactic battle with the Romans.

A similar explosion of resentment almost occurred in the United States during the twentieth century. By the 1950s African Americans had been oppressed by white society for over three hundred years, and resentment had been building for centuries. Martin Luther King Jr. helped prevent the race war that nearly exploded as tensions mounted during the civil rights era. Imprisoned in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail for conducting a peaceful protest in 1963, he wrote: “If this [peaceful] philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood

. . . If [African Americans’] repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.”13

Although some African Americans rebelled against slavery, why did so many agree to be oppressed for so long? Why did it take over three hundred years to spark a massive revolt, in this case a peaceful one? The first method I will discuss that causes people to accept being oppressed is something I call conditioned inequality. This involves the use of brainwashing, intimidation tactics, and violence to condition people to believe they are unequal, less than human, and not worthy of fair treatment.

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