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Frank
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The supposed superiority of the oppressed is now so deeply entrenched, at least in the minds of many Western intellectuals, that it has become hereditary, like a moral peerage. If one’s parents, grandparents or great-grandparents suffered oppression, then one also suffered it and is thereby granted an extension of their moral superiority.
Where oppression becomes a badge of moral superiority, it is only natural, or human nature, that those who believe themselves to be morally superior—probably 90 per cent of the human race—should come to think of themselves as oppressed. After all, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, and oppression is in the eye of the victim of it. You are oppressed if you think you are.
Swift:
So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:
Thus ev’ry Poet, in his Kind
Is bit by him that comes behind.
Bureaucrats, alas, are the poets of our age.
While racism remains top of the bureaucratic pops, as it were, there are other useful accusations in the search for the control of underlings, such as bullying and misogyny. These, too, can be crimes of perception, and hence are a sword of Damocles held over everyone, up to and including the person at the very top of the hierarchy, if there is a mechanism for removing him or her.
What supposedly starts out as a means of protecting people from oppression, therefore, becomes itself an instrument of oppression, but of an insidious type. At least with real oppression, its source is evident, and therefore in principle ought to be remediable; by contrast, everyone who falls under the dispensation of enforced and universal benevolence has permanently to watch his p’s and q’s. The first victim of this regime is honesty: no one can ever speak his mind, and since habit becomes character, minds come to be lost altogether.
ibid
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