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RE: The Agony of Power – By Jean Baudrillard – A book review
Are you saying that the dominated has to fight the dominator but the hegemonated has to fight the hegemony?
Halfway through your article I was thinking of how black celebrities are more likely to thank a super-being for their successes than white people, perhaps because during their ancestors' slavery, a super-being was the only hope they had in an unliveable situation. Is it true that they have perhaps internalised the dominance of organised religion and it has become hegemony by way of meme? I'm trying to find a foothold on this theory and terminology.
Thanks for interesting questions, @lenskonig. Good to see you back in the Steem room.
I'm trying to present Baudrillard's view more than my own, but as to your question about who the hegemonated (!) have to fight. I think it might be more about who they have to stop fighting: Themselves in shadow aspect.
Dialogue is the opposite of violence. (I have a feeling Marshall McLuhan said that).
My personal feeling is that we've reached such a deep level of simulacra (and simulation) that the way back to peace, globally, requires the kind of extreme intervention presented metaphorically in The Matrix movie. In other words, for us each to take some kind of pill, agree to wake up in the truth of our situation (being plugged into a mechanistic system of hegemony), face this truth, and find our way back to something real.
Of course, to many people this will sound like an absurd exaggeration of our situation here on planet earth. But many prisons do not have walls. They are inside us. And to escape one, and look back in, it is often a surprise to see what was unseen while trapped in our cell: To see the cell walls.
As for deference to superbeings. I'm not sure that's a problem per se, because there can be such variance in the way in which this is done. At the brighter end of the spectrum, a person could invent a personal god, acknowledge that god was an aspect of them, and gently project this symbolic figure out as a hopeful beacon of their own true, inner nature.
On the other hand, a lot of organised religion is a trauma-containment mechanism and requires deference to external superbeings who are judgemental and angry. Obviously, almost everyone now knows that this position is pure projection of the negative aspects of a person's parents onto a symbol, to avoid facing the painful memory of some childhoods. http://www.gregmogenson.com/GOD%20intro.pdf