Distress Recordings and Oppression
Oppression and exploitation take many forms in our society. A powerful, technically advanced nation oppresses and exploits weaker nations. One economic class oppresses and exploits another. An ethnic majority oppresses and exploits the ethnic minorities. Men oppress and exploit women. Adults oppress and sometimes exploit children.
These conditioned social processes impose many hurts upon the victims of oppression. Deep distress recordings are installed and repeatedly restimulated and reinforced in the oppressed people—recordings that tend in the direction of submission, self-invalidation, hopelessness, or, occasionally, resentment and ineffective resistance. The oppressors, too, are hurt by acting so contrary to their human natures and become full of recorded guilt and shame and fear of those whom they oppress.
In fact, the persistence of oppression is dependent on the installation and continual reinforcement of these distress recordings. Economic and power considerations are obvious motivations for exploitation, but we have had enough clear glimpses of what humans are really like to know that no human could continue to play the role of oppressor or exploiter unless distress recordings were making her/him numb and unaware.
From page 85 of “Human Liberation,” in The Human Situation