by first-time Winter Oak contributor Harvey Kropotkin

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg

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Self-respect is to plant the seeds of revolution.

Are you being treated by others as you wish to be treated?

I think the answer for most of us radicals is an emphatic “fuck no!” Every single encounter I’ve had with an authority figure has had two scripts: A) they are assholes attempting to swing their power around, and B) I respected them and their wisdom so I listened. Very, very few fall into camp B.

Every encounter I have ever had with a police officer has been camp A in my psyche, even if outwardly I chose survival over self-respect. In middle school I remember vividly once having to go into the principal’s office as a kid for drawing on my pants. Why did I draw on my pants? I don’t remember. When you’re 13 you make choices that don’t really make sense to an adult brain. But in hindsight, it did kind of make sense: school was boring, vapid, and the other kids were mostly stupid drones trying to look like the cast of WhiteBoyz. Not exactly a welcoming place for a young rebel. At least I wasn’t harassed when I read books, although that day seems to be coming in the US as we censor everything.

Not sure if this kind of thing has gotten better or worse since this movie came out in 1999. That Post-Malone guy seems to have done okay, even though he looks like he’s about 60.

In this moment, at age 13, when the former football star-turned-administrator (you can always tell these blowhards—big puffy chest, big red alcoholic face, clearly drinks too much, clearly hates his wife and his kids, clearly peaked in college, annoying as shit, probably slept with somebody at central office). This dude on a power trip lectures me, a 13 year old, about how the school’s policy doesn’t permit drawing on pants.

It is quite hilarious in hindsight, because even though I don’t remember if I internalized this arbitrary and stupid rule and successfully never pants-drew again, I do remember how I felt. I felt completely disrespected as a person. I didn’t understand terms like “subjectivity” or “domination” but I felt like I was going to just have to eat shit from this fat, bloated, disgusting, alcoholic, POS, toxic masculinity epitome administrator. So I stopped drawing on my pants, but I learned the lesson: do not have self-respect, if it breaks the rules of the status quo. Yes sir, sergeant, sir. You can understand how brown people in the US consistently have similar experiences and how it might grind down one’s psyche.

Does pants-drawing policy matter? There are many canvases for drawing that are not against school policy or, for us adults, work rules and regulations, or the law. What matters is that acts of domination like this intentionally erode our self-respect and self-determination to create compliant, docile citizens that (these days) will keep interacting with our phones in order to make someone else rich. I guess I learned an important lesson that day.

The imposition of rules and values to which you did not consent (pants-drawing or you know, important things like bodily autonomy/body fascism, paying taxes to subsidize the criminal White House or the criminal Zionist fuckers that love killing Palestinian children, the fact that the military contractors get to keep making bombs when our human brothers and sisters are literally starving) is disrespect from the system to the self. So let’s take a look at self-respect, and regardless of our pants canvas, let’s figure out what has been stolen from us and how we might be able to take it back.

What is self-respect? Self-respect generally means loving yourself and staying true to your values. This means your behavior is generally consistent with your values, and socially, you belong to groups voluntarily that align with your values. If you are a radical, you probably already hear alarm bells ringing in your head, or perhaps even nuclear war sirens, because this is near-impossible in our current world where exploitation, environmental destruction, and self-abandonment of values is caked into our every interaction. As Aus-Rotten reminds us in their legendary long-form song “And Now Back to Our Programming” (1998):

The self-righteousness of judgement is something that no human being has the luxury to pass. Every single one of us survives at the expense of other living things. Although our very existence contradicts our effects, our struggle is still relevant in relieving the burdens that we create, but our involvement is based on individual beliefs and ambitions. Hope needs to be nurtured, compassion and understanding will not grow out of scrutiny. Encouragement and tolerance are the only way that activism will evolve from indifference

The benefits of self-respect, according to the therapeutic hyper-capitalist “coaching” pages (coaching = psychological hacking for bourgeois people to extract more value from the rest of us, while also I would assume not killing themselves from overwork). I do agree with some of these AI scraped pages. Benefits of self-respect for our purposes here:

• You feel connected and positive about your relationships. This is the opposite of social media / social comparison. This is what’s missing for the youth. They are having less sex. They are more “connected” at least in theory/screen time, but it’s flimsy and fleeting. Why have a big breakup and write a love song about it when you can ghost each other and then gossip and be miserable and never have a catharsis? Then you can buy a bunch of fast fashion or subscribe to some “hot” girl’s OnlyFans for your fake pornography lack-of-connection that will leave you empty and hollow, like a Greek tragedy with no payoff. When you have self-respect, you feel connected and positive and authentic (for real, not the stupid neoliberal buzzword). This is the opposite of our collective experience with technology now that choices are foisted upon us, regardless of our consent or if they align with our true values.

• You can more clearly assess your relationships with others for depth and meaning… who inspires you? Who drains you? Why? How do these relationships of exchange “feel” in your gut? Do you get the Sunday scaries so bad that you think about just dropping out of life with bong in hand and following the smoke towards the riff-filled land? That is a gut feeling that can tell you something important about existence. That is intuition telling you something is missing and you are not living in accordance with your values. It’s a signal that you need to change something and take action.
• Your intuition and instincts, once you access your body (this is tough for us early spiritual sleepwalkers who are still waking up), will provide emotional information and context for you to make decisions to live your life more in accordance with your values.
• This is all of course for us radicals within the context of the structures of domination and unfreedom that dangle the carrot of self-optimization—more insights from Byung-Chul Han to come in the future. Speaking of which, let’s get to the main point here:

Self-respect is radical in the psychopolitics of contemporary life. The entire concept of consumer culture is predicated on establishing, maintaining, and amplifying insecurity and self-hatred. Consumer culture, now essentially totalized through the constant surveillance of smartphones, the Internet-of-Things, and now through AI chatbots that will inevitably sell you Sprite or porn or blue ED pills or whatever is most annoying that day, must erode or, preferably for shareholder value, destroy your self-respect in order to impel and induce you to obey and consume. We are all Roddy Piper in They Live, through the gaze of the truth glasses:

This is what I think about every solitary time I am in a line at a big box store. Life under the fluorescent lights is like being in some horror film on Shudder. “Stay asleep” indeed.

Examples of self-induced self-hatred, essentially, what in our habitus attacks self-respect in this current neoliberal hellscape:

• Patriarchy: women and men both bring each other down by missing the point and weaponizing feminism, which once was and could again (in the more mainstream sense, obviously there are plenty of real anarchist feminists out there) be congruent with anarchism as a lifestyle and life organizational choice. “Feminists” that are not truly radical will weaponize the co-opted language of inclusivity to dominate others, regardless of their gender, sexuality, or the relationship between the two.
  • We see this in “left” circles where toxic women —cmuch like my toxic man administrator above, except these toxic women have puffy red faces from wine, I guessc— utilize threadbare, now-capitalized feminist “discourse” that was once radical thought, in order to dominate and control others.
  • This dynamic was critiqued in the ‘80s and ‘90s when black feminism was a bit more radical than it is today, as the critical elements that black feminists rightly critiqued “white feminism” of the 1970s for failing to understand – intersectionality and the depth of economic and social oppression through things such as cultural capital, the colonization and commodification of black bodies, etc. And that women’s entry into the labor force created new problems and social reconfigurations that affected women of color disproportionately.
  • Much of these movements and thoughts have been co-opted to sell bad HBO shows, sometimes funny mugs from Reductress (they are kind of funny, not gonna lie), and worst of all as a represntation of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, those stupid fucking rainbow products. More Stonewall and fighting cops, less consumer culture, please and thank you. So, plenty of self-hatred there, and disrespect, and of course, selling out of values for rainbow capitalism (rainbowwashing? is that a term like greenwashing?)

• Insecure radicals with holier-than-thou attitudes or principles that ignore the lived experience and feelings of other people in order to get on top of the activist power structure. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes in certain activist spaces ends up meeting this guy (sometimes it is a woman, or gender non-confirming person) and wondering why the hell anyone puts up with them. The reasons typically are based on this erosion of self-respect by the other activists, who are probably activists in the first place because they experienced pain and trauma and want to help alleviate that from others.
  • Disrespect here becomes the way for domination to seep itself into what was supposed to be a radical, voluntary, prefigurative political situation. The abandonment of that cheapens the psychological experience for others in the group who judge and control (just like my puffy principal, but with more hippie/punk/bohemian vibes) rather than meet others where they are, for all their faults and zits and body odor and folds, with empathy and compassion. This is a more sinister but relatively common form of the negation of self-respect in activist spaces.
• Body fascism to increase the insecurity of the population. More insecurity leads to more $ for more products, more creams, more lotions, more anti-aging, more more more más más más mata mata mata! More jeans, more shirts, more products, even though you swore you were going to live in a more eco-friendly fashion, you can’t, because you have not respected yourself and you have responded to the inducements and (very, very effective) psychological propaganda Meta or the Chinese one or the other companies are throwing at you, after a tough work day and a tough breakup. You deserve it!

Advertising in general. Don’t need to explain this one. Even your MAGA Boomer family members who were once kind of New Left, now are very Fox News, and eventually will be dead, recognize the ubiquitous power of advertising to chip away at one’s values in order to induce consumer behavior.

So, lots of things working against us. Still, it seems crazy that as people resisting unfreedom, trying to unblock the freedom blockages, we sit here, attempting to hide our true nature. Why be a chameleon? Why not respect your own values and beliefs? What is the freedom blockage here that prevents us from respecting ourselves in our actions and behaviors? We shall continue this discussion in Part 2.