Ethics and Action: Breaking The Cycle

By: Chris Pratt

Following my previous work “Ethics and Action: The Path to Inclusive Liberation”, we generated two key questions that largely have been met with confusion and “I don’t know how to answer these.” With every question, formulated, it is a challenge partially in the theoretical, grounded in the historical, attempting to fill in gaps of revolutionary thought and direct action.

This article will be broken into two parts, one for each of the questions ending the previous work. Please, offer your input, view point, and critique in the comments so we can keep this work pushing forward.

“Does a free world include everyone?”

WHY OF COURSE IT DOES OR ELSE IT WOULDN’T BE A FREE WORLD.” I can already hear the meltdown, the challenge, the intellectual agreement that this is a stupid question. Yes, we can fundamentally agree that a free world does include everyone. Regardless of religious, sexual, ethnic, or cultural identity. Our liberation is everyone’s liberation. So where is the hang up? We can agree that freedom means autonomy, self determination, and liberty to the pursuit of happiness. It’s the AMERICAN IDEAL AFTER ALL.

The issue is, we have an identity that is so insidious, so vile, so sinister that it can sneak its way into the gaps of community, separate them, and weaponize them. It wraps its thorny vines into our soul and corrupts it, trapping us inside and whispers in our ear “you’re not trapped, you a free”. We can now recognize this virulent behavior as White Supremacy Culture. It allows us to cut our leg off in someone else’s trap. It allows us to see everything as a threat to the above pursuit while subjugating and oppressing anyone and everyone around us to claim “work harder for your liberation, I have to work for mine”.

This insidiousness is not a modern thought by any means. It is generationally taught by the oppressor to create oppressors. I believe, from communal internal diving, that our culture is one of self deprecation to the point of complete psychosis. A separation of self from reality, and because it is inter-generational and our lived experience, we do not see the full condition until another culture brings up the condition of the European American.

After that realization something sat with me. How can I be liberation minded if I do not view others in my body as deserving of liberation? And I asked this of fellow activists, mentors, friends, and acquaintances, and the conclusive answer is an extremely unsure “You can’t?” The role of revolution is to overturn an oppressive society, if we act in accordance with the oppressor through mutual violence, we only bring a reformed system into place instead of a complete revolution of the system. How many times must we generate this cycle of reformation for it to turn into a revolution? We definitely do not have an answer to that because our view of liberation coincides with the oppressors views of opposites. Liberation and freedom is the opposite of oppression and exploitation and we do not have a base of understanding what a truly liberated society would look like because we have consistently, only reformed cultures and not revolutionized them. I fear, that as long as we continue to think in opposites, we are locking ourselves out of potential avenues of genuine liberation. Avenues theorized throughout history, but one thing remains consistent. Building collective power.

With that, I will leave this question open until we can formulate an answer.

“How do we include everyone?”

-TwoToneTrouble