Many people who consider themselves anti-authoritarians seek out oppressed people and try to help them. As always with human behavior, beneath the uniformity of appearance, different spirits are at work seeking different aims.
Person A, humiliated by subjugation, takes issue with the character with the subjugation. Perhaps it is exploitative, or cruel, or destructive, or otherwise immoral. Person A gives to charity, does volunteer work, perhaps makes a career as a social worker, or distorts some other profession into a form of social work. (90+% of teachers today have no idea that they are not educators, but social workers specialized in skills training. “But how is that not education?” Exactly. As I said: no idea.) But beneficiaries of all this benevolence will never be helped enough to reciprocate, nor to gain enough power to challenge the benefactors. In fact, what is happening is Person A is subjugating weaker people, but in a nicer (or otherwise morally superior) way. Person A gets to regain lost respect by getting to play the part of the (moral) subjugator for a change. And so it goes down the line, until there are no more layers of socially sanctioned subjugation. So the very bottom layer subjugates through child abuse or crime.
Person B has a very different motive. Person B seeks the subjugated and marginalized in order to find allies against the subjugating power, which has become oppressive, or ugly or boring or otherwise objectionable. Person B wants equals and is willing to invest individual power in collective power.
And Person B hides half a zillion sub-doppelgangers, as well. Is it any wonder that every political union, however unified and dominant it seems, inevitably factionalizes, fragments, decays and finds itself in the place of the marginalized, powerless and must relearn the art of appealing to others to make alliances…
The convection current of history (I will draw this one day):
- The rulers of an order gradually forget how they came to power and being to attribute their power to their own innate natures. They forget the art of dialogue as they perfect the art of dictating to silent and powerless subjects.
- The subjugated, meanwhile, learn how to find unity within diversity through dialogue, and are able to form ever deeper and stronger alliances. They begin to combine individual power into ever deepening common cause.
- The rulers hit their peak of power and begin to decay into squabbling factions, each unable to see the others point, having lost the capacity for dialogue. The rulers lose power without even noticing it.
- The subjugated seize power from the rulers. The subjugated become the rulers and the rulers become the subjugated.
The process repeats.
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To authentically help a person — to equalize power — is to put oneself at the mercy of the other. And people who have been powerless for a long time often have no idea how to use power responsibly. Often the newly empowered person will exercise new power against the benefactor, not out of “evil” but out of sheer disorientated exuberance.