The paradoxes of institutionalized humiliation
Created | Updated Jun 13, 2004
The paradoxes of institutionalized humiliation
1. If we do it, it's okay. If someone else does it, it gives us another
excuse to do it.
2. Torture broadens one's horizons and makes one more aware of
how much more comfortable one was before one was made aware of
how much more comfortable one was before.
3. If someone is doing something horrible to you for your "own
good", then why don't they do it to themselves so that they will
feel much better about themselves without you being involved at
all.
4. Military organizations who humiliate their own people and then
get upset when they go and do likewise are just jealous that they
didn't get to play.
5. Political organizations who humiliate their own constituents
and then get upset when another organization tries to do the
same thing to them are just jealous that they didn't think of it
first.
6. Sexual harassment begins with each sex humiliating itself
when they were too young to realize that the elders they are
emulating should have been immolated instead.
7. The fashion industry makes it's living out of "lotus foot"ing
it's customers.
8. Popular music fashions systematically desensitize their
adherents so that the next "big" thing will slide in that
much more easily without lubricant.
9. The Bookselling business wants you to follow the lists so
that they can reliably predict which warehouses will be freed
up for next year's crop.
10. The movie industry has figured out that most of you lot
will be going to the cinema to watch something, anything,
regardless of quality. So they put as much something and anything
up on the screen as the market can bear. Every time you pay to
watch something you think you are gonna like, it helps finance
the film that you wouldn't watch with a ten foot welshman.
11. Automobile registration and licenses, as well as waiting in
labyrinthan queues to renew them, are a long-term scientific
experiment in animal behavior that is being performed on humans
because they can't teach mice to drive or to sit behind counters
all day waiting on each other to come up with the next lame excuse
for why they are a month behind.