The Owning Class and Ending Classism (draft 10.8.21)
The tiered system of class that is capitalism has the poor and working class creating the wealth, the middle class “managing“ to keep the system functioning and cooperative, and the owning class at the top of the tier taking and hoarding the bulk of the wealth.
To train and condition human beings to collude with, and agree to, such a deeply wrongful system takes a multitude of divisions and hurts and much misinformation.
These conditions comprise a system of oppression.
For the owning class to take and hoard the wealth of society, they have to have a driving motive of greed for profit and a disregard for any cost to individuals, to other cultures, to any other class, to any other species, and to the world of nature.
The owning class receive highly particular hurts and misinformation from birth in order that they will fulfill the role assigned to them.
Government, the military, corporations, banks, and private ownership control the flow of wealth within capitalism. All those institutions, in their turn, are led by minds that have been conditioned as owning class.
It is necessary to understand how young minds can be deliberately manipulated in order to adopt these leadership roles, and how a person can no longer know that they are good.
Whether at home or in institutions, an owning-class child experiences a deliberate denial of physical closeness and a refusal to allow the expression of painful emotion. Disconnection is absolute.A child is told not to show grief, fear, loss, insecurity, or any real emotional need. If they comply, they are praised and rewarded for being stoical and for pretending that everything is all right. We learn early not to ask, not to tell, and to put up with having no safe adult to turn to (except, perhaps, a paid working-class servant or nanny.)
An expensive education sees to it that an owning-class child is actually left ignorant of the conditions and lives of other people and of the reality of society and the world. This ignorance is a necessary part of the disconnection.
In family and in school, it would seem that every human value is taken away and replaced by a false one.
Closeness, love, integrity, honesty, principle, generosity, sensitivity, fairness, compassion, respect, truth, equality, kindness, loyalty, honour, and responsibility can be said to be instinctive human values found from birth in every human being.
If the person is to exercise the owning-class role, these human values must be diminished or distorted, and replaced by the alternative values attributed to status, control, domination, isolation, self-reliance, exclusion, appearance, ownership, and position. Doubt must even be sown about the nature of intelligence.
Greed and misrepresention of the truth (lies) become acceptable, alongside reserve, denial, pretence, affectation. and treachery. Also inculcated is a sense of superiority, entitlement, and self-satisfaction or complacency.
This conditioning leads to a confusion: that what you own, or how you look, or whom you know, is far more important than who you really are.
A pamphlet, The Owning Class, supplies the details of how this conditioning takes place and how to use the discharge process to recover from it.
At some point, a child’s mind has been so thoroughly confused that they no longer have any judgement about their own value, and so none at all about the value of others.
This confusion becomes the seedbed for the acceptance of all the oppressive messages about people of a different colour, sex, creed, class, size, or ability.
The owning-class person thus no longer sees any problem with any other person’s being used or exploited or mistreated for gain.
The owning class thus becomes the ultimate oppressor in a capitalist society.
Re-evaluation Counselling enables movement out of this role by recovery from those early hurts, reclamation of intelligence, and directions against all those distress patterns.
The keys are accurate information and the discharge process.
The following are the contradictions to those patterns that are necessary if we are to equip the owning class to play a role that has never before been deployed on the side of the working class. These directions are for the person who has inherited owning-class patterns (even if they have no actual wealth or “position” in their lives at present), and who wants to transform society into one of equality and justice.
- To reclaim and understand that they are essentially completely good and always have been.
- To reach for, and become close to, other owning-class people, that is, “their own people.”
- If there is inherited personal wealth, to divest from it, knowing that it has been earned by others.
- To be prepared to take responsibility, without guilt, and admit the truth of what an owning class has done throughout centuries of exploitation and oppression.
- To acknowledge that in our present society, the dishonest, manipulative patterns of the greed of the owning class are functioning as always and need to be exposed and rendered powerless. (It has to be recognised that in the present day, with the exposure of capitalism by the pandemic and the climate emergency, these patterns are being fiercely deployed in order to defend the threatened position of the owning class.)
- Openly to become an ally to every oppressed group and assist them to unite with all other groups to transform society and take the power and control of resources out of the hands of the owning class.
FURTHER READING
In addition to the above-mentioned pamphlet (The Owning Class), the journal Coming Home has detailed accounts of the installation and maintenance of the hurts and patterns of the owning class and of how divisions from other people are contrived. It contains details of the recovery process.