Episode 18 They lied to us

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider probably felt when I ripped through his carefully crafted web-home in the corner of the living room. On the other hand, we might feel a moment of poignant, freeing clarity, like an 8-year-old who learns that her classmates are lying when they tell her she’s ugly.

What  convinces us to participate in oppressive social structures, especially social structures in which we’re the ones who are oppressed? Karl Marx put it down to ‘false consciousness’: in a capitalist system, the working classes will continue to be ruled by the dominant classes as long as they cling to false ideas about how the system isn’t so bad, after all. For Marx, changing the world requires that people (a) recognise the ways in which these false ideas present an upside-down view of the world and (b) to take action through unification and revolution.

In this episode I speak about the value of prioritising imagination over immediate action when it comes to social change. Doing the research for the book I’m writing now has shown me that when people describe their troubled social worlds, their accounts reveal hints about alternative structures – desires for new, transformative social structures. Doing this work has brought to my attention the need to study these hints carefully, to engage in the work of re-imagining social structure, and to allow action to be led by these new visions of better social worlds.