I can’t stop thinking about anthropologist Michael Taussig’s book Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man about the terror of the rubber trade in Colombia. In it, he describes how colonizers wantonly tortured Putumayo workers, with violence becoming a culture in itself, for its own sake. Like it was a sunk cost they couldn’t escape.
Every violent step they took trapped them in a cycle where stopping would mean they’d have to reckon with what they’d done, and the shame was too great, so they’d dig deeper, go even darker.
I think about this all the time when I think about Ӏsraeӏ. And about ӀCE. I often see people saying that capitalists/colonizers, and their footsoldiers of state violence, have no shame. But I think it’s exactly the opposite.
I think they spend every waking second pushing an ocean of shame down. I think it drives everything they do. We know this about how narcissism—which is entirely a product of early childhood trauma—functions. Dehumanizing others goes against our prosocial human nature. The core of their being, way deep down, knows that harming others is wrong. That leads to shame, which, in the absence of support for healing and contextualizing their trauma (including the trauma accumulated in the body from harming others), eats people from the inside out. Shame is an important human emotion to keep us from harming one another, but it’s an incredibly powerful one that is meant to be used extremely sparingly to align people to the collective good. Shame is like spicy flavour: keep it away from small children, and use it only as part of a complex balance of different flavours, not the whole-ass meal. Love is the vegetables, the carbs, the protein. We’re so deeply malnourished.
Organized Christianity, for all its well-meaning aspects and the good deeds of many of its more humble adherents, turned shame into a whole lifestyle, teaching people that we’re fundamentally broken and bad. “What’s wrong with you?” is thrown around like confetti in our culture. When you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it. Patriarchal power brokers in the early days of co-opting pagan spirituality towards monotheistic control couldn’t deal with the shame of owning slaves and treating women and children as property, so they took the culturally existing pan-Indigenous animist beliefs in everyone as fundamentally beautiful manifestations of spirit (good, helpful) and twisted that into “everyone is fundamentally saveable, but only if you submit to the will of this one angry god, as defined by us, and the power structures that we’re in charge of.”
Maybe fascists have no remorse, or some other word that describes their willingness to confront their own wrongdoing on a surface level. But I think, at their deepest core, they’re so full of shame that it leaks out of them like acid. They loathe themselves more than anyone around them ever could, so much that they’re barely alive. They are disconnected from what love would even feel like, because they don’t think they deserve it. Their bodies learned that in childhood, from parents passing down generational trauma through neglect and abuse, and/or from a patriarchal colonizer culture that cut them off from the aliveness of nature around them, from spirit, from joy, from kinship, from connection, from their own humanity. And most people around them today, including all of us, continue to tell them that they deserve nothing but pain and punishment. There are very few people saying to them “you’re human, you’re doing your best to fit in and survive in a fucked-up society that taught you that violence and domination are how to do that, and you have the capacity to heal, change and be happier.”
This is why I feel like something is deeply missing from our understanding of fascist violence, the larger structures that create and support it, and especially from conversations about what to do about it. How do we move forward if dehumanizing our oppressors in turn is the only move we have space for? If vengeance is all we can think about?
Many of us are exposed, and contribute, to social media discourse wherein the average conversation doesn’t go farther than “those guys are bad people who need to be punished.” I crave more than this type of in-group soothing of ourselves as being the Good Guys. In the offline organizing spaces I participate in, I do get deeper conversations about what we should actually, practically do about all this, and I strongly encourage people to join organizations in your community to be exposed to that kind of genuine worldbuilding. I just want to believe we can do better in online spaces as well, because it’s where so many people get all their information.
Colonizers, especially those attracted to positions of power and violence like certain frosty agents of the state, are acting from deep generational trauma and disconnection from nature and relationality that goes back centuries, and I don’t think we’ll stop the cycle until we reckon with that. (Read my dissertation for a thorough discussion of this issue.)
So, what can we do about this situation?
If you do feel ready to do this deep, difficult, rewarding work of movement-building without shame, here are my suggestions. But first, I want to express my gratitude to you, because it’s really, really hard to push past the anger enough to do this. Most people are not resourced enough for it. I struggle with it all the time!
Step one is to identify which of your identities makes you best suited to talk to other people with that same identity. As much as it sucks, I have to accept that white people are more likely to listen to me than the Black and Indigenous people I have learned from, so I talk to them. It’s a responsibility, but also an opportunity. Men, talk to other men. Straight people, talk to other heteros. Religious people, talk to others in your faith. Non-Indigenous people, talk to other settlers. Most of all, working class people, talk to each other about class issues! (Class is generally the most productive place to focus your efforts in my opinion, because it’s the great uniter, and the reason we were divided against each other by capitalists in the first place. But it has to be grounded in decolonization as well.)
Here are five resources I suggest to start with to build these communication and organizing skills. None are perfect, all are just tools in a toolbox. Pick whichever interests you, leave anything you don’t feel aligned with.
1) Nonviolent communication training: an incredibly resource for learning how to talk to and connect with people using a non-authoritarian approach. (This is where I learned to identify how often people interpret suggestions and requests as demands, a quick way to see how unresolved trauma functions to hamstring our movements.)
2) Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba: practical advice for organizing and activism, and how to make hope something that you build with others.
3) Maybe I’m cheating by calling this one a single resource, but it’s just too good! Interrupting Criminalization has got so much! Use it all, share it all! They are amazing!
4) Shaun does amazing work speaking to and about young white men from a critical but also humanizing perspective. Here’s another of his videos, and more resources I’ve compiled for fostering positive masculinity.
5) This one is a bit of a spicier recommendation, but if you’re ready to go even deeper and see how spirituality is an essential component we need to integrate in order to combat the appeal of fundamentalist cults, then listen to The Emerald podcast. “Oh Justice” is a relevant episode, but listen to any that pique your interest. My favourite is “Snail Juice.”
Be well, keep up the good work, rest and find joy. I love you, we’re all in this together.
I quit academia to educate without gatekeeping. I’ve compiled a ton of free resources here. If you REALLY want to get down and dirty with that decolonial life, join my Patreοn to get access to exclusive patrons-only writing and videos, including my PhD dissertation, which was embargoed by my university for being too politically spicy. If you’re on a healing journey, you can consult with me about psychedelic use.
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Dr. Hilary Agro is an anthropologist, community organizer and mother of two young children.
Dr. Hilary Agro, PhD 