It is hard to accept that you were abused. A victim. A human treated as a thing by someone you trusted. Even though the evidence is right there, you doubt the clarity of your own senses. What if I’m just making this up? I always exaggerate things. Other people never notice. Other people like them. I love them! They can’t abuse me if I love them, can they? They love me! They do this for my own good. They can’t help themselves. That’s just what being a parent/lover/teacher/friend/coach is all about, right?
And so we talk ourselves out of self-knowledge for another day.
The problem is, the people who abuse us never, ever match the caricature that society has painted for us of an “abuser.” That is because modern western society is built on imperialism, which is it say, on abuse, and that violence has filtered into every aspect of our culture for the last five hundred years. According to our popular culture, an abuser is an unrepentant monster, a laughing maniac who cannibalizes children and suffocates grandmothers. Even if he puts up a good facade for the neighbors, he knows who he really is inside, and once the mask is ripped off, he is happy to spew the venom of his real self onto anyone in spitting radius.
The fact is, even the worst person you can imagine spends at least fifty percent of their time doing perfectly normal things. You could be married to Jeffrey Dahmer and mostly know him as someone who laughs at Facebook memes and only buys organic.
An abuser is your neighbor. Your boss. Your sister. Your boyfriend. Your wife. They are the people you interact with every day. Sometimes you have an inkling that something is off about them and sometimes you have absolutely no idea. Sometimes these are people who do genuine good in the world, who help others and invent amazing technology and create beautiful art. They are soft-spoken. They meditate every day. They are the authors of self-help books that sell millions. They are spiritual leaders. They are people who you cannot believe have this kind of ugliness living inside of them.
But they do.
Hannah Arendt has written famously about the banality of evil, by which she means the way that ordinary, even clownish, individuals can perpetrate unspeakable acts when accomplishing those acts through socially-accepted norms. They are entirely unconvinced of the seriousness of their crimes, and to a great extent, the larger society supports them1. Adolf Eichmann should not be seen as a monstrous exception of human nature, but a warning of what most of us could be capable of, given the right circumstances and society. German society during the Third Reich was particularly barbarous, but is US society in the early 21st century really so far behind?
There’s a lot more to say about Arendt’s brilliant work, but I want to specify some aspects of it here as they pertain to locating ourselves on the spectrum of abusers and their victims.
An abuser is someone who uses another person without regard to that person’s will for the abuser’s personal gain. That gain can be social, monetary, emotional, sexual or spiritual. But an abuser’s actions always take power away from someone else in order to use it for themselves. Rape is abuse, but so is pinching someone’s butt without consent. Belittling a subordinate in a meeting is abuse, but so is subtly undermining their confidence over the course of years. Abuse can be interpersonal, like most of what I’ve brought up here, but it can also be societal. Redlining entire housing districts so that Black people can’t buy there is abusive on a social level. White homeowners are taking power away from Black potential homeowners for their own personal gain. Slavery and imperialism are obvious societal-level abuses. Let me take your freedom and your land and your culture and appropriate whatever parts I find useful for myself.
Abuse is ubiquitous. It is the clothes we wear, the television we watch, the food we eat, and in our relationships along the length of our lives. Most of us in the modern world can only find tiny respites from this onslaught of abuse, be it societal or interpersonal. Many of us haven’t gone a single day without it. But if abuse is so common, you might wonder, what’s the point in condemning it? If you define abuse such that everyday interactions fall under its umbrella, don’t you render the term useless? If even pinching someone’s butt at a club is “abuse,” then you’ve exhausted with trivialities the same people who might have supported you when you complain about real abuse, like rape.