She decided to sue The Order.
The lawsuit would focus on the Big Lie, the one that said you were born inferior.
Being born inferior meant that you would hold a subservient position in life, accommodate the needs of others, and perform labor for no pay. Voicing complaint would bring punishment, imprisonment, or death.
The Big Lie of one's inferiority at birth focused on two things: having female or non-Aryan physiological traits. Either or both of these conditions resulted in one's lowered place in caste society.
Application of Law differed for those born inferior and those born superior. For one born superior, that is, without female or non-Aryan characteristics, the ethics of responsibility dictated that one was responsible for actions that endangered oneself or other superiors. For one born inferior, however, the Law was turned on its head: here one was responsible for actions committed against oneself, as well as one’s own actions. In other words, superior beings were not held to account for hurting inferior beings. By contrast, the inferior was at fault for inciting the hurtful actions by the superior. Therefore, the one receiving pain would pay the consequences for the one bestowing the pain.
"Oh you want it all right, I know what NO means!"
"Stop resisting arrest! You think I'm going to kill you?"
The Order controlled her family’s livelihood, education, and beliefs, both religious and political. No greater honor, she was told, could grace her life than to be pious, pure, and accepting of her lot. Reward and joy would follow quiet obedience.
She tried.
In childhood she grew smart and noisy, a disappointment to all. She hid her talents as well as she could, muffled her voice in the bedclothes, tripped over every stepping stone, drowned her observations in every street puddle. She pretended not to see, not to hear, not to feel, hoping that soon she would, in fact, cease to sense the external world at all.
Declining the finger of God, she visualized the rib of Adam within her torso, providing her diminished purpose on earth.
She stumbled over the correct interpretation of Plato's Republic, the dynamics of marital bliss, the economics of unpaid labor. She had the most trouble with the illogic of backwards causation, the dead policies based on manipulating effects rather than causes. Poor must pay for rich, black for white, women for men, slaves for masters, the addicted for the sellers, the pregnant for the impregnators? Why again was it thus?
Memorization was also difficult: Climate and energy and dinosaurs were exempt from science, otherwise a coherent web of transport and telephones, bridges and buildings, faucets and sewage systems....
One day she awoke, exclaiming,
"We are three-quarters of the world! Women and slaves from Ancient Greece to GOP Georgians, we are still deprived of votes, of land, of pay, of freedom itself! We are three-quarters of the world and they are afraid of us!”
***
Another word for "order" is cosmos, from the Greek κόσμος, "the order of the universe." This was opposed to chaos, χάος, the "state preceding the creation of the universe."
Cosmos is simply, what is, what exists.
Which, by the way, includes us, all of us.
The very human Order is an artificial attempt by some of us to control another portion of us within this divine Cosmos. If some of us can be convinced of the Big Lie, that we are born irreversibly inferior, the Order can function. If we can be made to believe that it is our natural destiny to work for you, please you, raise your kids for you...we will make life glorious for you! We will happily chant that arbeit in your name will make us frei. We will even take responsibility for your actions when you need to hurt and discipline us. We will swallow this upside-down logic like bad phlegm, disappearing it for you daily.
All of this is a lie.
A Big Lie.
I need a lawyer.
28 MARCH 2021