The Exploitation of Power Struggles

It’s not necessarily so much about the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, as it is the potential for exploiting and leveraging these natural or systemic struggles from a tertiary position for the purpose of furthering one’s own ends.

Individuals derive a sense of self-actualization from appropriating and responding to the struggle and suffering of others. Conglomerates improve their social capital by doing the same thing (think public relations, advertisements). You may have heard these acts referred to as virtue signaling, or moral posturing. This is the mechanism that explains why social justice warriors and their varieties are in most cases driven by fundamentally selfish motivations. It also explains why they are destructive, because it empowers them with the moral authority and agency (in accordance with the uninspired consensus of the status quo/Overton window) to attack any individual or entity that doesn’t meet their subjective and often arbitrary standards of what is “just” and “fair”.

What’s really fascinating, though, is when one or many individuals inadvertently become pawns in a scheme greater than themselves. The term “useful idiot(s)” comes into play, and in this case, refers to those (SJW’s, liberal protesters, Antifa, etc) whose actions and the results of which become funneled upwards, and are disproportionately beneficial not to themselves, but rather some institution with a political agenda. I imagine dimly lit rooms with long tables surrounded by shadowy figures, who rub their hands together, reveling in the satisfaction of knowing that the “kind”, “just”, and “benevolent” masses are doing the heavy lifting for them.

What we are left with, ironically, is a caste of slave drivers who are unaware that they are slave drivers, nonetheless working for their masters; the unseen class of top-level oppressors.