This morning’s lecture by Professor Rick Roderick was on the philosophy of Michel Foucault.  I could not follow some of the deeper convolutions of thought here but I did come away with fresh inspiration for my rants about the lack of democracy in our democratic civilization.

Embedded in the animal world is the practice of dominance. I have been reading more about how we animals establish hierarchies of leadership when we hunt and procreate.  I would venture that top dogs (wolves are a better example) get to be the procreator of the next generation because they can beat up lesser dogs.  This seems true in the human world.  The smaller, weaker dogs do not get the prize.  In all species, bigger and stronger specimens prevail.  Smaller, weaker and perhaps smarter individuals find other ways to APPEAR bigger and better by obtaining wealth and power in human social, political and economic arenas.

While all of this is going on, babies of all species are trampled on, the different are excluded and the old are discarded.  Dominance is expressed at the expense of others who cannot rise to the top of a pyramid of power.  In our society, we worship wealth, success of any kind and are morbidly entranced by the stories of the disenfranchised who become criminals.  We are fascinated by punishment and stories of prison life. For a few brief moments in history, we thought we could rehabilitate outcasts to retake their places in society.  The problem with this thought is that prisons do not reform or rehabilitate. We incarcerate the refuse of a system that worships success and punishes weakness and “difference”.

The marginalized in our world are the poor, the foreign, the outcast and the weak. Children are like the infirm and the aged.  When you think of the names of the gods and demigods whose pictures constantly appear all over the media, you do not think of the vast majority that live lives of quiet desperation and who do not replicate themselves.  We have a society that now explicitly sells beauty as the only worthwhile goal where sex is free and is for everyone except priests and child abusers. If you tattoo your own body, pierce visible parts and hang jewelry in those places, this is not abuse but may be the expression of self-knowledge that the person who does this will never be top dog or that dog’s consort. Alienation is everywhere.

Marginalized people can vote but do not vote for their own good.  They accept the lesser role in life that seems to be their assigned lot.  They worship the wrong gods and place the strong, the bigger and the best looking over them.

I think I will do as the professor suggested and read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.