Character VS Status Quo: Introduction
First in a series of essays on marginalization, identity and power structures, and how those are explored in stories centered around challenging the rigid standard.
Content warnings:
passing but constant allusions to the horrors of capitalism (worker abuse, involuntary labour, etc.);
various systems of oppression, but most prominently: ableism
Let’s talk about capitalism! Wo-o-o-o.
It seems that many people that find themselves alienated by the mainstream society end up deeply hateful of the capitalist system. In a market driven by endless pursuit of growth, competitiveness and profit over the well-being of local communities and the natural world at large, those of us already in a vulnerable position, e.g. locked into poverty due to systemic oppression, living in economically disadvantaged areas, not wealthy enough to survive gentrification, so on and so forth, - are going to be most affected by the outcome of unethical and uncompassionate business practices.
Then, the job market is not too friendly to anyone, but especially not to those of us who have to navigate life while subject to prejudice, or while pushing themselves to live up to an expectation beyond their physical and mental ability. Marginalized and especially disabled people will rarely be favoured by employers.
And finally, the way I see it, if one has to fight constant discrimination to prove they have worth as a human being, to be seen as such by their families, community and the society at large, they are usually not too thrilled about having to confront a system that adds another condition to their perceived worth, claiming we all need to be productive, or we are lazy, unmotivated and deserve to starve.
I have a thesis to run by you: capitalism rides on standard. Job descriptions, performance targets, KPI: all of those stem from a fantasy of a completely predictable, controllable production or service process that will not falter as long as you look for the right people and push them the right amount and in the right direction. I have worked two service jobs in my life so far, albeit rather briefly; both suffered from hopelessly poor management going all the way to the top. The fatal flaw was the same: unreasonable expectation in pursuit of profit, which led management to aim to deliver consistent results, unfailingly, every time, despite tech, people, weather, you name it, not always acting the desired way.
Capitalism rides on standard, mostly the standard of performance. The image of a “good worker” is implemented in us from an early age, and targets and traumatizes marginalized kids first and foremost. Standardized testing can be hell for neurodivergent students; language standards often become a tool of racism, classism and cultural oppression.
And when you are already a bit off the mark when it comes to the expected image of What A Person Should Be, the standard is bound to exclude you, and you are bound to have to fight for survival. Which is… a grim, depressing prospect, if that is the only way you can envision the rest of your life.
The experience of getting left behind, on the margins, not considered when standards get set and systems get put in place; finding yourself on the receiving end of exploitation if you can get a job at all, or environmental racism, or inaccessible or culturally inconsiderate working hours - all of this can feel deeply isolating, like you were not meant to exist within this system, like it does not want you. Or, if it does, it is only to take advantage of your lack of options to force you into unsafe and abusive working environments.
There are many factors that would make someone struggle with employment. What would often make someone unexploitable, though - even in terms of illegal practices or forced labour - is disability.
(Now is a good time to mention: this essay is written by an able-bodied individual with input by a disabled loved one; if our combined perceptions fall short of accounting for the wide spectrum of disabled experiences, or if any statement is inaccurate, comes off as too generalized or otherwise off in tone or implication, I am absolutely ready to revisit any part of this post, and would be grateful for any corrections.)
The employability/exploitability statement is not meant to ignore the fact that disabled people often have to try to push beyond their limits and subsequently exhaust themselves trying to handle inacessible jobs; but we also cannot pretend that that would be sustainable. A disabled person pretty much automatically differs from the hypotehtical employee “standard”, so “standard” work cannot always fit into their life.
Let’s go back to the idea that the capitalist worker model gets implemented in early childhood. When everything is built with a narrow and strict standard at the very core of the system, there are bound to be students that cannot adjust to it. Those will simply fall out of the equation, since there are no tools within the education process to include them.
Of course, a large percentage of the students neglected by the education system still can and will be exploited. Cannot finish school or get a degree because of your unaccommodated learning disability, unaided environmental depression, trauma, your background or family situation, cycle of poverty, so on and so forth? Welcome to the working class! You are disposable, your managers hate you, your customers hate you also, and the hours are inhumane.
But there will be an odd case or two (or, rather, somewhere between 50% to 90%) in which a person simply won’t fit in. Their energy levels will not allow them to, or the debilitating mental condition will remain untreated, or the neurodivergency and/or physical disability will render them unable to function unless specific accommodations are met - and no one is going to care enough to meet them. At the end, a disabled person is often seen as a “burden” on economy and local and global community, often requiring financial aid while not “contributing” “as much” as an able-bodied neurotypical individual.
In a humane society, that should not be a problem; and in certain political and economical systems, it ideally would not be: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". (We can unpack how the governments that claimed to be communist failed to uphold that ideal some other time.)
In a capitalist society, however, you have to earn. And the requirements for that are not rooted in fair and reasonable expectations: competitive economy is concerned with growth and profit and substantial “talent” and “performance”, not whatever effort people would actually be happy to volunteer.
We can correctly identify the deep flaws of the disconnected, harsh and often deadly reality we live in - but righteous anger will not always heal deeply ingrained self-perceptions. And, once again, being one of the disfavoured by the mainstream society and the political, social and economical climate is lonely, hard and alientating. When fitting the standard is presented as a matter of effort, diligence, proper behavior, self-discipline and self-control, and/or inherent intelligence, it will be extremely hard for those who struggle to keep up not to internalize their struggle as something that is fundamentally wrong with them, not the system overall.
It is essential to talk about the impression it leaves on a person, to be constantly told that they are consistently failing at what an overwhelming majority of people seems to be getting right.
In a capitalist society, your identity feels ultimately out of your hands. We are discouraged from entertaining the idea that it is enough to just exist, that there is enough worth to being a human person with human passions, friendships, hobbies and favorite foods to eat. We get asked: “What are you doing with your life?”, as if living in itself is not enough; as if we cannot be trusted to find meaning independently, to dedicate ourselves to what is authentic and important to us, not the omnipresent economy masquerading as progress of the human race. We are constantly defined by our achievements and our “usefulness”; and when one lacks the latter, that vacuum gets filled with either the perceived failure, or the assumed identity of a rebel: very punk and honestly often admirable, but also dangerously isolating.
Sometimes, it is a bitter mix of both.
A dear friend of mine coped with lack of accommodation for their neurodivergency and intense transphobic harassment and bullying at school by developing potent, powerful resentment for the education system and capitalist interest overall - which is absolutely their right. At one point, they told me: "If I am a brick in the wall, I want to be a crumbling one, and I want to bring the wall down with me".
My friend is bright, kind, talented, generous, artistic, spiritual, a visionary; I could come up with hundreds of labels that would offer a glimpse into the rich contribution they make to this world, by simply sharing it with the rest of us. But our society has reduced us to our role within its profit systems so ultimately that the only way they could define their place in the world was that: “a crumbling brick”. It's as if our only two options are to commit to upholding the system - or to embrace being its undoing.
Both leave us unable to claw out an existence and an identity that are not fully defined by an arbitrary impersonal lifeless construct that rules our lives.
I want to do the “rebellious failure” perspective as much justice as I can, as I am deeply compassionate to the sentiment. The way I see it, my friend’s morbid excitement to be what makes the system crumble was not pettiness or selfishness. It was insight, and a desire to share it with the rest. Because there is no strict binary, the world is not clearly divided into "standard" and "outcast". It is a complex spectrum, in which some people get close enough to "standard" in one way but find another aspect of it challenging, and in which some of us are deemed as falling “too far” out of it.
If you are too disabled or too unmotivated by the capitalist lifestyle or too Something Else, you can consider yourself fully excluded from the equation that no longer cares for you. Those who can still play along, on the other hand, are forced, in one way or another, to mold and mask the aspects of their identity and personhood that might cause them to underperform.
The desire to bring the system down with you is not vengeful (though it has a certain right to be); instead, it is the need to expose the inherent flaws of what hurts you, and show how it harms the entirety of our society, no matter how "standard-passing" some or most of us are.
One of my favourite games, “We Know The Devil”, presents a striking and poignant narrative of LGBTQ+ identity in the context of Catholic guilt. Playing around with the concept of inherent sinfulness of humanity, “We Know The Devil” claims: in the eyes of the Catholic god, we are all “bad kids”; gay and trans people are simply “the worst of the worst”, hounded by their peers in an attempt at personal salvation - because as long as there is someone “worse” than you, you just might escape the inevitable punishment and persecution for a while longer. Very “Torches” by The Oh Hellos, I think.
Not one of the “better” bad kids is content, safe and secure, though, and that fuels their resentment of “the worst”: it is, ultimately, a deflection, a self-soothing mechanism to continue telling yourself, “You aren’t as bad as you could be; at least you’re not a sodomite”. But that is a non-life; it’s suffocating, hateful of others and yourself, tirelessly fixated on staying afloat by pushing others to the bottom. At the end, everyone wants to be free - they’re just too horrified of the price they would have to pay should they put too much trust into others, who have to allow them their freedom.
That was a deeply revolutionary and formative narrative to me. I would like to borrow the core of it and have it be the basis of my upcoming media exploration. As we consider multiple pieces of media that resonated with and excited me, I will be returning to the same angle:
rigid structures hurt all who are subject to them indiscriminately;
however, the most persecuted and marginalized suffer most vividly;
they get rejected by the more privileged as an instinctive survival tactic that is, ultimately, unsuccessful and unhelpful;
a person (in our case: character) challenging the status quo will most often hold a marginalized identity,
and that identity, whether explicitly or not, will often be a disabled one.
A-a-and with that, my long-winded introduction is out of the way! Nice.
Stay tuned for the next part, in which I get to actual media analysis as we discuss the excellent narrative of “Chicory: A Colorful Tale”.