Bullying, Cruelty, And Tyranny
Exchanged emails with a friend on the related terms: bullying, cruelty, and tyranny. Is not the recognition of this type of behavior a matter of skill? One learns by experience, and by exposure to literature, poetry, and story telling,–empathy. Empathy is learned. It is the profound appreciation of our capacity for suffering. The capacity for suffering transcends all of the usual tribal boundaries. We all suffer, never mind the ethnic and linguistic differences.
Pain is nonlinguistic.
It is what human beings have
that ties us to the nonlanguage using beasts.
So victims of cruelty, people who are suffering,
do not have much in the way of a language.
That is why there is no such things as the
“voice of the oppressed”
or the “language of the victims.”
The language victims once used
is not working anymore,
and they are suffering too much
to put words together.
So the job of putting their situation into language
is going to have to be done for them
by somebody else.
The liberal novelist, poet, or journalist
is good at that.
–Richard Rorty
excerpt Contingency, Irony and Solidarity page 94
