Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Marxism is a very alluring ideology to the bottom half of the population that benefits from taking from the top half. It never really caught on in the U.S. even though early in the last Century it was being promoted in the labor unions, and had significant popular support. The emerging Middle Class, focus on individual liberty, and belief in The American Dream of a classless society, never really gave Marxism much traction, and after the ignominious demise of the Soviet Union, Marxists had no place to go. But leave it to French Intellectuals to recast the Marxist Us vs. Them Class narrative into an Us vs. Them Oppression narrative where The Patriarchy is the “oppressor,” and Identity Groups are the “oppressed.”

Everybody wants to think their lot is life would be better if not for some outside force holding them down; and with academia, Hollywood, and feminism providing cover, victimhood of the oppressed has been eagerly adopted. We are preprogrammed in society to sympathize with Victims; we want them to be made whole, and punishing the culprits can also be satisfying. The Oppression culture taps into this subliminal support: to equate past oppression of a particular Identity as victimizing them; race or sex being the most obvious examples. These feelings are successfully exploited in business and government by preying on the vague guilt we all feel when we compare our relatively comfortable and secure lives to most of the rest of the world, or people from the past. It's an effective strategy, and oppression mongering has been very successful in changing the goals of society to become the goals of the “oppressed.”