Photo by K. Mitch Hodge
The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.
–Proverbs 12:18
There’s such a thing as the crime of bodily harm. It’s recognised in law because history has shown that, in any well-functioning society, protection of bodily integrity should be a legal right. It’s obvious. Going round breaking people’s arms or slashing faces, disabling or disfiguring them in any way, is extremely antisocial. If someone breaks my arm, stabs me, or beats me up, the violence is visible as blood, bruises, scars, and deformity which are recognised in forensic reports and condemned in criminal charges.
There’s another kind of violence that doesn’t cut you or break your bones but it can destroy your life.
This kind attacks with words, humiliation, systematic harassment, orchestrated defamation, permanent exposure, online bullying, and routine fabrication of an invented hateful person, the public enemy, and therefore someone who deserves to be killed. While such harassment can cause physical injury or death, in this case it’s more intent on gradually undermining a person’s self-confidence, willingness to speak out, and ability to keep existing as a subject in public space.
My name for this kind of violence is “subjective injury”, and I’d say it’s a counterpart to evident bodily injury.
This wound is no mere metaphor and it’s not imaginary suffering either. Neuroscientists have shown that pain caused by harassment and (especially public) humiliation, and vicious defamatory lies activates brain circuits that are partly shared by those caused by physical pain and especially torture, which is defined in international human rights treaties (to which Brazil is a signatory) as a crime against humanity.
The psychology of trauma shows that persistent campaigns of harassment can trigger or worsen conditions of anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress. I’m living proof that this field of human knowledge knows what it’s talking about. I was diagnosed as having Generalised Anxiety Disorder after being subjected to an unremitting online hate campaign complete with death threats from 2016 onwards. It was only when, emotionally shattered, I went into exile that I could get the diagnosis and treatment.
It’s clear that our member of parliament Talíria Petrone has suffered the same symptoms as a result of the same violence, as have philosopher Marcia Tiburi, anthropologist Debora Diniz, and choreographer Wagner Schwartz, and also the members of parliament D’Áviala and Áurea Carolina.
The philosophy of recognition emphasises that no one can be a subject in isolation. You can only be a subject in relation with others. Psychoanalysis, and especially with the work of Julia Kristeva, has drawn attention to these new forms of externally inflicted psychological suffering that have come with changes in contemporary life. Yet they’re still ignored in the domain of law.
Knowledge about what I’m calling subjective injury is advancing in neuroscience, trauma psychology, and psychoanalysis but not (or barely at all) in law.
In general, this kind of violence is treated as “moral damage”, as if it were some kind of individual annoyance that can be fixed by means of compensation. But the real world has changed dramatically, especially since the advent of the Internet and its big-tech colonisation of digital platforms which are promoting subjective injury on an industrial scale, just as the Nazis industrialised extermination of Jews, Roma, communists, people with disabilities, and homosexuals in their gas chambers and crematoria.
Big tech companies have discovered that cheaply manufactured outrage, fear, resentment and hate egg on their audiences and this, of course, is profitable. What once took the form of action by small groups has turned into an economic system underpinned by algorithms that reward the viral spread of conflict and dehumanisation. I call this general phenomenon “falsolatry”.
Falsolatry fuels the new technologies of subjugation. Unlike other traditional forms of power, for example what Michel Foucault describes in his Discipline and Punish, these more recent political forms of thraldom don’t only aim to discipline bodies but also to extinguish subjectivities by wounding the soul (in the sense of self-awareness) or selfhood.
The far right were the first to grasp the full political potential of these technologies. Destroying reputations can be much more effective than refuting arguments or presenting new laws, and fearmongering and creating public enemies through lies and slander is an easier way to sway voters than coming up with achievable socially responsible proposals. After all, why would you think about social proposals when, as Trump (among many other heads of state on lesser scales) has so clearly demonstrated, neoliberal politics is about corrupt personal enrichment, which then means that critics must be destroyed by all means possible. And, finally, a people who are emotionally devastated by subjective injury will leave the public sphere of their own accord. Moreover, once you rip up the social fabric with routine lies and defamation, laws become redundant.
In Brazil, I’d say that the right-wing ultraliberal MBL (Free Brazil Movement) is one of two groups that have best managed to turn this kind of violence into a machinery of political action. Its members don’t confront their adversaries with arguments but subject them to relentless campaigns of character assassination with lies and slander and mobilising social networks, influencers, and online communities to create a permanent state of harassment when not organising more direct forms of physical intimidation in order to generate defamatory content. MBL’s aim isn’t to win debates governed by ground rules, but to treat anyone who challenges them as an enemy to be annihilated so that, unable to bear the psychological cost of continuous insults, their critics fall silent or resort to violence in self-defence (which can then be turned into more slanderous content).
Recent attacks against businessman Eduardo Moreira, founder of the Instituto Conhecimento Liberta (ICL), a platform for critical education and independent journalism, and federal MP Glauber Braga are clear examples of this type of systemic of violence. Independently of any political differences anyone might have with either of them, what appears is this recurring pattern of public hostility that goes well beyond criticism or disagreement in aiming to cause emotional burnout, demoralisation, and isolation.
This is the “adult” version of adolescent cyberbullying that some studies calculate is more than twice as likely to lead to self-harm and suicidal behaviour. Crude and effective. When the aim isn’t responding to disagreement but destroying people who disagree, we’re faced with quite another kind of thuggery, on an incalculable scale because, now in the digital age, millions of people (like the young teens who’ve demonstrated the dire effects of online bullying) with their iPhones have a weapon for destroying others they don’t like, and the method works faster in an alienated society which, rather than legislating against this form of cruelty, actually encourages it.
I mention Moreira and Braga, two straight, cis, white men, but this kind of violence is especially aimed at women, Black and LGBTQIA+ people. In these cases, it often takes the form of “sexual correction” or punishment designed to intimidate and crush people whose very existence challenges patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative frameworks.
It’s to be hoped that the twenty-first century will come up with a law similar to those that appeared in earlier centuries which can act as both deterrent and at least partial remedy. The nineteenth century brought in recognition of bodily integrity as a legal right. The twentieth century brought in protection of honour, reputation and privacy. Our own times demand something more: recognition the integrity of subjectivity also requires legal protection.
Until that happens, we’re going to keep treating as mere “moral damage” what has actually become one of the most sophisticated forms of today’s political violence. Subjective injury leaves no blood on the pavement. It leaves silence, anxiety, and depression, and all of this then becomes a huge social and personal financial drain in terms of doctors, therapists, and remedies for those who are privileged enough to have access to these remedies. This is exactly what the far right wants to do, assisted at the very least by the negligence (or collusion) of big-tech companies and the negligence (or collusion) of a bought-off judiciary.
Perhaps the fact that Brazil’s Supreme Court justices are now targets of defamatory attacks might prompt the legal community to take this crime seriously. It’s not yet defined in the Criminal Code but it’s everyday far-right practice in the streets and on the social media. Will they now act?
The post You Can’t See the Wound, But It Harms appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
