• zxcvbnm [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Reminds me of an interesting comment I saw in r/antiwork. (the best place to post agitprop) https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/r9h7me/its_an_older_code_sir_but_it_checks_out/hnccskp/

    Consider the most well known cases of Stockholm syndrome.

    The first is the case after which it's named. Some armed robbers stormed a bank in Stockholm and took everyone there hostage. By the time the crisis ended, many of the hostages were expressing sympathy for the men who had threatened them.

    The second, of course, is Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the SLA (radical leftist group in the US), and then apparently willingly joined them in multiple incidents.

    We call this Stockholm syndrome as if the only possible explanation is a mental illness. But there's another explanation. The bank robbers in Stockholm had literally nothing to gain from actually killing their hostages. They needed the threat to exist to keep the state from coming in guns blazing, but if any of the hostages actually died they'd have murder charges on their docket as well as the armed robbery charges. What if the robbers just...told the hostages this. Just said, "Look, folks, we really don't want to kill you. We have no reason to hurt you at all. But due to [insert life circumstances which have for some reason been completely erased from the publicly told story about these events] we desperately need money. We have every intention of letting you go, please just work with us here. It's the system fucking all of us, after all."

    And as for Patty Hearst, her explanation is even easier. She was a billionaire heiress who had likely never seen true deprivation. The SLA could show her what that looked like and appeal to her humanity, while demonstrating that they were not the enemy by showing her genuine kindness in other ways.

    So yeah. What if there's no such thing as Stockholm syndrome? What if that's just what we've been conditioned to call people becoming disillusioned with imperialism and capitalism in unusual circumstances?