existing social forms¶

One of the main ways existing social forms have been able to achieve dominance in the first place is by assessing which elements of existing cultures can be folded into the hegemonic structure they hope to build. Certain features are valuable to building a new hierarchy. https://t.co/oOaVAGX7j6 Those features get appropriated by the purveyors of the "new" culture as it evolves into being and championed as having been theirs all along. Others are assessed as harmful to the stability of the emerging order, and must be repressed for it to fully coalesce. The result is the illusion of continuity, which is integral to the project of naturalizing the new way of doing things.

Those "old" elements that got retained and reinforced were, at some point, a new invention. They got refined and reinforced by each successive social order. To make a long story short, it's all constructed and its evolution and endurance has been continuously directed by social movements of various stripes throughout history. And we are totally free to have our own movement that gives rise to liberation, rather than oppression.