Is there some kind of sub-conscious field, socially shared, understood and accepted – and unchallenged (in the main) – underpinning all hierarchies and systems, perceptions and social actions?

Groups, bullying and subconscious fields

Humans create categories and try to put people into them, and to some extent, we identify with those categories:

And describe what people are like differently based on them.
And then value people differently.
And treat people differently as a result too.
And in such a way that it justifies exclusionary or hostile behaviour towards people from certain groups.

These fields may, in part, be hidden to our everyday consciousness.

They are taken for granted in such a way that it would require a good deal of conscious effort to become aware of them and study them.

It may in some cases, be taboo to even mention the fields. For example, these days, politically and within organisations, to talk about social class as an issue, can elicit groans and patronising commentary from others.

Racism

You could apply the idea of fields to the way humans consider and talk about race.

‘Racial’ or ‘ethnic’ categories are a fiction.

They are not objective categories.

White people, for example, are not white. Black people are not black.

Racism then does not start with discrimination based on race. It starts with the very idea of race in the first place. Racism is the act of describing and sorting people into different racial and ethnic groups. Racial discrimination is when you favour certain groups, based on the fact that they apparently belong to a particular racial or ethnic group.

But race, as a subconscious social field, is so deeply ingrained, that whilst we may make some effort to fight discrimination, we find it almost impossible to dispose of racist categorisations.

I wonder. If racist categorisations, and in particular, the identify of White and Black, were created by men who were part of a group that they wanted to call themselves White, trying to justify the subordination of people, who they wanted to call Black, is there any benefit for people identifying with the category Black?

Christianity and Judaism

Christianity might be thought of as an attempt to destroy or revolutionise a field.

Judaism is the older of the two religions.

The Torah predates the Bible.

But the Bible was written to overthrow the field established by Judaism.

In the Bible, the ‘Christian’ identity is created – that is a follower of Christ. It is explicitly set up against Judaism, of those who did not follow Christ.

It sets up a field, in which Christians can feel themselves superior to Jewish people and people of the Jewish faith.

It provides the rationale for which Christians set up missions, with the intent of converting Jewish people to the Christian faith.

It provided the rationale, in part, arguably, for anti-semitism in Christian nations. See how it is does not feature in Asian thought or any other religion for that matter.

It provided the rationale for pogroms, anti-semitic sentiment in the United Kingdom generally and in the 1930s in particular, and the holocaust.