Spellbinding stories
As this inquiry moves on I continue to be interested in two lines of explanation for the persistence of domination and subjugation in the world:
1. trance/hypnosis and the many varieties of /pr/news management that induce and maintain them.
and interwoven with these...
2. story telling, especially the telling and re-telling by dominant elites of stories that justify their dominance and invalidate conflicting or challenging views, especially those originating with subordinate groups.
Note, this is not to deny the value of either trance (we can be benignly entranced by music that touches us) or to believe that a life can be lived that is free of stories. We tell stories to ourselves (this is one of them) and we warm to, or feel touched by, or cool off, in response to hearing other people's stories.
The g.o.r.i.l.l.a. agenda focuses on pointing to those stories and trance inductions that maintain the domineering, bullying, discriminatory, racist behaviours that pollute our daily life and that attempt to invalidate resistance and demands for deference.
At certain moments in history an elite story is decisively contradicted and the trance it propogates fails dramatically.
If you want to discover more about how dominant elite stories, or 'transcripts', as he calls them, are devised and maintained, I recommend James C. Scott's book Domination and the Arts of Resistance Yale University Press 1990