Practitioner Supremacy

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Title: Practitioner Supremacy
Major Warnings: Discussions of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, as well as some minor notes on dehumanisation.
Summary: Exploration of the real world parallels to various deep-seeded ideas in Practitioners, focusing on Bristow's lecture on Oddfolk, and arguments about the Oni Wars. Spoilers up to Gone Ahead 7.1

What’s this? Two posts within a week? I know, it’s highly unusual, but the discussion around this past chapter has been immensely frustrating, and I feel like this is necessary.

So, today we’re going to talk about frameworks, manipulating information and propaganda, and why Corbin’s arguments this chapter were atrocious and rightly caused offense with the Kenneteers.

Bristow, Knots, and Subhumans

But we’re not starting with Corbin, or the argument in the most recent chapter. No, we’re starting with Bristow’s first class in Cutting Class 6.4, specifically the one about:

“Visceral Knots,” Corbin said. “We’ve never had a class with Bristow.”

(Well, look who’s here?)

During that class, one of the first things Bristow discusses is:

“Twist bloodlines enough, and you get subhumans.”

Now, if the term ‘subhumans’ isn’t enough to raise your hackles (perhaps you’re of the opinion that this is just the technical term and that makes it okay), let’s look at one of the specific stories he tells about this:

He resumed. “The second was a family living in a dilapidated tenement in Europe. Afraid of the outside world, they inbred, moved in and out of various apartments, and subsisted on rats, their sickly, and their rooftop and balcony gardens. Their language had mutated as much as their features- all of them appeared eerily similar, chinless, wide-hipped, and small-eyed, their language a nonsense mishmash of nouns. Civilization found its way to them, they were split up and given care, their existence was hidden by practitioners and a city council that had ignored too many warnings about their existence. I was invited to help at a late stage, but damage had been done, their world unraveled as they were taken from one another, and they died soon after they were separated.”

In other words, people found an isolated group of human beings, decided they were lesser beings, kidnapped them, separated them, and essentially killed them in isolation. The historic parallels here don’t need elaborating on, but, in case you missed it, this is the darkest side of colonialism, and Bristow is a disgusting human being for presenting this in such clinical, ‘it is what it is’ language.

Just look at, for example, the horrendous atrocities hidden in the phrase ‘Civilization was brought to them.’ I know what happened within that phrase, you know what happened within that phrase, hell, but Bristow’s happy to brush over it and treat it as just a thing that happened without any decisions being made by anyone.

(I recommend looking up how the news twists facts when they talk about ‘officer involved shootings’, by which they mean a cop killed a guy, but by hiding the subject (as in, the one that actually did the thing) in, say, a passive voice, they try to whitewash what actually happened.)

But, alright, Bristow’s an asshole, there’s nothing new there. Why am I talking about him? Why is this relevant.

Earlier in that lesson, Lucy notes how Bristow’s presenting himself:

Lucy nodded a bit to herself, at the same time she studied Bristow and his mannerisms. Did his confidence slip at any point? Not really. Did he have any tells? Not really.

The way Bristow presents these stories, and his involvement with them, isn’t with shame, or guilt, or sympathy. He doesn’t consider his involvement a great failure of his. No, he presents them comfortably, confidently, proudly, even, in that ‘humblebrag’ kind of way. Why?

Because Bristow expects this to go over well. He expects his audience to be on his side, because he knows the society he lives in, and these stories, and his involvement with them will give him prestige (which he uses to make this class his own and claim it).

And he’s not wrong:

“And he’s gone,” a student two rows behind Lucy murmured. There were some faint sounds from annoyed and amused students.

The rest of his class is amused by his stories, or annoyed at the showboating aspects of it. They are not, aside from Lucy and Avery, viscerally horrified at the casual bigotry and horrendous immorality that suffuse every aspect of those stories.

Bristow’s audience (and this includes, as we know, Corbin) accepts Bristow’s framework as normal, and acceptable, and as nothing worth raising a fuss about.

This is what Practitioner society is. It is deeply messed up in serious ways, and this runs through every single story they tell themselves about their society and the way this society interacts with people outside of it. Bristow may be full on colonialist/Pure Human’s Burden kind of man, but keep in mind that the Blue Heron Institute had a separate ‘Other’ table during mealtimes, and Snowdrop wasn’t exactly treated as a full person either, was she? This goes deep.

And it’s not just the way the Practitioner society treats Others. Just look at how they treat their own kids! Fernanda had to watch one of her cousins get married off to some random jackass, knowing that she’d suffer a similar fate if she didn’t live up to her parents’ ridiculous standards. Ms. Graubard threatened to murder her own child and replace her with a doll if she didn’t live up to her potential. This society is extremely messed up. These people are not on the side of our modern understanding of morality.

So when we hear stories from this society, unless the teller proves themselves to be unusually enlightened and sympathetic, we can assume they’re operating within this abhorrent framework, and judge the story they’re telling accordingly.

And that finally brings us to Corbin.

Corbin, Oni, and Propaganda

One of the interesting things about the world Pale takes place in is that most of the important people in it don’t lie. It’s not that they’re physically incapable of lying, mind, just that lying would be a bad idea.

This does not, however, mean they’re telling the truth, now does it? Their words may not include lies, but the way they frame the information they’re sharing, and what they leave out, well, they can mislead with those as easily as they could with any lie.

So if you’re engaging with this society, you better be able to recognise the lies they don’t tell, because if you’re not, you’re going to be led down some seriously dangerous roads.

This is propaganda.

In Gone Ahead 7.1, Talos explains the history of the Oni Rebellion:

“But there are longstanding traditions of practitioners seizing as much control as they can, over there, in the big families. To leave zero room for error, they wouldn’t have conversations with their Others like you do with Snowdrop. The big families would just bind her and turn her into a tool. Change her, infuse her, tie her to an item so she can be put on a shelf when she isn’t needed.”

Note the explicit comparison between Snowdrop and the Others in question. The Others were thinking beings, self-aware, with agency. They were people, and the way they were treated by these families was abhorrent, immoral and wrong, as is agreed by even the prejudiced Practitioner society we find ourselves in.

“As humanity surged and the families expanded into branches and sub-organizations, it got pretty oppressive for the Others. It brewed for a long while, around the mid eighteen-hundreds to early nineteen hundreds, Others really kicked off on fighting back. They organized and started to try to subvert the practice and all conventions. They devised their own contrary practices and counter-practices. Stuff like their faerie trading glamour for goblins to dress up in, until the ‘goblin’ label stopped fitting. Or a goblin edging into the spiritual to make itself more immaterial, or an echo being led to realms to get a bit of Abyss in it, or a bit of elemental.”

So the Others banded together to rise up and defend themselves by upsetting this paradigm, and making it harder to be enslaved or used for raw materials. This was, let’s be entirely clear here, a slave rebellion. We’ve had our fair shares of slave rebellions in reality, and I think we’ve largely agreed that these rebelling slaves were entirely right and justified in doing so.

“Step one of binding is usually to identify what you’re binding, and they confused labels enough to make that next to impossible. The Oni thing was more of a uniform than a typing that could be used for binding, as were the masks, old weapons and other recurring visual motifs they adopted. They worked hard to devise answers to everything. We rely on truth, they used the rule of discourse to shape their language, so every Other in an area would agree to accept that every third statement from a powerful Other would be accepted as a falsehood. Then they’d keep that Other in the background until a crucial negotiation. They actively set out to create more Others that weren’t bound to the Seal of Solomon, which never had as much traction there as in the West, shaped themselves to be dangerous to various practices.”

And they were pretty good at it.

Now, Talos telling this story is pretty unobjectionable. For someone raised in this Practitioner society, he’s pretty even-handed. Note how I’m not trying to see if this is biased in the Oni’s favour. It’s not going to be. He’s given no indication that he objects to his society’s framework. Indeed, Talos hasn’t really put that much thought into the matter:

“Did it work?” Lucy asked.

“Did what work?”

“The war. Escaping this horrible dynamic. Did the Others get what they wanted?”

“Dunno,” Talos said. “Never looked into it.”

So, with the general history established, let’s look at the stories told about the aftermath from within the Practitioner framework:

“Which makes them a background danger,” Corbin added. “We’re about as far as you can get from the epicenter of that stuff, and a lot of the bigger groups have either been disbanded or started cooperating with us again- like Yadira’s family. But it’s still like… one in a thousand chance that you might think you’re dealing with something and then wham, it’s one of the Oni that fled after the war ended. Or wham, that ghoul you’ve been trying to track down for a year? Traded for a token that flips a binding onto the binder. Then you’re ghoul food. They worked with practitioners, but they’d pick out the people who were as far from traditional families as they could get, and make them into Others, or get them to make complex cursed items, or teach them tricks to make them assassins specializing in countering practitioners”

‘We’re about as far as you can get from the epicenter of that stuff’ is an attempt to distance themselves from this event not only geographically, but also ethically. ‘We’re not like them,’ Corbin says, and what he means is ‘we don’t deserve their anger’, but we already know this society is fucked up in ways pretty similar to what sparked this rebellion to start with.

The story about the ghouls is especially telling. Oni rebelled against slavery, against being bound, and Corbin has the audacity to consider it a horror story that Practitioners can no longer freely enslave people as a result. This isn’t a nasty side-effect. This is literally the Oni achieving their morally justifiable goal. You try to enslave a person, they kill you. I can’t bring myself to be on the Practitioner side here.

Also, making ‘hey, we want to deal with people not enmeshed in this horribly bigoted society’ sound ominous is an especially interesting rhetorical trick to avoid thinking about the fact that they might well be the bad guys.

“I think it depends how you look at it,” Corbin said. “Things are a bit gentler. Practitioners have to move more slowly, do more due diligence instead of binding whatever. But I dunno. The practitioners at the lowest level had to start to be harsher with those regular Others who used to be free to integrate or exist at the edges, to protect themselves. I think the war hurt more than it helped, on both sides. It escalated things, made them nastier. A few leaders of families got offed, but it didn’t really change how those families operated, except to make them even more controlling, by necessity.”

‘Practitioners can no longer enslave people willy-nilly!’ See, Corbin doesn’t understand that binding especially is still the problem here. He’s still treating binding as a morally neutral thing to do, that now comes with more potential challenges, instead of something pretty fucking horrific that should take serious moral considerations before being used, and not just practical ones.

Anyway, the slavers grew paranoid and lashed out against innocent Others as a result of the war, and this is now also the Oni’s fault because the Practitioners are just reasonably following incentives, guys! They had to do it! They responded to things by necessity!

This is minimising the agency of the Practitioners involved, while quickly brushing over the incentives that cause the Oni to rebel in the first place, and that those things haven’t really changed much.

“That open warfare and subterfuge is a heck of a jump. The Others had other options. Like retreating to their very organized spirit world or wherever else and putting that same effort into erecting defenses.”

‘They should’ve retreated from the land they’ve lived on with no issues for ages because we say so! Go back to your own realms and make that better! America is for white people Earth is for humans!’

‘If you’re being genocided and pushed out of an area, you shouldn’t ‘jump to open warfare and subterfuge’, but should just let yourself be displaced!’

What Corbin is doing here is erasing the clear power differential that existed between slave owner and slave, and suggesting that the slaves might’ve been right to rebel, but they should’ve been nicer about it.

Are there other interpretations that might be more charitable? Maybe. But this society has made it clear it doesn’t deserve more charitable interpretations, and Corbin hasn’t shown that he rejects this society’s framework enough to deserve them either.

“What are we even doing if we step in here? Are we making this situation worse, like the Oni War allegedly did? Why should we even get involved?”

“Because this is different?” Corbin asked.

“Is it? How?”

“Because we have a right to the school. We paid dues. We made the effort to come here.”

‘We have a right to be here’, right after downplaying another group’s efforts to get their rights and personhood acknowledged is… really fucking awful. It made me flinch when I read it.

“And the Others didn’t have a right to be in the city?” Lucy asked. “They didn’t play their own roles? They should’ve just gotten out, holed up in their own ghettos? And if they can’t protect themselves well enough, well, that’s their own fault?”

“Kingdoms, not ghettos, and I’ve never said the actions of the big practitioner families out there are good, or that it’s the Others’ fault. I know you think this is some allegory for stuff that’s happened between humans, but it’s different,” Corbin said, clearly testy. “Human cities are the province of humans. It’s part of what was spelled out by Solomon.”

‘Kingdom’ or ‘ghetto’ is really a matter of framing, isn’t it? The more neutral middle ground might be ‘reservation’?

And no, Corbin isn’t saying he agrees with those awful people that enslaved a large number of people, he’s just playing defence for them, and maybe wishing those former slaves would go away and stop bothering all these humans already.

Also, it feels weird to talk about dehumanisation of non-humans, but ‘depersonalisation’ doesn’t carry as much weight. Regardless, basing your moral considerations on humanity, rather than personhood is something I take issue with to start, but the idea that humans haven’t done their damndest to exclude people from the ‘human’ category in order to justify mistreatment is just patently ridiculous.

This is why you learn history, kids.

Also, Solomon lived a long time ago, in entirely different circumstances, and I don’t see why we should take his decision ages ago seriously here. You’re not entitled to an ethnostate a single-species status quo just because some dude ages ago said so, dude.

Which isn’t even touching on the fact that humanity is spreading and continuing to displace Others by spreading their human cities for humans out over lands that were occupied by Others beforehand.

“If you don’t accept the facts as they happened, Solomon’s law, and all that, then you’re going to hurt yourself somewhere down the line,” he said. “This is fundamental.”

“Oh, believe me, I know that stuff’s fundamental. Thing is, I don’t like it enough to support it. We can debate this for hours, I’m sure.”

“It’s reality.”

“Corbin,” Talos said.

“It’s reality, though,” Corbin said. “What are you going to do? Give Solomon and his laws the big middle finger? They pretty much saved humanity.”

You can’t see it, but I’m gesturing vaguely in the direction of that post I wrote the other day.

Corbin is defending the status quo here, and we’ve discussed what the status quo actually is. Corbin’s claims that he’s not really on the side of the slave owners that sparked the Oni war look pretty hollow in this context.

“And so what are you going to do about it? Tens of thousands of Others tried their hands at banding together to reject it and they failed. Are you and you alone going to do what they couldn’t? Because if you’re going to try and stand up for them, you shouldn’t start by belittling their efforts and puffing up your own ego. And I don’t think you should be standing up for them to that degree. They were vicious and they crossed all sorts of lines.”

The condemnation for the Oni sure is a lot stronger than his condemnation of the slave owners, I can’t help but notice.

There’s also the amusing part where he suggest one person can’t do much against the tides of history, while just a second before he was praising Solomon, and how his word is law and should be followed and isn’t this one person so amazing?

Anyway, the rest of this is without content. It’s empty rhetoric meant to demoralise and cow Lucy into submission.

I’m happy to dismiss Corbin’s use of the word ‘vicious’ out of hand, given the framework he’s operating from, and I don’t trust his idea of what lines shouldn’t be crossed. Without any further examples of what lines got crossed, I don’t see why we should take this seriously.

I know some of you will be frustrated that I haven’t quite addressed the obvious thing: that Others are actually violent and should be pushed out because they can’t exist alongside humanity, but here’s the thing. I don’t think that’s true.

You know how news stories can take widespread movements and take one bad actor to paint them as representative of the whole thing? There’s a lot of power in being able to decide what stories get told, and how those stories get told. And if you want to justify a campaign of domination, well, you’re going to tell the stories where the people you’re dominating are violent and need to be dominated for your safety, aren’t you?

Right before Lucy asked if the Oni rebellion had worked, Talos said this:

“That thing in the box? It was like a spirit surgeon. Took the time to modify all the Others into Oni while they were stored in the box. And those Others? A lot of them had been properly bound or quarantined. It caused a lot of harm, letting them loose on this Oni’s say so. Harm that Oni wanted.”

Can you see the things that aren’t said here, now?

‘Properly bound and quarantined.’ Is this a practical concern or a moral one?

‘It caused a lot of harm.’ Harm to whom? It sure seems to imply that the undeserved, or even the innocent were harmed, but it doesn’t actually say that, does it? The fact that it’s harm the Oni wanted and that Oni oppose Practitioners, it can be safely assumed to be Practitioners.

Because if the harm were done to innocents, don’t you think the story would include that? If you want to make the Oni sound dangerous, as this story clearly does, there’s only one reason for someone who shouldn’t lie to not include it.

And that’s because it’s not true.

 

Comments

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God this post was controversial back when I wrote it, but I think it holds up really well. I also like how well this works as a set-up for stuff I talked about way later.