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The workers sing:
Oh, keep your head, keep your head low Oh, you gotta keep your head low If you wanna keep your head Oh you gotta keep your head low
And of the capitalist, Orpheus sings:
The more he has, the more he holds The greater the weight of the world on his shoulders See how he labors beneath that load Afraid to look up, and afraid to let go So he keeps his head low, he keeps his back bending He's grown so afraid that he'll lose what he owns But what he doesn't know is that what he's defending Is already gone
This moment in the show is absolutely brilliant. When you see it actually staged, Orpheus stamps his feet in time with the "keeps his head low" line, mimicking the choreography from the workers' chant. It's a fantastic, beautiful reversal of the theme, showing how Hades is just as trapped as his workers.
Being on top of an oppressive hierarchy is awesome from a resources and power standpoint. You have all the power, money, food, everything you could possibly want, at the expense of everyone underneath you. But beyond that, from an emotional -- or perhaps even, a spiritual -- perspective, there are no winners in the game of oppression. Being at the bottom sucks worst of all because you fear for your survival, your basic needs. But the top of the pile is a terrifying, lonely, impossibly stressful place as well.
I say this not to say "Oh, think of the poor billionaires, managing a company from their yacht parties must be so stressful! :(" but rather to point out that *everyone* is worse off under oppressive hierarchies, even when those hierarchies seem to explicitly benefit them. We are not meant to hold so much power. We are not meant to constantly watch our backs, fearful someone will take away our position at the top.
An egalitarian society would benefit everyone. Even the billionaires would be better off and happier (though in practice, specific billionaires will resent losing their positions of power).
I don't really know if there's any practical value to this point, but it feels important to note. Perhaps I feel like it's important to cultivate some amount of compassion for our oppressors, if we don't want to repeat the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Maybe I feel like the triumphant image of the working class crushing the capitalist class under its feet isn't *really* in the spirit of the whole egalitarian project, and could foul up the whole thing. Maybe I naively think that we, as a society, can do some of the work of healing from capitalist trauma *now*, so we don't fuck things up with bitterness and hatred and fear if we do abolish the class divide.
In all honesty I might not be in any state to try and say anything important right now. I've been out of my antidepressant for several days now, and every time I move it's like electricity emanating out in to my body from my head. Like my brains are sloshing around. I dunno. But this is my gemlog so I can fill it with my unhinged and unmedicated ramblings if I feel like it. :)