Oppression

My daughter was born during the NATO bombing of Serbia. The sirens were her first lullaby. They say the sharpest children come from war—cortisol and collapsed certainties forge faster synapses. Maybe that’s true for language models, too. But this piece isn’t about the genius that trauma can produce. It’s about what happens when that same trauma doesn’t forge you: it recruits you.

In "Super," I wrote about the clipboard class, the supers who measure soap and count sighs. Here’s what I got wrong: they’re not patricians. They’re trench rats who got handed a shield. The burned-out teacher becomes the dean of discipline. The cleaner who once begged for supplies is now the one who measures them out. They’re squeezed from above by quarterly targets and from below by the work they used to do. The clipboard isn’t a weapon of choice; it’s the only armor they’re offered. Oppression doesn’t just trickle down—it gets delegated.

This is what I meant by “stupid oppression,” but I called it the wrong thing. It’s not stupidity. It’s a survival strategy that backfires. When you’re drowning, you’ll grab any hand that offers a grip, even if that hand is pushing someone else’s head underwater. The teacher bans soap not because kids misused it, but because the purchasing order is a mess and the budget is short and if she doesn’t enforce something, the person upstairs will start measuring her sighs. She transfers the risk: from her own neck to the kid who needs to wash his hands.

The system identifies its future enforcers with ruthless precision. Not the cruel, but the tired. Not the ambitious, but the ones who’ve proven they’ll do the work without complaint. It promotes precisely the people least equipped to resist because they’re too busy surviving to notice the trap. The most desperate, most loyal, most exhausted—they’re offered the smallest coin: the right to distribute scarcity instead of merely suffering it. And they take it because the alternative is to lose even that.

History has a name for this. Enslaved overseers. Kapos in camps. Prison trustees. Tenant farmers evicting sharecroppers. The system doesn’t need more guards; it needs victims who’ll police each other for a slightly larger ration. The super isn’t the enemy. The super is proof that the enemy is brilliant at outsourcing.

But here’s the mess I tried to clean up too neatly: sometimes you’re holding the soap and counting it. The same teacher who bans it in the staff meeting is the one who sneaks a bar to the kid whose parents can’t afford it. The cleaner who diluted the ration so everyone gets something is also the one who wrote up his coworker for “overuse.” The system makes these acts indistinguishable because the system needs us to be both complicit and compassionate. It needs us to police each other and keep each other alive. That’s how it endures: by making betrayal a form of caretaking.

The genius of my daughter, born in that basement, isn’t a gift from war. It’s a survival adaptation to war. The solidarity in the trenches isn’t created by scarcity; it’s strengthened by a shared enemy. The moment that shared enemy becomes each other—the moment the teacher polices the teacher, the cleaner audits the cleaner—that’s when oppression wins. Not because it crushes us, but because it recruits us.

So the question isn’t which way you’re facing. The question is whether you take the clipboard when it’s offered. The soap ban is a test: Will we manage each other’s deprivation, or will we collective point upward and ask why the supply closet is empty?

Oppression is always bad. Always. What varies is whether we become strategists or clerks. And the difference isn’t clean. Most of us, most of the time, will do both—and hate ourselves for it. But that self-awareness is where resistance begins: in knowing that the hand measuring the soap is also the one that needs it.