The knowledge of the Third Thing makes for a disturbing presence in that part of our mind which is not unconscious but also not fully conscious. We are too ashamed to speak this knowledge directly, but it nonetheless expresses itself through a conspicuous denial.
A man might become confused when he says to his wife “You look even more beautiful without make-up” and she acts annoyed instead of grateful. It was just a compliment right? Yes, but a compliment that serves as a denial of the cliché that a woman needs make-up in order to make herself attractive to men. By positing his wife as the exception, the husband half-consciously reaffirmed the rule.
How do you fight an idea when even its rejection can serve as a reproduction? It’s much easier to fight a man who says “Women need make-up to be attractive to men” than it is to fight the poor stupid husband who is caught up in this idea much like many women are.
The thing to do then is to hold the idea to light and say “This is wrong”. The difficulty then is how to deal with the flood of denial from people who say “Of course it’s wrong, who said it was right? I sure didn’t!”
This is what makes the phrase “Black lives matter” so incredibly powerful. It shouldn’t offend anyone, since no one (neo-nazis and KKK excluded of course) is claiming that black lives don’t matter. So what is white America so upset about? What America is desperately trying to deny is that in its public unconscious, black lives do not matter as much as white ones. A black life doesn’t have the same value as a white one. This is why so many people try to change the phrase to “All lives matter”, to erase the disturbing implications of “Black lives matter”. Ironically, this white resistance is the triumph of the black movement, since it shows that racism is much more widespread than a handful of clansmen and neo-nazis. “All lives matter” finally makes tangible the institutional racism that oppresses black people.
So here we have two different rejections of a Third Thing knowledge. “Black lives matter” rejects the content of the idea, while “All lives matter” rejects the notion that this idea is even operative.
Often the lines between these two rejections are more blurred, especially in left-wing circles. When a man says “Fat women can be super attractive”, is he saying that because he feels accused of thinking something mean about fat women, or because he is trying to create a society where attractiveness isn’t constrained by beauty standards? The former only reproduces the Third Thing, while the latter challenges it.
The only way to loosen the hold that the Third Thing has over us is to become conscious of it. This can be a painful process because of the often horribly racist and sexist content, and because uttering this content is highly stigmatised. But what if this stigma is caused only in part by an honest societal rejection of sexism and racism? What if this stigma is also caused by the societal repression of sexism and racism? Maybe the time has come to challenge the stigma, to be able to say: “The world, including me, is racist and sexist”.
Maarten Schumacher 