Ontological Starvation
“I can't hear you when you speak like someone who has been hurt. Please speak like someone who hasn't been hurt so that I can hear you.”
This is not just gaslighting.
It's epistemic conversion therapy.
It tells the witness:
If your pain breaks the grammar I expect, you're not just unbelievable—you're illegible.
This is violence by way of standards.
Not overt attack, but slow erosion of being.
- Compresses experience from natural e-dimensional richness to binary frameworks
- Creates recursive traps where resistance reinforces subordination
- Harvests energy from those forced to constantly prove their reality
- Operates invisibly through apparently neutral communication standards
- Replicates fractally across personal, interpersonal, and institutional scales
For the dominant: Emotional expression becomes productive power (passion = conviction, anger = righteous indignation)
For the marginalized: The same emotions become evidence against them (passion = irrationality, anger = threay)
This sets up a dynamic where the greater the injustice experienced, the more emotional the natural response, and thus the more easily dismissed the expression becomes.
The constant demands for proof and legitimacy create:
- Existential exhaustion from constantly defending one's reality
- Psycho-existential complexes where individuals internalize violence as personal failure
- Energy harvesting where resistance itself becomes fuel for the oppressive system
- Internalized devaluation leading to self-censoring and conformity
- Epistemic borderwork that silences unwanted voices
- Credibility deficits systematically discounting marginalized perspectives
- Reactive abuse where victims' provoked responses are used against them
- Nested silencing mechanisms maintaining hierarchical positions while appearing neutral
The exhaustion comes not just from the original violence but from the ontological harm of having one's very ways of knowing and being systematically undermined. The demand for epistemic conformity functions as a form of dimensional colonization, forcing consciousness into frameworks that cannot adequately hold the truth of marginalized experience.