Figure 6d.

Unmasking power: Recognizing the seven mental moves that colonize the imagination
This is based on Chela Sandovals adaptation of Roland Barthes rhetoric of supremacy. The moves are practiced when people or groups of people uncritically see the dominant culture as normal and natural.

mental move or habit of mind

allowing difference only in small doses denying of history

description
habit of allowing difference and dissimilarity only in cautious injections of small doses

outcomes
incorporates only small tidy portions of difference to ensure that the true depth, enormity and pain associated with difference is masked or ignored all institutions and practices remain as is tames and limits imagination as viewers prevents the recognition of any responsibility for what has and will become or any ability they might have to intervene renders one incapable of viewing actual differences in the other face to face with the other, one blinds oneself ignores the differences denies the other transforms the other into oneself freezes meaning in place, protecting and legitimating what is *creates a closed loop where the question refers to the answer and then relies on authority or history to prevent further debate or discussion

habit of distancing all objects, practices and institutions from the material history that made them what they are habit of comparing and weighing in order to equate all differences habit of either brushing differences aside as unimportant or assimilating them habit of taking refuge behind argument of legitimating authority where there is merely a gesture of rationality (some example statements might be, thats just the way it is! or because I say so or truth is truth!) *habit of using norms about how the world works to defend that which cannot stand up to reason and debate while casting any alternative view of the world as naive or utopian (an example reply for the question why must nations go to war? is because that is what nations do!)

denying the extent of differences by Identifying

freezing meaning

mental move or habit of mind

wanting neither and choosing what is by default

description
habit of feigning neutrality or objectivity by reducing reality to two or more formal opposites and then saying I want neither this nor that. habit of valuing images, objects, people according to the quantity of effects they produce: the more the better habit of connecting the search for increase with a higher, better, more noble existence habit of seeing constructed knowledge as common sense: speaking and knowing with certainty, asserting ones reality as if there were no other habit of seeing what one believes as a statement of fact, denying the possibility of being mistaken

outcomes
register differences, then reject those differences and falls back on what is appear to take higher moral ground by making no commitment to alternative direction goodness of quality reduced to quantity ability to dismiss those who have less quantity, as the subjugated often do, as being lower, worse, less noble, etc. become convinced that how things are is how things ought to be

believing quality is quantity

denying possibility of being mistaken

* This helpful explanation of freezing meaning (what Chela Sandoval calls tautology) comes from commentary in the online magazine In the Fray that can be found at inthefray.org