Modern Day Curses and the Weaponization of Words

When most people think of curses, they think of something supernatural, like witches or sorcerers or lycanthropy and other legends. I have made the argument before that many legends, myths, and stories have metaphorical or allegorical applications to things that do in fact exist. I believe the concept of a curse falls into this category, but curses exist in a way most people often overlook.

One of the most notable examples, and one of the most important in terms of its social and reputational consequences is the act of labeling someone as something. Labeling acts as a curse because it puts someone in an identity box, and when that label is spread around a social group or community, the person who is labeled has that label be part of their identity in the eyes of the members of their community and social circles. Depending on how severe the label is, it may be exceedingly difficult to shake off and get rid of for that individual. False or misleading labeling of an individual can destroy relationships, ruin families, destroy economic and social opportunities and cripple the upward mobility of an individual.

Labels that have a stigma attached to them, usually stigmas based on fear and hate, are the most socially, economically, and politically crippling. These included things like mental illness diagnoses or the the committing or accusations of certain crimes or actions that have high social and cultural taboo in their respective communities.

Once a stigmatizing label is attached to someone and spread around a community, that person's social life and economic opportunity has the potential to suffer a devastating blow. Labels are like curses in that they follow you at every stage in your life, and everywhere you go. Labeling is particularly potent when it is done through legalities and the government. In this respect of labeling, you can honestly be reduced to a second class citizen and prevented from partaking in certain social activities and deprived of certain economic and career opportunities.

This type of labeling is all but impossible to shake off, change, or get rid of, as government and institutional bureaucracy often creates a massive paper trail of the label assigned to an individual. In this case, it can often be truly a lifelong curse, one that honestly maybe only an act of God can change.

Labeling is how genocides get their origin. Labeling is how a human being is dehumanized and reduced from a sentient, willful, complex individual to just a bureaucratic statistic of some government or organisation, "reduced to just a number" as some might put it.

Just prior to the collapse of the Rwandan government in 1994, the Hutu extremists, in their attempts to dehumanize the Tutsi ethnic group, used radio broadcasts in Rwanda to slander the Tutsis, labeling them as unhuman things like cockroaches or insects. Over 700,000 people died in the subsequent three month genocide. They were mostly killed by mobs armed only with machetes.

In the years prior to the Second World War, the Nazi Regime would have grade school aged German children read fairy tale stories with Jews often as the antagonists. These stories would say things like Jews want to drink the blood of German children and cook them and eat them and other forms of demonizing slander that precipitated the holocaust.

Slander and highly restrictive and destructive labeling are unequivocally real and often effective ways of cursing people, and they have been around forever.

Another method of cursing is calling someone a false label over and over again until the targeted individual starts believing it, and then weaponizing the persons capitulation to the curse by using the label you attached to that person against them after you convinced them that it was true.

Slander and labeling are in essence an often potent weaponization of words, and sadly can be very damaging. Sometimes irreversably damaging, and even can lead to death by both suicide and sometimes even murder.

Slander and Labeling are rooted in one of the primary foundational conflicts in reality: the battle between Truth and Deception. This battle has been going on for a very long time, and its even biblical. The Devil, in scripture, weaponizes slander and labeling all the time. Thank God that lies are based on a non-existence. This makes liars able to rebuked and the lies corrected and the damage repaired and healed over time.