The captivity of grievance: A challenge to modern progressive ideology

By Michael Hancock | Commentary, Undercurrent Substack

The Psychological Chains Hidden Inside the Language of Compassion

There are chains that can be seen. There are chains that must be discovered.

The visible chain is the easier one to condemn. It clanks. It bruises. It announces itself in iron, law, lash, and blood. Chattel slavery was such an evil. It placed one man’s body under another man’s ownership and then constructed an entire moral fiction to justify the theft. It was not merely an economic system. It was a theological lie. It denied what Genesis declared at the beginning: “God created man in His own image.”

That is where every serious conversation about human dignity must begin.

Not with race. Not with class. Not with grievance. Not with politics. Not with ideology. Not with the shifting vocabulary of social fashion.

With God.

Genesis 1:27 gives us the first anthropology: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” That statement is the foundation of human equality, human dignity, human responsibility, and human freedom. Before man is anything else, he is an image-bearer.

Progressive ideology begins elsewhere.

It begins not with creation, but with oppression. Not with the soul, but with the category. Not with moral agency, but with social location. It tells people they are primarily products of systems, victims of structures, captives of invisible forces, members of oppressed classes, and inheritors of permanent injury.

That is not liberation. It is captivity dressed in the language of compassion.

And while it is not more physically brutal than chattel slavery, it may be more psychologically devastating precisely because it is harder to detect, easier to transmit, and capable of infecting not merely one people, but the imagination of humanity itself.

The slave master once said, “You belong to me.”

The modern ideologue says, “You belong to your wound.”

Both are lies.

One attacks the body. The other colonizes the imagination.

This is the more subtle danger of modern progressive thought, especially in its social justice and critical theory forms. Critical legal theory teaches that law is often a mask for power. Critical race theory teaches that society is structured primarily around racial domination. Gender theory teaches that male and female are not created realities but social constructions to be dismantled. Queer theory presses further still, treating boundaries themselves as oppressive.

The common thread is not justice. It is suspicion.

Everything must be interrogated. Everything must be deconstructed. Everything must be reduced to power.

Family becomes patriarchy. Merit becomes privilege. Standards become whiteness. Discipline becomes oppression. Order becomes domination. Disagreement becomes harm. Forgiveness becomes complicity. Faith becomes a tool of control. Responsibility itself is treated with suspicion, as though discipline, work, and moral agency are not universal virtues but tools of oppression.

A worldview like this does not produce free men and women. It produces people trained to distrust the very things that make freedom possible.

This is especially destructive when aimed at Black Americans. After surviving the monstrous lie that they were less than human, they are now offered a new lie: that they are permanently acted upon by systems beyond their control. The first lie denied their humanity. The second diminishes their agency.

It says: your future is not primarily yours to build.

It says: your condition is chiefly explained by forces outside yourself.

It says: your neighbor is not first your neighbor, but your oppressor.

It says: your country is not flawed but redeemable, but fundamentally hostile.

It says: your suffering is not something to overcome, but something to organize around.

This is the captivity of grievance.

And grievance is a poor substitute for greatness.

To be clear, the answer is not to deny racism. Nor is it to pretend America’s history is clean. A nation that needed a civil war to settle the question of human bondage and a civil rights movement to enforce the obvious truth of equal citizenship has no right to sentimental innocence.

But honest memory is not the same thing as permanent accusation.

There is a difference between remembering injustice and building an identity around injury. There is a difference between teaching history and manufacturing resentment. There is a difference between demanding equal dignity and cultivating permanent victimhood.

The old civil rights movement understood this better than many of its modern heirs. Its greatest moral power came from appealing to the promises America had already made but failed to keep. It did not ask America to abandon its founding creed. It demanded that America live up to it.

That was its genius.

It spoke in the language of Scripture, Constitution, conscience, and citizenship. It appealed to the image of God and the Declaration’s claim that all men are created equal. It did not say, “Burn down the moral order.” It said, “Honor it.”

Modern progressivism often does the opposite. It does not call people upward into shared truth. It divides them downward into competing grievances. It does not heal memory. It weaponizes it. It does not restore dignity. It redistributes resentment.

This is why its psychological effect is so debilitating. A man can see a chain on his wrist. But how does he see a chain in his assumptions? How does he escape a prison he has been taught to call enlightenment?

Ideological bondage spreads because it does not arrive as tyranny. It arrives as empathy. It speaks gently. It says it is here to validate pain, expose oppression, amplify voices, center lived experience, and dismantle harm. But beneath the therapeutic language lies a devastating message: you are not primarily an image-bearer, a moral agent, a builder, a creator, a father, a mother, a neighbor, a citizen, or a child of God.

You are your wound.

Once that lie takes root, it can be passed from parent to child, teacher to student, activist to institution, institution to policy, policy to culture. It becomes viral. Not because it is true, but because it offers a ready-made explanation for pain without requiring the harder work of responsibility, forgiveness, discipline, repentance, reconciliation, and rebuilding.

Christianity offers something better.

It begins with dignity, but it does not end there. It gives man worth, but also responsibility. It teaches that truth liberates, sin enslaves, forgiveness heals, work dignifies, family forms, and God redeems.

That is the path out.

Black Americans do not need another ideology telling them they are trapped. They need the truth that has always been higher than every oppressor and every false liberator: they are made in the image of God.

So is every human being.

That is why this argument is not finally about race. It is about mankind. Any ideology that replaces God’s image with political identity will eventually enslave everyone it claims to liberate.

The body may be free.

But the mind can still be in chains.

Hancock also publishes on Substack. You can check out more of his work here.

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