Politics & Power Quote by Kathy Acker

Internalization sounds clinical, even self-help adjacent, which is exactly why it makes such a lethal political weapon. Kathy Acker is pointing to a sleight of hand: power works best when it can outsource enforcement to your own nervous system. Instead of cops on every corner, you get people pre-policing themselves - swallowing shame, narrowing their desires, editing their speech - because theyve been trained to treat certain limits as natural, private, even moral.

The phrasing matters. "Used in this country" is deliberately blunt, a refusal to prettify the American habit of calling coercion "choice" and discipline "freedom". Acker, whose work tore at the seams of sexuality, authorship, and respectability, understood that politics is not only laws and elections; its the psychic management of bodies. Internalization is the mechanism that turns social hierarchies into personal feelings: if you are poor, you must be lazy; if you are unsafe, you must have invited it; if you are angry, you must be irrational.

The intent is accusatory but also diagnostic. Acker is naming how ideology becomes intimacy: the state and the market dont just tell you what to do, they teach you what to want, what to fear, and what to consider thinkable. "Effective" lands with bitter irony. If the trick works, resistance has to be more than policy critique; it has to be unlearning, a fight over the interior, where the most obedient citizen is the one who calls their own cage a personality.