Sam Smith dug up another good article, posted below.
Natalia
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/are_americans_a_broken_people_why_we%27ve_stopped_fighting_back_against_the_forces_of_oppression/?page=entire
Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against
the Forces of Oppression
A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent
corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer
have the will to save ourselves?
/December 11, 2009/ |
by Bruce.E. Levine
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do
not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a
demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed
because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious
oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S.
population?
Can /anything/ be done to turn this around?
/Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed
do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?/
Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses,
bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies,
emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces,
and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get
weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies,
abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain
in these relationships.
/Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are
deep in these abuse syndromes? /
No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive
submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can
feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one
already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the
pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down
or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of
one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive
actions.
/Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?/
In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance,
and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing
their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected
officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions
of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this
betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial
industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these
circumstances.
Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al
Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the
one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed
Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized
5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked:
"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the
winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser
is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an
impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few
demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice.
Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they
have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it.
And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more
psychologically broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same
reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel
helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And
ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the
face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape
strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions,
which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all
abuse syndromes.
/Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed
because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious
oppression will demoralize us even further?/
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of
Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of
people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people
call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of
inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come
to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the
2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their
full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get
away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the
boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
/What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S.
population?/
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and
terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other
dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by
financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a
powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on
the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of
having no health insurance.
The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation
created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 /American
Sociological Review/ study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in
Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25
percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10
percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.)
Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, /Bowling Alone/, describes
how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of
U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in
face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization,
commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other
variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union
activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other
the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has
rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic
necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other
people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that
alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
*Schools and Universities*: Do most schools teach young people to be
action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people
that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools
provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of
authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey,
John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and
John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a
miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief
means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where
kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they
often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find
meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places
where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of
compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept
bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
*Mental Health Institutions*: Aldous Huxley predicted today's
pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he
said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a
pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."
Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with
authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with
psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom,
resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more
compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis
for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often
actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and
"often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive
authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive
defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD
will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they
have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good
time and in control, the "disease" goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest,
they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting
depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason
why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of
rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this
passive-aggressive revolution.
*Television*: In his book /Four Arguments for the Elimination of
Television/ (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics
such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich)
compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of
Autocracy."
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for
breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so
that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2)
separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4)
occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and
thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV
itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug
advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates
or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8)
redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
*Commericalism of Damn Near Everything*: While spirituality, music, and
cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all
of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn
near everything -- not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of
the masses."
The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of
"citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and
selling within community strengthens that community and that this
strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While
citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind
of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a
temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing
self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from
normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased
products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
/Can anything be done to turn this around?/
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths
about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them
free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of
courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the
vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over
immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized
population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have
not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft
of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health
professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in.
Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image,
spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the
traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create
patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In
contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this
kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session
that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in /Understanding Power: The
Indispensable Chomsky/, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the
audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of
hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel
hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the
chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably
not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those
predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of
your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that
assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the
assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only
rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the
advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the
overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in
Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively
opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got
involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me /impossible/
that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my
evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a
complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are
either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist
"helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight
people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric
intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by
his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become
demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the
immobilized need a shot of morale.
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is
Surviving AmericaâEUR^(TM)s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale,
Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1933392711/counterpunchmaga>
(Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net
<http://www.brucelevine.net>
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