I'm surprised that Bruce.E. Levine doesn't
mention the clearest sign of all that "Americans
are a broken people". Recently they have not
been not replenishing themselves in sufficient
numbers. In this they are following an even
larger population of "broken" Europeans who've
not been replacing themselves voluntarily for two
or three decades now. The predominant shaper and
selector of evolution, the environment, is at
work again. In our case the environment is not
just the ecological one but also the economic one
-- the new era of high specializations (and
increasing automation as a byproduct). As always,
the environment doesn't cull in any precise way
and there's always a large measure of
"unfairness" in the process but the end-result is
always decisive enough. In our case -- so far --
both of the two main classes have been affected
but there is already evidence that the 20-class
are much more aware of the problem than the
80-class and are already taking steps to make
sure that their numbers are maintained. They're
already saying that educational standards must be
vastly improved so, in all advanced countries,
the 20-class is reaching down to identify
talented people from the 80-class (usually those
with learning-friendly parents) with a variety of
meritocratic methods -- and at younger and
younger ages -- in order to fast-track them out
of the steadily failing state school systems.
Mind you, the political and business leaders of
the 20-class are not prepared to release their
nations' state schools from bondage and allow
each of them to compete freely for quality
production as their own schools do. If the
20-class did that then a wave of talented and
qualified young people would come along from the
80-class which would elbow itself very rapidly
into its protective practices. That would never
do! -- so it will have to remain a highly controlled process.
Keith
At 21:27 27/03/2012, Natalia wrote:
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>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
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1933392711/counterpunchmaga>Surviving
Americaâs Depression Epidemic: How to Find
Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone
Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web
site is <http://www.brucelevine.net>www.brucelevine.net
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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