Change? Or Are We Just Failing to Organize Effectively?
By Don Hazen and Les Leopold and Bruce E. Levine
January 7, 2010.
Real change seems almost impossible. What are we doing wrong?
--
A few weeks ago Bruce Levine wrote a provocative article titled "Are
Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against
the Forces of Oppression." Levine suggested that many progressives
and much of the general population may be so broken by the system
that they've given up hope and become passive. He uses the metaphor
of an abusive relationship, in which lack of hope and the sense that
nothing matters make people passive instead of angry.
Levine, a radical psychotherapist practicing in Cincinnati, Ohio, has
carved out a popular niche with readers, writing about psychological
issues related to politics and change. Two of his most-read articles
are "The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty" and "
Has American Society Gone Insane?"
Longtime labor organizer and economic thinker Les Leopold, whose
recent book The Looting of America was excerpted on AlterNet, took
offense to Levine's article and wrote a response. While calling
Levine's argument an eyeopener, Leopold wrote that he has not
experienced the passivity Levine describes in labor unions and among
progressives. Leopold insists that progress will come from the hard
work of organizing: building infrastructure, connecting issues and
thinking big. We can't count on people like Al Gore, who was passive
after the 2000 election, and Barack Obama.
Levine crafted a counterresponse to Leopold. In his rejoinder, Levine
made a case that there are two classes of progressives. One group is
highly educated and relatively well off. They are often older, like
Levine and Leopold, and do not have alienating jobs. They tend to
enjoy certain privileges and have fairly good access to health care,
etc. In another group are those who are truly hurting from the
breakdown of the economic system.
Levine suggests that the more privileged progressives may be in
denial about the difficulties that working-class people experience;
young people who can't find jobs and are burdened by heavy debt from
college loans; older people who saw a lot of their savings evaporate
when the stock market fell or their companies ended their pensions.
Needless to say, some fundamental questions are being asked here. Are
progressives collectively depressed and incapable of action, depleted
by the relentless corporate machine? How much of progressive inaction
is a consequence of how comfortable the progressive elite is, and the
gap between affluent progressives and younger, less prosperous
progressives; especially those who do not work in the nonprofit
sector? How effective are the cherished, fundamental principles of
organizing and social change against the power of the banks, health
care corporations and tens of thousands of lobbyists? Is the basic
organizing model no longer applicable? Does it need revision, or is
it simply a matter of applying it more effectively and trying harder?
Like most important debates, there is no one truth, and Leopold and
Levine both make important and provocative arguments. On the one
hand, resources are not going to be more fairly distributed and
corporations are not going to be held accountable unless there is
more effective mobilizing with both grassroots pressure and in the
electoral arena. But at this point what is the path to change?
Especially when disenchantment with Obama seems to breed cynicism and
withdrawal, rather than anger and action?
Is traditional organizing for social change feasible in the current
environment? And how might it happen, especially given Levine's
suggestion that elite progressives are too comfortable to be in the
streets fighting for poor people or against wars with a voluntary
army, which provide employment to many young people at a time when
jobs are scarce.
While I admire Les Leopold's principles, I wish they were more
effective at this point in history. And I do think progressives have
minimized the class question. As a consequence, some of us have a
hard time imagining, or perhaps don't want to think about, how hard
it is for tens of millions of people in this country to just get by.
After all, most of us who have jobs in the nonprofit sector, in
progressive media and philanthropy are well paid, or at least
decently paid. Almost all of us have health care, and very likely
dental and vision, and even extra goodies. With some notable
exceptions there has not been widespread job loss in the nonprofit
sector. People with college degrees in general are doing much better
than the population at large.
AlterNet writer Adele Stan tackled this class disparity in "Shocking:
High School Grads Twice As Likely To Be Jobless Than College Grads
and Right-Wingers are Profiting From Their Pain," underscoring the
fact that college graduates in general fare much better in economic
downturns and are therefore often unaware of the pain suffered by
those without degrees.
It could be argued that many of us in the idea, media and funding
industries live, operate and succeed in a bubble. We mostly interact
with peers who are also well educated -- many at the best colleges --
and often have graduate degrees. Many of us boomers are incredibly
privileged, even in comparison to our younger, well-educated
brethren, because the cost of being educated and credentialed was so
much cheaper 30 years ago. And of course many in our sector come from
upper-middle-class families to begin with.
I know this scenario doesn't apply across the board, not even close.
There are many people working in the trenches, battling tough issues,
working with the poor, who are not privileged by any stretch of the
imagination. But there is a major class gap in the nonprofit, media,
philanthropic sector, and it may be having a significant impact when
we wonder why change is so difficult. What is the solution to this
possible dilemma? There is no easy answer. But thinking about it and
reflecting on our lifestyles, our privilege, and how we spend and
redistribute our hard-earned cash is certainly a place to start.
The three pieces by Levine and Leopold follow in order of the most
recent -- Levine's response to Leopold's critique of Levine's
original article. If this is a new discussion for you, and you want
to start from the beginning, scroll down until you get to Levine's
original piece. Assuming this back and forth provokes comments and
varying opinions, we will produce a followup article with the
thoughts and ideas from readers.
Don Hazen
--
BRUCE E. LEVINE: 'A Response to Les Leopold: Comforting the
Afflicted, Afflicting the Comfortable'
A friend in the clergy once told me, "I see my job as comforting the
afflicted and afflicting the comfortable." It is my experience that
among progressives, there are both the afflicted and the comfortable.
At different times in my life, I have been in each group and have
found that my level of affliction and comfort affects my exhortations.
The afflicted know they are being screwed but feel that they have no
voice, no platform, and that they are powerless to change their
powerlessness. They may work at alienating, mindless jobs in order to
hold on to their health insurance for the sake of a sick spouse or
kid; or they may be hustling three poorly paying jobs to pay college
loans, rent and a car payment, and have no time for activism; or they
may be unable to find even a poorly paying, mindless, alienating job,
and are helplessly watching the tsunamis of foreclosure and
bankruptcy close in on them. Afflicted progressives include young
people, older people, good people and smart people -- all feeling
voiceless and helpless to end their helplessness.
While I have been in that afflicted group for part of my 53 years on
the planet, in my last couple of decades, I have gradually been
inching into the comfortable group. I grew up in a working-class
neighborhood in New York City (Arverne in Rockaway) which both
Democrat and Republican politicians fucked up into a jobless,
impoverished, third-world wasteland, as powerless parents watched
helplessly. Throughout my junior high school and high school years, I
had that scared, helpless, powerless feeling that comes from worrying
about my draft lottery number, and knowing that the bastards --
especially Kissinger and Nixon -- couldn't care less if I was maimed
or killed in Vietnam. Then in my 20s in clinical psychology graduate
school, I felt like I had exchanged a wasteland neighborhood for a
wasteland profession that was increasingly about manipulating,
modifying and medicating alienated people to fit into an automaton society.
I no longer feel so powerless. I get to write articles for
CounterPunch, AlterNet, Z Magazine, Huffington Post and other
publications that give me a platform and a voice. If I actually got
paid for these articles, I would be disgustingly comfortable.
However, in order to make a living, I still must partake in
shit-eating financial dealings with the health
care-industrial-complex. But what I actually do in my practice itself
is not alienating. So while I have burned too many professional
bridges to allow for a comfortable prof job, I am far more
comfortable than I once was -- and far less afflicted and demoralized
than many other people. Comfortable enough to be helpfully afflicted
by certain truths.
Years ago, I read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United
States, and its most powerfully afflicting truth for me was not
anything about distant U.S. history but something relevant to the present:
In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive
without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given
small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police,
teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers,
technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers....They become
the guards of the system....If they stop obeying, the system falls.
Zinn is absolutely right. Most of my clinical psychologist training
was pretty much about socializing me to be a "guard of the system."
So thank you, Howard, for that great affliction.
I don't know how financially comfortable Les Leopold is, but I know
that he has a platform, as I do. He writes for some of the same
'zines I do, and we have both published books with the same
publisher. He also has what appears to be a non-alienating job as
director of two nonprofit educational organizations (the Labor
Institute and the Public Health Institute). So by my standards, Les
is comfortable and should be able to handle some affliction.
Les begins his critique of my article with this: "I feel compelled to
respectfully disagree with his basic analysis." Les then explains
that "political action doesn't fall from the sky; it requires
deliberate political infrastructure." Who can disagree with that? Not
me. The question is, why is powerful action not happening?
Les sees the answer in our "political infrastructures our activists
and leaders, our political parties and not by analyzing "U.S.
citizens' at large." If Les is simply pissed off at the failure of
activists, leaders and political parties, I have no quarrel with him.
However, shouldn't all of us -- including U.S. citizens at large be
part of the "political infrastructure"?
I am glad Les does not shame U.S. citizens at large, but I have
trouble understanding why he doesn't want to recognize the
demoralization of many of them, understand its root causes, and then
confront the institutional sources that break people's spirit of resistance.
Les also makes the point that there are many Americans who don't feel
broken. He offers up the Tea Party folks whom he wishes were broken
and passive, as well as progressive activists whom he celebrates.
Again, of course there are some Americans who don't feel broken and
demoralized. The point of my article was that there are many, many
Americans who do feel broken, and that comfortable progressives are
doing a disservice by not taking this seriously.
Comfortable progressives often seem afraid to acknowledge the
experience of helplessness and demoralization, as if acknowledging
the existence of that state actually creates defeatism and sanctions
inaction. Not true. People's pain needs to be validated before they
are receptive to any kind of suggestion. The good, smart people I
know who are caught up in this state of helplessness are not moved to
action by lectures about the history of successful movements and
advice to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I wish they were so
moved (that would be an easy fix), but more often those kinds of
lectures are a turnoff.
Comfortable progressives must realize that while we've been in tough
times before, there are certain forces in today's society that may be
making people especially young people -- feel more broken and weaker.
I was able to get a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from public institutions
between 1973 and 1985 without any parental financial support and
without accruing any debt. Today, because of the dramatic rise of
tuition, I would likely have a mountain of debt. I know for sure that
if I had walked out into the job world with that mountain of debt, it
would have been far less likely that I would have had the balls to
"un-network" myself by calling out my colleagues on their
diseasing-of-rebellion bullshit.
Les seems especially upset by the idea that truths don't always set
people free. Truths do sometimes set people free, especially when
people are not broken. Certainly Tom Paine's truths in Common Sense
energized many people. However, does Les think that African-American
slaves on a plantation or Jews in a concentration camp could have
freed themselves if only they had heard all the truths of their
oppression? Les is too smart of a guy to actually feel that way.
Encouraging liberation sometimes means offering compassion to people
who, for the time being, have almost no chance to successfully resist.
"I will fight no more forever," said Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
after the failure of his valiant effort to resist invading U.S.
government troops. Certainly, Les can have compassion for Chief
Joseph's feeling of brokenness. This famous line in Chief Joseph's
surrender speech has become, ironically, an energizing rallying cry
for many Native Americans. Chief Joseph's statement is a powerful
weapon that inflicts the pain of shame on the U.S. government for its
attempts at genocide and subjugation of Native Americans.
Maybe some of America's young people who feel broken do have just
enough energy to march in front of the Capitol and the White House
with signs and T-shirts saying, "You corporate whores win. You have
fucked with our lives so much that we too will fight no more
forever." Perhaps, for a couple of the corporate whores who have not
yet become completely soulless (that leaves out soulless scumbags
like Joseph Lieberman), this kind of shaming pain of a million kids
would have some impact. Maybe not. Who knows? It would be an
interesting experiment.
I am surprised that Les minimizes the value of small victories:
"Levine's analysis offers a way forward that involves building
'morale' through 'small victories.' That's not good enough. The
pursuit of the little ball right now, I believe, is a colossal
organizing mistake."
While Les, thankfully, sees some value in small victories, he feels
we have more important needs. He says, "We need more information,
more truth, and I intend to do all I can to share what I can with you."
I get energized by small victories. I would be energized, for
example, if the Nez Perce grabbed back, via cash or lawsuits, a few
thousand acres of their stolen land. Could Les be even a little
encouraged and energized -- and a little bit encouraging -- to a
group of teenagers who successfully "collectively bargained" with
their McDonald's supervisor for 15 more minutes each day for a break?
Like Les, I too love truth. One of a writer's great motivations is
discovering and telling the truth. Besides the egotistical motive of
being perceived as insightful, the altruistic motive is that
something good will surely come out of people knowing it. I wish my
declaring the truth of people's personal abusive relationships or
systemic corporate-governmental oppression was enough to set them
free. However, the deeper truth is that these kinds of truths are
often impotent and sometimes even shaming -- not exactly a great
recruiting tactic. My point -- which many of the afflicted seemed to
get and many who are comfortable did not -- is that many activists
have become lazy, pursuing only easy truths.
What if the fact that we are getting screwed by the various
governmental-industrial complexes is not a revelatory truth but one
that, as singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen says, "Everybody knows"?
What if the more important question is one that focuses on the forces
in our society that are demoralizing us and what we can do about this
so as to regain morale and energy?
Maybe it's not only the job of my clergy buddy but the job of all of
us to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Hopefully,
each year we gain greater wisdom in making that afflicted-comfortable
distinction.
Bruce E. Levine
--
LES LEOPOLD: 'Bruce Levine Says Americans Are Broken: Is He Right?'
Bruce Levine's thoughtful piece about why we're not fighting back has
hit a responsive cord among readers. I thank him for initiating this
critical discourse about activism. In the spirit of open dialogue, I
feel compelled to respectfully disagree with his basic analysis.
Political Action Doesn't Fall From the Sky; It Requires Deliberate
Political Infrastructure
Levine reminds us of how passive we seem to have been in the face of
obvious injustices hurled our way. As he points out there was little
to protest against the theft of the 2000 election by the Bush forces.
He further points out that we are again missing the moment concerning
health care -- that "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." (I recently asked similar questions about
the lack of protest against the current Wall Street rip-offs. See,
"Have We Forgotten How to March?")
Why aren't we in motion? His deeply disturbing analysis deserves a closer look:
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.
While this may describe individuals Levine has encountered, I can't
buy it as a political justification. I believe we can find more
compelling reasons by looking at our own political infrastructures
our activists and leaders, our political parties and not by
analyzing "U.S. citizens" at large. These "abuse" brush strokes are
too broad and cover up the detail we need to examine.
Mass demonstrations are almost always the product of hardcore
organizing. (The major exceptions were the spontaneous riots that
ripped through our country in the 1960s like the ones triggered by
the assassination of Martin Luther King.)
Those who have been involved in organizing mass demonstrations know
how much effort it takes. If the infrastructure to do all of this
hard work is not in place, it's an impossible task. Or if those who
control the infrastructures (churches, unions, environmental groups,
political parties, etc.) decide to sit it out, you won't succeed very
often. (Clearly, some moments are riper than others. In 1965, for
example, the Students for a Democratic Society shocked themselves and
everyone else when 50,000 turned out in Washington for their first
anti-war demonstration. But it still took considerable resources that
came from organized groups including the labor movement.)
Take the 2000 election that Levine uses as an example. The response
from the Democrats and the Republicans was quite different. The
Republicans flooded Florida with their top dogs who participated
actively in the recounts. I can still recall Bob Dole glowering as he
challenged every Democratic hanging chad. The Republicans also
concocted faux demonstrations by flying in staff.
Meanwhile the Democrats relied on the legal process even though they
could have organized massive demonstrations all over Florida. What
did Al Gore, the leader of the entire party, do after the Supreme
Court decision against him? Nothing. He meekly accepted the results
and moved on. He refused to call us to join him for mass protests at
the steps of the Supreme Court because he believed in the judicial
process, however flawed. He refused to rock the system because he was
so much a part of it.
You weren't there and neither was I because of choices made by Gore
and the Democratic Party, including its major constituent
organizations. But I find it difficult to blame us or the American
public for Gore's lack of will. You know full well the Republicans
would have fought to the bitter end. (Why don't they suffer more from
abuse syndrome?)
So rather than looking for the problem in the "American People" we
should examine our failure to create and mobilize progressive
infrastructures that have the wherewithal to organize large-scale
protests (like the French seem to do with great regularity and success).
Do the Totalitarians Want Us to Know the Truth?
Bruce Levine offers an intriguing conjecture that totalitarians might
be using the truth to beat us into submission, to further humiliate
us into inaction: "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?"
To back up this point, he cites comments given by George W. Bush just
before the 2000 election: "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the
have-mores. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base."
This remark, Levine believes, should have angered us to the point of
mass upheaval. And because we did not rise up, he cites this as a
sign of our abuse syndrome. Further, he believes this suggests that
Bush and company may have understood that the truth could be used to
"demoralize us even further."
Wrong example. The speech was given at the bi-partisan $800-a-plate
Al Smith dinner in New York on October 20, 2000, a few short weeks
before an election that everyone knew would be close. This was no
ordinary dinner and these were not your typical stump speeches. The
Al Smith dinner tradition requires the major candidates from both
parties to lampoon themselves. (See CBS News.)
In this speech Bush certainly was not a totalitarian banging us over
the head with the truth. He was banging his own head for a laugh,
which he got. Had he been serious, you can be sure that he and his
advisers would not want that line to get out to the public in swing
states just before an incredibly tight election. That kind of truth
would have cost him the election.
But more to the point, I don't think that Levine or anyone else can
identify one totalitarian who uses the truth to humiliate and
subjugate those they rule. Think for a moment of two infamous
American leaders who leaned toward the totalitarian -- Dick Cheney
and Dick Nixon. Their passion for secrecy and flat-out lying were
legendary -- from Watergate to weapons of mass destruction to outing
Valerie Plame. Lying to the public was their weapon of choice.
The record of totalitarian régimes in Italy, Spain, Germany and the
Soviet Union shows a consistent and willful disregard and hatred for
the truth. In fact, those who dominated those regimes constantly
undermined the truth and destroyed those who put it forth. Victims of
abusive relationships may become further debilitated by the truth,
but victims of totalitarianism hunger for the truth, and are willing
to die for it.
Who Are These Abused Americans?
We should be cautious whenever creating and using a massive category
like "broken Americans." When you push on it, it can shatter.
The broken Americans group certainly doesn't include those in the Tea
Party (whom I wish would be more passive). The abused also don't seem
to include the extremely vociferous followers of Rush and Beck. Those
folks are opinionated and confident in their points of view. If
anything, many of them come across more like abusers than abused.
Clearly, the beaten-down passive group does not include the tens of
thousands who are active in their unions each day, fighting against
incredibly long odds. It doesn't describe those who have spent the
past several years fighting for health care reform. It doesn't
describe MoveOn.org and the thousands of people who registered voters
and got out the vote for Obama. Nor does it describe the gay and
lesbian activists fighting right now for same-sex marriage. It
doesn't describe the tens of thousands who are struggling to protect
a woman's right to choose, especially in battleground states like
Nebraska and South Dakota. Also the category of abused, passive
Americans doesn't describe the millions of environmental activists
who are extremely effective on a range of issues from global warming
to toxic waste. And it doesn't describe the many who have made
difficult life choices to build the new world of organic farming and
other sustainable products.
The list of activist groups goes on and on (and my apologies for the
many who are not mentioned).
More to the point, I don't believe "abuse syndrome" describes you --
the person who is reading this piece right now.
Then who does it describe? Levine points to those subjugated by
financial debt, those without health insurance, those living in
social isolation in the suburbs and those who have been turned from
citizens into consumers. This is an amorphous grouping that covers
just about everyone, except for all the counter-examples we could
easily provide.
Yet Levine is tapping into a strong current that runs through our
political discourse. We sense a growing fatalism -- a feeling that
significant change is not possible even when our most basic
institutions are failing. We are frustrated that Obama seems less of
a change agent than hoped for. We wish more of us would be willing to
fight back. So the image of the "broken American" seems like a
reasonable explanation and I'm sure many of us have run into people
who fit this description. But I urge us to take care in extrapolating
from those anecdotal accounts to a general political account of "the
American people." We are far too diverse, and I hope, far too resilient.
Does the Truth Set Us Free or Subjugate Us?
Perhaps Levine's most eye-popping claim, at least for me, is that the
American people may be so broken that the truth will not set us free.
You can understand why this would get to me. Going after the truth,
however murky, is what I try to do. I write because I'm trying to
share an analysis, a sense of reality that I hope is as truthful as
possible, as well as empowering. I work closely with editors and
fact-checkers by choice because I want them to keep me honest. It's
very easy to twist the truth, to write propaganda, to get lost in
ideology, to subjectively slant the analysis. So it will take one
hell of an argument for me to stop trying, and I will have a great
deal of internal resistance to thinking that it's not a good idea to
share the truth with the public, even with that segment who might be
in the "abused" category.
Levine's discussion puts us into a kind of Catch 22 because he quite
obviously is sharing a truth with us. But if the truth doesn't set us
free, why is he bothering to write to us? Aren't we also suffering
from too much truth? (You have debts? You live in the suburbs? You're
a consumer?) If we're not the abused, then who are "we" and who are "they"?
"They" seem to be "elitist helpers" who use the truth recklessly. For
example, he writes:
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.
But are Levine's readers and commentators the elitists or the broken?
Do we need a heavy dose of Levine's "truth" or a "shot of morale"?
I vote for the truth, even Bruce Levine's provocative version.
Because the alternative more often than not is not "a shot of morale"
-- it is falsehood. If we are confused and immobilized, I'm willing
to wager that the suffering is enhanced by being lied to again and
again. We've been lied to about the economy. We've been lied to about
Vietnam and Iraq. Lying is our public way of life. In fact lying and
giving us a boost in morale often come packaged together -- I'm
thinking of Reagan's "Morning in America" and Contra-gate. I don't
think we know whether the truth will set more Americans free, because
there has been so little of it coming from public officials.
But let me pose a more basic question to you: Do you find the truth
empowering or debilitating? If you think the truth is extremely
valuable, then what makes you so different from the rest of America?
To me the very definition of elitist is someone who withholds the
truth because he or she doesn't think the other person can handle it.
Democracy means that we have to handle the truth, painful or not,
syndrome or not.
So What Do We Do?
Levine's analysis offers a way forward that involves building
"morale" through "small victories." That's not good enough. The
pursuit of the little ball right now, I believe, is a colossal
organizing mistake.
Much of organizing for the past generation has focused on "small
victories." Following the teachings of Saul Alinsky, community
organizers were trained to produce small concrete results to keep
those we organized from becoming discouraged. As the small victories
mounted, some organizations like ACORN, the Industrial Areas
Foundation and others would build up the victories to influence
higher and higher levels of policy -- from the local schools to city
minimum wage campaigns to state programs to provide health care for kids.
Many community organizers did not feel that they or their
constituents needed any education about the shape of the entire
economy or the role of Wall Street since their organizations were not
poised to influence that level of policy. It seemed like a waste of
time since the American economy was unlikely to collapse. The 1930s
were long gone. (The WTO protests in Seattle seem like a major
exception but that massive effort had considerable support from the
labor movement, especially the Steelworkers.)
Our organizing strategy needs to be enlarged. We need both small
victories and we need big picture agendas and struggles. When the
economic system nearly collapsed, we didn't know how to respond, in
part because we had ignored those questions for too long. The banking
elites certainly knew how to respond; they engineered the largest
transfer of wealth since slavery. To focus on small victories right
now, I believe, will give bigger and bigger victories to the financial elites.
The Tea Party folks got it together in a hurry, but progressives seem
at a loss. But that doesn't have to be a permanent condition and it
has nothing to do with abuse syndrome. Rather we have to relearn how
to develop broad agendas and campaigns like progressives did to usher
in the New Deal. Building an economic agenda with popular resonance
won't come easy. But if we don't challenge the very fundamentals of
Wall Street finance, we will enter what I'm calling the "billionaire
bailout society," where the wealthy get to amass vast riches, gamble
to gain even more, and then use the rest of us as a piggy bank to
bail them out when they lose. To me, that's fundamentally abusive.
Here's the rub. I suspect one of the reasons we're not in motion is
that we feel intimidated by the financial elite and their complex
financial casinos. We don't just need more morale. We need more
information, more truth, and I intend to do all I can to share what I
can with you. We need to build up our economic literacy so that we
can duke it out with the big boys.
If I'm contributing to your abuse syndrome, I apologize. But I doubt
that I am. I have the confidence that as we educate each other we
will develop new modes of activism to challenge the beast. In fact,
that may be our biggest problem. The old ways of protest don't seem
to fit our new realities, but we don't yet know how to combine our
many new communication tools to make our defiant voices heard. It may
take a generation or two, but we'll find a way, because ultimately we
have no choice.
The truth may not set us free right away, but it drives us forward.
And what else do we really have besides each other and the truth?
Let's drink to that and to Bruce Levine for prodding us forward.
Happy New Year!
Les Leopold
--
BRUCE E. LEVINE: 'Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped
Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression'
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, discouraged 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.
Commercialism 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 meimpossible
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
--
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and
Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of
America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our
Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperityand What We Can Do About It (Chelsea
Green, 2009).
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist whose latest book is
Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy,
and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).
His Web site is www.brucelevine.net
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