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,
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
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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