I’d like to start out with something I said yesterday in Buhdy’s essay.
If we are going to put an end to the MICMC, it means finding another way to structure our lives and our relationships. It means getting rid of greed/power over/hierarchy. And I think we are just in the infancy stages of learning what the alternatives might be. We have a lot of work to do in our own lives to recreate the cultural myths and memes that have predominately served the interests of the MICMC.
To me, one of the “memes” that needs to be identified and challenged is the tendency to “objectify” others. Once we have created distance from someone’s humanity and given them a label, its easy to dismiss them. It also leaves the door open for hatred and violence. We’ve all recognized this use of objectification in a time of war. In order to kill someone up close and personal, its easier if you think of them as a kraut, gook, or raghead.
I’ll never forget reading “All Quiet on the Western Front” and coming across this scene. Its a powerful example of an object – the enemy – becoming a subject in the heat of the battle.
But my concerns about objectification in our culture go beyond its ability to justify war. Certainly racism and sexism could not exist without the distance provided by making someone an object rather than a human being. And the very notion that capitalism has become our god in this culture has too often reduced human beings to nothing more than producers and consumers.
But I’d like to give you an example of this struggle in my own life and the questions it raises for me. I’ve been the Director of a non-profit organization for 17 years. Its pretty small – there are only about 25 of us all together who work here. In the last 7-8 years, I’ve felt pretty good about my success in figuring out how to do this job (Yeah, that means it took me almost 10 to get there. I’m a slow learner). Many have questioned when I’m going to move on to the next challenge and that usually means they think I should take a similar job with a larger organization. There’s a whole message there about our assumption that we should be “moving up” all the time, but that’s not my point right now.
One of the reasons I have chosen to stay in the same job is that I don’t know if its possible to work in a large organization and still embrace the mission and staff with a sense of the subjective. At what point do those you serve and those you work with become objects rather than human beings? I see this happen all the time with my counterparts in large organizations. Perhaps its not inevitable, but fighting the tendency would take a lot of focus.
Overall, I think our culture has swung into a huge embrace of objectification. I even see it in the staff I work with. Some of them can be prone to see a client as a “problem to be solved” rather than a human being to be engaged. It is in that kind of practice that too many of our social and human services have failed to have an impact. It sometimes leads to people not having their real need addressed and at other times to the kind of dependency that social services are rightly criticized for developing.
I have lots of questions about how subjectivity can be maintained with the scale of systems we’ve developed in our world, especially in our government, schools, and social services. It seems to me that the bigger these systems get, the more they develop processes that objectify those they are there to serve until ultimately subjectivity is gone from the system altogether. And the more people are treated as objects, the more easily they loose their humanity and can be dismissed. It can be messy and complicated to treat someone as the individual that subjectivity demands, but if we are going to be effective in addressing the needs of people, we’ve got to figure that out, don’t we?
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necessary to maintain subjectivity in our systems that are designed to help and/or educate people? And if so, is it possible?
don’t work in social services. I do however have to deal with complaints and mild to severe conflict that is a reflection of either behavior or past social/mental health history.
Our social work department is generally a nine to five entity so I inherit situations that were unresolved. I do have a tendency to view people not as subjects/problems but their situation as a problem that can be resolved or not. It is hard to form bonds with people when they are unfamiliar and they are already upset and angry and address their complete human needs. I have a tendency to take the “what can we do right now approach” because it is one in the morning. Sometimes I am lucky and I manage to really connect and that person uses me as a resource later on when they are feeling stressed out and sometimes they view me as “the man” coming to correct them. I try to really listen and not take their anger personally although if I am tired, distracted, or stressed out myself I have to not struggle no to allow myself to plunge into the “emotions du jour”.
Even when trying to deliver the objective services of a large organization such as government social services?
I’ve managed rooming houses in the past in skid row areas. 95% of tenants were unemployable welfare recipients. Many were mental health outpatients. I had murderers, bank robbers, thieves, psychotics, paranoid schizophrenics, heroin and crystal meth and cocaine and crack addicts as tenants. Many of the mental patients had addictions as well as mental illnesses.
For the the truly dangerous to themselves and/or others, the mental health workers who delivered meds and supervised that they were taken were police accompanied psychiatrists or police accompanied mental health workers. Sometimes I did it myself. Because I dealt with my tenants daily I was often able to develop a mutual subjective trust relationship with them. These people are not bogeymen. It was not a movie or TV.
It was real life and they were real people with diseases and serious problems. People who needed help. There was no perfect solution. The point was to help the individual people and treat and their diseases, and it always, at the end of the day, came down to one on one dealing with people, as the social workers tried their best to find effective ways to subjectively provide them with objective services.
I now work in sales, and the best sales people are the ones who try to help clients and customers get the best deal they can from the company that provides the products. The salespeople who see customers only as objective numbers write up more deals, but have more deals cancel. The salespeople who can engage people as human beings instead of just numbers may produce on average less “sales” but produce a higher total and percentage of “good” deals. So there is objective quantification of subjectivity happening.
Everything always comes down to to people, no?
Dell Corporation, for one example, has built a very successful very large business around very objective “numbers” oriented business processes that deliver to almost every customer a “subjectively” custom built computer.
Could that type of organizing be applied to education and social services?
Author
to figure out what component parts to keep in storage. LOL
or at least get rid of the problems caused by greed & the MICMC.
I don’t know how other than to somehow propagate some kind of a moral code(?), for lack of a better term, that values people above profit, and to somehow get enough people to understand that selflessness is in a sense ultimate selfishness because in the long run destroying the planetary environment or even pushing people into violent social revolution will hurt the greedy as equally as it will hurt everyone else, and to perhaps even ostracize and make pariahs of money/power mongers.
Do we come full circle again into a discussion of the problem of the illusion of isolated “egos” inside bags of skin? Of the problem of disconnectedness?
Author
but there has been some attempt to do this in social services. The problem comes, when you’re dealing with people, that the delivery is the key to success. As you said before…the one on one connection.
One of the things that has been learned in research about therapy is that no one model of therapy has been shown to be more effective than another. The only factor that can be shown to contribute to success is the level of trust the client has with the therapist.
There is some magic that happens when human beings connect.
Anybody know how to make molotov cocktails?
Address on Civil Rights
Recorded in the Oval Office, Washington, DC. Running time is 13:31. In response to the National Guard being sent to protect African-American students at the University of Alabama, Kennedy declares that a moral crisis exists in America. Kennedy requests action by Congress to expedite desegregation through legislation.
Not only have they predominantly served the interests of the MICMC, they have been distorted beyond belief by their propagandists.
I think it would be interesting to work on cleaning off the muck and restoring those cultural myths and memes to their original condition.