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? Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've
Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of OppressionBy Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on
December 11, 2009, Printed on December 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/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 © 2009 Independent Media Institute. All
rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/ | 
