Kumar Das (On Milgram)

According to Milgram, the subjects, through signing the
contract to become a part of the experiment, entered into an
agentic state [4]. The agentic state of a person in a society is influenced by the milieu or lattice of our social structure which is often based upon a hierarchical form. This
hierarchical form of the society is internalized by the
individuals living in that society throughout their raising
since birth – going first through family and then through
school and other institutional modulators. These past
antecedent modulations of a subject’s mental constitution,
influenced and guided by various situational determinants,
often enforces and encourages them to immerse into a typical
agentic state casting off their individual independence of
actions and behaviours.

In the agentic state created by this experiment, the
experimenter claimed an authoritative power to which
obedience was usually automatic and socially accredited.
Signing the contract and pledging to help the experimenter
for the sake of science further bound the subjects to that state where they lost the liberty to act upon their own, and where breaking off from the allegiance was considered socially disapproved and supposed to confer shame and discredit upon the subjects. Within this ambience, even if the subjects felt their own intentions and mental tendencies were going against the proceedings of the experiment, yet they found it difficult to get them out of the situation, and continued to carry out the experimenter's commands. Disobedience only emerged when the force of this personal strain, arising out of the conflict between the individual's own intentions or mental tendencies and the experiment's demands, outweighed the binding factors that had been keeping them submerged into that agentic state.

Other explanations for the outcome of the experiment
include conformity with the request of the experimenter, and
yielding to the 'foot in the door technique' [7-8]. When the
subjects were complying with the small requests of the
experimenter to give low doses of shocks, at the same instant, they were also synchronically giving way to conforming and considering themselves as the type of persons behaving that way. So, when they reached to the positions demanding of delivering larger voltage shocks, they felt less cognitive dissonance as they had been already accustomed to it. However, Milgram excluded conformity as a possible
reason for the result as mutually countervailing demands, both from the experimenter and from the learner, to conform in favour of them in the experiment actually nullified or zeroed its effect[4]. But it depended also on the closeness of the persons in the experiment. In experiment 5, the subject and the experimenter were in the same room whereas the learner was in the other room; but in experiments, where the subject and the learner were in the same room, the obedience to the experimenter fell.

Krishanu Kumar Das

"The past practices - pursuit of the highest possible economic growth rates, extending the culture of excessive consumption to additional billions of people, and treating the biosphere as a mere assembly of goods and services to be exploited (and used as a dumping ground) with impunity - must change in radical ways."

Vaclav Smil

Reid (Irish Times)

"As we become stronger, we may be able to offer a helping hand to pull our able bodied friends away from their inadequacies so they no longer need us as dependents. It may be that the able bodied will come to lean on us for support instead of the other way round".



"Our duty is to lead so called able bodied citizens away from their imaginary world of physical and mental perfection into the true world where we all have to live together and share our imperfections".



"How could a charity run mostly by sighted people expect to know what blind persons want?"


"The medical model limits disability to that which can be described and treated by a doctor, followed by rehabilitation and discharge. Under this regime, the doctor is all powerful. The medical model may be useful when relevant and professional, but...Disability is a social, economic and ethical, not a medical, problem and should be treated as such".

"The charity model is equally destructive. Some people need others to be dependent on them, to comfort them and make then feel better and so become givers of charity. But charity postulates dependency, expects gratitude and denies equality. The do gooder feels "good" and seldom stops to consider the well being of his victim".



"Disability harnesses you into exclusion. This makes you frustrated and angry. What did you do to deserve this?"


"The foundations supporting disability apartheid are weak and can be shattered, it is fear, supported on the twin pillars of inadequacy and dependency, that keeps the barrier in place".



"APARTHEID against blacks in South Africa has crumbled like the Berlin Wall. Discrimination, against women is lessening. But people with disabilities find themselves still segregated, out on the margins of society and expected to be grateful for crumbs of charity. Until recently, they had no voice and, no power. They were looked on as having little value".

BEATRICE REID

 

Chomsky

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege. 

       Noam Chomsky

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

            Noam Chomsky

Chomsky

An ideal form of social control consists in an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends. 

            Noam Chomsky

Oakeshott

“To theorize’ means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning.”

“The process of experiencing is well described by Goethe when he says that our life is made up of our connections with the world about us, and that we must each spin our own web and sit at the centre to catch what we can.[21] The web itself is made up of past experiences, and each new connection with the world about us, in so far as it is fully known and understood, is an addition to that web, and so an added means of experiencing.”

“For there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellence of it, to its neighbours.”

 Michael Oakeshott

Næss and Sessions

 

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.

   This formulation refers to the biosphere, or more accurately, to the ecosphere as a whole. This includes individuals, species, populations, habitat, as well as human and nonhuman cultures. From our current knowledge of all-pervasive intimate relationships, this implies a fundamental deep concern and respect. Ecological processes of the planet should, on the whole, remain intact. “The world environment should remain ‘natural’” (Gary Snyder).

   The term “life” is used here in a more comprehensive nontechnical way to refer also to what biologists classify as “nonliving”; rivers (watersheds), landscapes, ecosystems. For supporters of deep ecology, slogans such as “Let the river live” illustrate this broader usage so common in most cultures.

   Inherent value as used in (1) is common in deep ecology literature (“The presence of inherent value in a natural object is independent of any awareness, interest, or appreciation of it by a conscious being.”) [1]

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

   More technically, this is a formulation concerning diversity and complexity. From an ecological standpoint, complexity and symbiosis are conditions for maximizing diversity. So-called simple, lower, or primitive species of plants and animals contribute essentially to the richness and diversity of life. They have value in themselves and are not merely steps toward the so-called higher or rational life forms. The second principle presupposes that life itself, as a process over evolutionary time, implies an increase of diversity and richness. The refusal to acknowledge that some life forms have greater or lesser intrinsic value than others (see points 1 and 2) runs counter to the formulations of some ecological philosophers and New Age writers.

   Complexity, as referred to here, is different from complication. Urban life may be more complicated than life in a natural setting without being more complex in the sense of multifaceted quality.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

   The term “vital need” is left deliberately vague to allow for considerable latitude in judgment. Differences in climate and related factors, together with differences in the structures of societies as they now exist, need to be considered (for some Eskimos, snowmobiles are necessary today to satisfy vital needs).

   People in the materially richest countries cannot be expected to reduce their excessive interference with the nonhuman world to a moderate level overnight. The stabilization and reduction of the human population will take time. Interim strategies need to be developed. But this in no way excuses the present complacency — the extreme seriousness of our current situation must first be realized. But the longer we wait the more drastic will be the measures needed. Until deep changes are made, substantial decreases in richness and diversity are liable to occur: the rate of extinction of species will be ten to one hundred times greater than any other period of earth history.

4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

   The United Nations Fund for Population Activities in their State of World Population Report (1984) said that high human population growth rates (over 2.0 percent annum) in many developing countries “were diminishing the quality of life for many millions of people.” During the decade 1974–1984, the world population grew by nearly 800 million — more than the size of India. “And we will be adding about one Bangladesh (population 93 million) per annum between now and the year 2000.”

   The report noted that “The growth rate of the human population has declined for the first time in human history. But at the same time, the number of people being added to the human population is bigger than at any time in history because the population base is larger.”

   Most of the nations in the developing world (including India and China) have as their official government policy the goal of reducing the rate of human population increase, but there are debates over the types of measures to take (contraception, abortion, etc.) consistent with human rights and feasibility.

   The report concludes that if all governments set specific population targets as public policy to help alleviate poverty and advance the quality of life, the current situation could be improved.

   As many ecologists have pointed out, it is also absolutely crucial to curb population growth in the so-called developed (i.e., overdeveloped) industrial societies. Given the tremendous rate of consumption and waste production of individuals in these societies, they represent a much greater threat and impact on the biosphere per capita than individuals in Second and Third World countries.

5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

   This formulation is mild. For a realistic assessment of the situation, see the unabbreviated version of the I.U.C.N.’s World Conservation Strategy. There are other works to be highly recommended, such as Gerald Barney’s Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States.

   The slogan of “noninterference” does not imply that humans should not modify some ecosystems as do other species. Humans have modified the earth and will probably continue to do so. At issue is the nature and extent of such interference.

   The fight to preserve and extend areas of wilderness or near-wilderness should continue and should focus on the general ecological functions of these areas (one such function: large wilderness areas are required in the biosphere to allow for continued evolutionary speciation of animals and plants). Most present designated wilderness areas and game preserves are not large enough to allow for such speciation.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

   Economic growth as conceived and implemented today by the industrial states is incompatible with (1)-(5). There is only a faint resemblance between ideal sustainable forms of economic growth and present policies of the industrial societies. And “sustainable” still means “sustainable in relation to humans.”

   Present ideology tends to value things because they are scarce and because they have a commodity value. There is prestige in vast consumption and waste (to mention only several relevant factors).

   Whereas “self-determination,” “local community,” and “think globally, act locally,” will remain key terms in the ecology of human societies, nevertheless the implementation of deep changes requires increasingly global action — action across borders.

   Governments in Third World countries (with the exception of Costa Rica and a few others) are uninterested in deep ecological issues. When the governments of industrial societies try to promote ecological measures through Third World governments, practically nothing is accomplished (e.g., with problems of desertification). Given this situation, support for global action through nongovernmental international organizations becomes increasingly important. Many of these organizations are able to act globally “from grassroots to grassroots,” thus avoiding negative governmental interference.

   Cultural diversity today requires advanced technology, that is, techniques that advance the basic goals of each culture. So-called soft, intermediate, and alternative technologies are steps in this direction.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

   Some economists criticize the term “quality of life” because it is supposed to be vague. But on closer inspection, what they consider to be vague is actually the nonquantitative nature of the term. One cannot quantify adequately what is important for the quality of life as discussed here, and there is no need to do so.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

   There is ample room for different opinions about priorities: what should be done first, what next? What is most urgent? What is clearly necessary as opposed to what is highly desirable but not absolutely pressing?

9. Arne Næss and George Sessions

Illouz

"If a true German was someone of Aryan ancestry – that is, if citizenship became a matter of biological lineage – it was far easier to turn, overnight, bona fide citizens into non-citizens. Nazis thus illustrated what sociologists know: namely, that groups do not have intrinsic or natural boundaries. These boundaries – between “us” and “them” – can be easily shifted. Jews viewed themselves as full members of the German or French nations until these nations “reclassified” them according to ethnic or racial criteria. The Nazi notion of race divided humanity into un-mixable human groups, making mixing itself a crime, the sign of a degenerate humanity".

"A distinctive characteristic of evil regimes in general is the belief in the need to preserve the racial or ethnic or religious purity of the dominant group, with minority groups – be they “Jews,” “Muslims,” “Tutsis” or “Armenians” – becoming a qualitatively distinct group, a compact entity perceived to be radically “other,” distinct from the majority by dint of some invisible and powerful criterion..."

"Such polarization between social groups, de Swaan says, are not born overnight. The capacity to divide sharply between “us” and “them,” and to view the “them” as a foreign element in our midst, is the product of a historical process through which new modes of thought are acquired".

Eva Illouz

Powell

"Stratification research repeatedly demonstrates the critical roles that educational institutions play as they sort students at early ages into pathways through school that differ in their access to later educational and employment opportunities.

Mobility within social structure determines individuals' successes and failures, while 'modes of access to positions in social structures...determine how individual efforts and abilities become linked to social and economic rewards', affecting individual beliefs about the relationship between personal efforts and achievements (Sorensen 1986: 178).

Education not only determines societal patterns of economic and political allocation, but also legitimates such patterns. School systems distribute each cohort of children into a society's adult stratification system (see Kerckhoff 1995)"

"Universal compulsory education led schools to develop a variety of sorting mechanisms. Especially during the resulting transitions within an educational system's learning opportunity structures, special educational needs are identified, labelled and categorical boundaries drawn around dis/ability altering individuals' trajectories. By stigmatizing, separating, and segregating students, special education institutions in Germany and the United States construct social inequality."

"Increasingly, all students are expected to master a common curriculum to meet national and state standards (Farkas 1996: 79 94). At the same time, teachers differentiate curricula according to a variety of educational interests, abilities, and needs (Heubert and Hauser 1999). However, most research shows that tracking increases variation in student performance between groups without altering the average higher tracks gain more than the lower due to cumulative dis/advantages from track placement (Kerckhoff 1995: 328).

Studies of tracking suggest that we do change children's academic intelligence all the time. The entire process of tracking is designed to do just that... By these practices schools demonstrate the pliability of cognitive skills as well as the powerful effect social factors have on the success of individuals. Policies alter intelligence (Fischer et al. 1996: 167).

Elementary schools sort students in three ways being held back, being placed in special education, and being grouped for instruction by administrative decision. These in school tracks are more difficult to analyze precisely because they are 'so far below the level of social consciousness that they are not even thought of as tracks' (Entwisle et al. 1997: 80). Entwisle, Alexander and Olson argue forcefully for a focus on children at very early ages, because 'rigid social stratification begins when children start their formal schooling, or even before, yet much of the social sorting at this point in life is overlooked' (1997: 4). Their longitudinal Beginning School Study found that boys, minority group members, and poor children are more likely to fail a grade or be placed in special education classes in elementary school".

"While categories of dis/ability have been continuously revised (most recently due to disability critiques of the medical model), the categories and processes of classification resist change. Similar to other Western bureaucratic administrations run by professional gatekeepers, special education and its classification systems based on the ideology of 'normalcy' derived from statistical science (Davis 1997) developed at the nexus of the modern social sciences, industrializing nation-states, and social policies (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996: 310). Defining mental, physical and intellectual 'normalcy' and assessing populations has become a preoccupation of nation states and international organizations alike (Marks 1999: 53)".

Justin J.W. Powell

Wilkerson

"The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.”

“There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Führer. If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide. Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fatefully, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it. His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.”

“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”

Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.”

“Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.”

“It is also tempting to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.”

“Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror.”

“As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations, and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species.

“Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it. Dehumanize the group, and you have quarantined them from the masses you choose to elevate and have programmed everyone, even some of the targets of dehumanization, to no longer believe what their eyes can see, to no longer trust their own thoughts. Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable.”

“Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity.”

"The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.”

"I had been writing about a stigmatized people, six million of them, who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the South, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste, I would soon discover, follows Indians in their own global diaspora.”

“The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.”

                     Isabel Wilkerson

 

An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. 

Judith Butler

 

 

Sophie Wang

 

https://freerads.org/tag/science-under-the-scope/

Genesis 6:6

"Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—every man and beast and crawling creature and bird of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them."

Park\Su\Takahashi (Excerpts)

"I think in my own experiences I feel like the parts that have made me feel most whole and healthy have been when I spoke truth to a lot of the injustices I’ve witnessed or experienced and had people around me who understood what I was talking about or where I could put my experiences into a broader context and name what was happening".

"But I think that professionalization is very profitable. One, the whole course of obtaining that degree: there are certainly institutions that profit from that. And then two, how much people with degrees can profit vs those without degrees". 

"I think that falls directly in line with what we’ve been saying about the medical industrial complex in that independence and isolation are not that far apart from each other, and if we’re not taking responsibility for each other, then it falls on one person to make all the decisions, even if that one person is not equipped to handle all those decisions".

"And what happens in that concentric circle is everything that happens in the family like family dynamics, family culture, and the patriarchy and how that plays out in there. And then emanating from that is your community circle, and so there are a lot of dynamics that play into how a community might engage with family, engage with trauma, and engage with different senses of healing and addressing violence in that way. And then outside of the community aspect is the institutional. And so this, you can think of as within the institution of the medical industry where there’s a way of doing things, there’s a way of addressing health that’s like legislative or in policy and just structurally enforced. Or the institution could be the state, like the nation-state or government authority, and how they want to deal with certain problems. And you would think that that’s kind of it, the way that societal institutions play out, but I think there’s another circle that emanates from it which is historical trauma or historical perspective, so the concept of historical violence that plays out on a state-wide level".

"I think a lot of time medical students and doctors are just a part of the system, and now that I’ve been doing research on it and seeing it in action, I can see it. But when you go through medical school, you become indoctrinated into everything and don’t really realize what’s going on". 

"...there are aspects to naming the system and breaking it down that have helped me in thinking about a lot of these issues. In that visual [from Mia Mingus], there are four tenets of medicine and agreed-upon goals by society in how we talk about medicine. Those four tenets are: 1) Science and Medicine, 2) Health, 3) Access, and 4) Safety. These are fairly neutral terms — and possibly even positive terms — that we all would not see as dangerous to ourselves, but what the [visual of the MIC] really lays out is that these four goals are actually motivations for things that are more oppressive. So for example, the goal of Science and Medicine has led to something like eugenics — technologies that erase people, and technologies that place value on certain lives. The goal of Health is used as a motivator for desirability. The goal of Access is used as the motivator for charity and ableism. And Safety is another goal that is used as a motivator or excuse for techniques of population control."

"This reluctance to pursue complexities and to engage fully with the multitudes contained in human experience becomes most dangerous in social justice contexts. Statements about structural disparities in healthcare systems are delivered in almost the same tone as descriptions of genetic disorders: vaguely regretful, always “objective,” and ultimately removed from responsibility". 

"So when we say mental health I think the focus is very much on being a functional worker in society whereas empowerment is about...a wellness model that goes beyond just being functional but feeling like you have agency in the world, and you can participate fully, and so I think that for me, a lot of my involvement in various communities have made me feel...empowered in that way that’s also another type of mental health care".

"I think it’s a combination, being able to address both the individual needs and also the larger community, institutional, and historical systems that affect your own sense of well-being". 

"I once asked a paleontologist about what he thought about the role of curiosity in his own work. He said that the point of human civilization was that once we’re at the point where we can feed and house and generally care for ourselves, then we could do the real interesting stuff like make art, create beauty in the world around us, and do things like curiosity-based inquiry.

We have obviously not achieved that utopic vision yet. When curiosity-driven inquiry begins to take priority over community-driven inquiry, we are privileging the self-gratification of the elite over the lived hardships of our most vulnerable. If you are a passionate architect who spends their whole life building grand architectural pieces that only the top 1% can afford to live in, what kind of world have you helped build?

   “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” – Robert Oppenheimer [2]

Curiosity-based inquiry often masks the very real consequences of scientific research".

"...as I said, his teacher very obviously physically abused him and so he would refuse to go to school, and that was at the time seen as a manifestation of his mental illness. Whereas looking back on it it seems completely rational that someone who is being abused by their teacher would not want to go to school for that reason. And he describes that period of time especially as he was depressed and he would be tired all the time and he would just lay down on the couch and not move, and these were sort of things that the teachers around him would really incriminate him for–I don’t know if that’s the right word. But their response to that would not be like, “let’s think about why they’re doing this and let’s address that,” but more like “oh, we have to bring you into line.” Even just lying on the couch would cause them to restrain him. I’m not sure how much my parents were totally aware of that, since I think there’s also this lack of belief in people who have mental disabilities in telling their experiences because they’re labeled as “crazy” so their perspectives are kind of dismissed. But hearing his side of the story was really shocking to me, because I had just had this whole narrative of his life, and I had never really even bothered to talk to him about it".

Kelly Jiyoon Park, Andy Su and Alexis Takahashi 

 

"Charity is a framework that often means rich people giving a little bit to poor people to make themselves look better in the eyes of God or other people. Usually there are lots of strings attached to what they give: e.g., giving only to mothers, only to children, only to sober people, only to people of faith and other “deserving poor” models. This means that charity is often a strategy for controlling poor people. Charity also frames people in need as morally lesser than rich people—as if poverty were the fault of the poor rather than the fault of systems of racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, land theft and labor exploitation that make some people rich and keep other people poor. Charity looks like generosity from rich people, but actually upholds the systems that make most people poor for the benefit of the few.

Charity is the frame used for most social services delivery. Most social services blame poor people for poverty, operating on the idea that there is something wrong with people in need—they need to get sober, they need to get “housing-ready,” they need to take parenting classes, they need to work harder. In reality, poverty is a result of capitalism, and people of color and women are the poorest people because of sexism and racism. Social service agencies typically employ middle and upper class people, often with race and educational privilege, and put them in the role of judging, punishing and controlling poor people. Sometimes they put “empowerment” in their name or mission statement, but the power dynamics are usually the old standards.

In recent decades, charity and social services have been privatized and contracted out to what critics call the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Non-profits compete for grants from corporations or philanthropists to address social problems or serve poor people. This means that rich people and corporations get to decide what strategies should be funded. They also get to protect their money from taxation if they give it out to non-profits. Non-profits are mostly run by rich white people with graduate degrees, they have steep pay scales in which upper class people and white people get paid more, and the people most effected by the issues they claim to address have no say in what they do or how they work".




 

"Mutual aid projects depart from these norms of charity, social services and non-profitization in several key ways that often include:

• An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability
• Governance/control by people who are most effected (can mean having a membership base of those most effected, or being formed in ways that ensure those providing the aid are from the same group as those giving the aid, or models that allow allies to participate but focus on accountability to those being served)
• Transparency about how they work, any money they use or manage (many mutual aid projects are not funded and are all volunteer run)
• Open meetings and pathways for new people to join and participate
• Political education within the organization to help those working in the project to expand their awareness of experiences that are not their own, to build solidarity, and to make the project supportive and welcoming to marginalized people
• Humility and willingness to accept feedback about how to make the project more useful to the people it serves
• Long-term commitment to provide the aid the project works on
• Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects and other transformative work
• Commitment to dignity and self-determination of people in need or crisis
• Consensus-based decision making rather than majority rule"
• fourcornersmutualaidnetwork

Mingus

"The myth of independence being of course, that somehow we can and should be able to do everything on our own without any help from anyone.  This requires such a high level of privilege and even then, it is still a myth.  Whose oppression and exploitation must exist for your “independence?”

Mia Mingus

"Interdependency is not just me “dependent on you.”  It is not you, the benevolent oppressor, deciding to “help” me.  It is not just me who should be grateful for whatever I can get.  (And we can think about this as it relates to service provision, as it relates to political organizing, right?)

Interdependency is both “you and I” and “we.”  It is solidarity, in the best sense of the word.  It is inscribing community on our skin over and over and over again.  It is truly moving together in an oppressive world towards liberation and refusing to let the personal be a scapegoat for the political."

Mia Mingus

Boyer

The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute...of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.

Anne Boyer

Burton

A person enters the depressive position if the amount of stress that he comes under is greater than the amount of stress that he can tolerate given the compliment of genes he has inherited...If these people are in the depressive position it is because they tried too hard or took on too much. So hard and so much that they have made themselves ill with depression. In other words, if these people are in the depressive position, it was simply because their world was not good enough for them. They wanted more. They wanted better. They wanted different, not just for themselves, but for all those around them...They could of swept everything under the carpet and pretended as so many people do, that all is for the best and the best of possible worlds.

Neel Burton

Alison Motluk

‘It’s hard not to notice how differently I am treated when I am wearing my parent hat, rather than that of a science journalist. I’ve spoken to probably hundreds of psychiatrists, neurologists and neuroscientists in my career, and I know that, if I’d raised those possibilities [she is referring here to possible causes of her child's psychological condition] as a journalist, I might have been congratulated for having read the literature so thoroughly. Journalists who read widely and deeply are specialists; parents who read widely and deeply are nutcases who spend too much time on the internet.’

'Strangely, although the coordinator thought the problem was our parenting skills and the key was strict discipline, she never inquired about those things.' 

'Later, people who knew us found the story funny. “Have they ever met you?” our sister-in-law asked sarcastically.'

'But we knew not to draw attention to our parenting practices: it was clear that if a dearth of parental discipline wasn’t found to be the culprit, it was only a matter of time before a suspicious eye would fall upon our presumed excess'.

'It was as though each professional we consulted had become a caricature of their professional selves'.

Alison Motluk:  'A Journey to the Medical Netherworld'