A crime spree is a disorganized class war.

Catherine Liu

Harcourt

As Foucault made abundantly clear in his genealogical work on the prison—a book he aptly subtitled “Birth of the Prison”—and as Nietzsche emphasized throughout his writings and mindful life, the genealogical impulse was oriented toward praxis, toward action, toward willful transformation of self and others. Foucault wrote his book on prisons for users, for actors, for those who seek to change the world. “The little volume that I would like to write on disciplinary systems,” Foucault explained, “I would like it to be of use for a teacher, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for a public, I write for users, not readers.” 13 J’écris pour des utilisateurs, non pas pour des lecteurs. The book was intended to spur action in the finest tradition of Nietzsche’s intervention on history. It was the written accompaniment, the textual complement to the organizing and activism of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (“GIP”). 14 It was intended to augment action by exposing the Western “carceral archipelago” by contrast and as a parallel to the “Gulag Archipelago.”15

Bernard E. Harcourt

The Marginalian

Two decades before Hannah Arendt asserted that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” and a century before social scientists came to study how unconscious biases afflict even the most conscientious people, Lippmann offers an elegant analysis of how stereotypes work — how they help us, how they hurt us, and how to live with them in a way that maximizes their cognitive aid and minimizes their social damage:

The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien…Were there no practical uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life.

What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those inclusive patterns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind.

And yet the great tragedy of human society — a tragedy that has played out in devastating ways in the century since Lippmann, from the Holocaust to the twenty-first century’s various corruptions of democracy — is that those in power are reluctant to hold stereotypes lightly and modify them gladly, because stereotypes are how they stake out their place in the world and maintain the world-order that is the source of their power. Lippmann writes:

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members. We know the way around. There we find the charm of the familiar, the normal, the dependable; its grooves and shapes are where we are accustomed to find them. And though we have abandoned much that might have tempted us before we creased ourselves into that mould, once we are firmly in, it fits as snugly as an old shoe.

No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe.

The Marginalian 

Marginalian

The challenge, of course, is that what is essential — about the totality of life, as about every littlest thing in it — is not easily visible, largely because nothing is actually reducible, or should be reduced, to an essence: to a single point of truth, a particular attribute or quality that makes it what it is.

And yet we have betrayed the complexity of life with our longing for the shorthand of essences at least since Ancient Greece. The crucible of democracy was also the crucible of its antipode in essentialism — the idea that everything has an innate potentiality, which predetermines (and therefore limits) its possible development, and that, no matter what external forces are exerted on it, this innate essence remains immutable.

Even the deep-fathoming, far-seeing Aristotle fell under the spell of essentialism and, bamboozled by its dangerous implications, came to believe that women belonged lower on the social ladder than men because their essential nature was to be subordinate and slaves were enslaved because their essential nature was lacking a certain faculty of reason necessary for freedom.

All prejudice is at bottom essentialism: Some animals are more equal than others because it is their essential nature to be oppressor or oppressed; all entitlement is at bottom essentialism...

Essentialism is the human animal’s faulty coping mechanism for the fact that the world and everything in it is multifaceted and mutable, often dizzyingly so — something Chinua Achebe captured in his astute observation that “there is no one way to anything,” because nothing is one thing only, to be grasped by only one dimension and to serve only one possible purpose.

     The Marginalian

excerpt

Democracy and Distress

If democratic/co-operative organisational forms were made and made use of, clients would be members and members would be expected to volunteer for the organisations which they are members of. The management committee would be, for the most part, made up of members elected by other members and the chairperson would also be a member elected by other members. These organisations would employ paid staff when required and members would each have the opportunity to vote on matters regarding their operation. Generally, in housing co-operatives employees are not allowed to vote because the fact that they are paid is deemed to lead to a conflict of interests. Employee rates of pay are set by members and the admission of new members is decided upon by current members. It is members who will be most affected by incoming residents and so it makes sense for them to decide who to admit. Housing co-ops are typically, although not exclusively, intended for people in dire housing need and the housing that they offer is sometimes short life and sometimes permanent. Perhaps democratic organization could help with the isolation and dis-empowerment that often goes along with or plays a part in generating distress. 'When it comes to rights over the homes we live in, our nation is a divided nation – divided between the two thirds who own their own home or are buying it on a mortgage and who are totally responsible for its financing, repair and maintenance and the one third who rent their homes and whose responsibility stops at the wallpaper. They are tenants dependent for services on the paternalism of their feudal landlord over whom they exercise little influence or control, however benevolent that landlord may be. In a modern democratic society, the issue of who controls rented housing is central to housing policy.'(David Rodgers)

As far as I can tell, no extra resources are required to implement democratic process. The difference between organisational forms such as these and the forms in place in most of the mental health sector is stark in terms of ‘empowerment’, involvement and democracy. In these latter organisations, 'clients' often have next to no say in terms of who they live with and so if, say, ’alcoholics’ and ‘criminals’ (to use less than helpful and somewhat stigmatizing tabloid examples) are moved into their flats there isn't much they can do about it. People in psychological distress are often already dis-empowered and so the dis-empowerment and the bureaucratic runaround that goes along with the kind of democratic deficit mentioned might hit them particularly hard. This deficit, Carol Bacchi suggests, is connected to a mania for such things as monitoring, performance measurement, strategic planning, best practice and risk management etc. which are, in turn, connected to, and come under the rubric of evidence-based policy: ‘…There is a further assumption that policy-making is a rational decision-making process. Parsons (2002: 45) describes evidence-based policy as a ‘return to the old time religion: better policy-making was policy-making predicated on improvements to instrumental rationality’, ‘a return to the quest for a positivist brick road’. He sees links between evidence-based policy and the popularity of auditing, monitoring, performance measurement, strategic planning, best practice, risk management and quality management systems, all buzzwords of our time. The emphasis, as Parsons says, is on professionalization (of public service) with an accompanying decrease of commitment to democratisation.’ See, also, the work of economist William Easterly et al. Steiners broad-view notion of social threefolding and the Christian democratic notions of subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty might also be apt. At the macro level, policy is predicated on improvements to instrumental rationality as Bacchi indicates and at the micro, procedure etc. is (in a scattergun manner) predicated on the same; visceral/personal phenomena are also very much implicated.

Bachi’s work is, itself, influenced by post-positivism. (Put very simply: post-positivism is a kind of humble positivism that incorporates ambiguity, hermeneutics and constructivism but which is, nevertheless, primarily empirical and rational in the positivist mode).

I see no reason to suggest that decision making shouldn't, where possible, be informed by evidence but what's at stake here seems to be the danger of a kind of technocratic rule; where, ironically, the demos is ill-informed when it comes to evidence. Sure, evidence filters down; diluted knowledge does filter down and as it does, sometimes it transforms into the kinds of things that Bacchi and Parsons list. Or, it goes hand in hand with them – with monitoring, performance measurement and all the rest - e.g. a fixation on evidence leads to a fixation on data and so implies monitoring in order to gather it. We go with the inescapable flow of whatever rolls down from headwaters high up in the mountains. When we talk about evidence we could ask whose evidence (or intellectual property) it is or why anyone would attempt inform themselves if they are unlikely to be understood in any non-trivial sense, less still, to see that understanding acted upon in any non-trivial sense. (As one survivor put it: “…I try to communicate and they still brush it off, then I end up exploding”). And we could ask whether or not there is a tendency to shoe-horn evidence into what we’ve already got.

Leaving aside the question of expertise, the notion that individuals should have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree that they are affected by them seems to be relevant. Can any meaningful degree of accountability exist outside of something akin to the kinds of (relatively) socially mixed and democratic organisation discussed? Isn't a relatively enlightened membership important when it comes to things as complex and as widely misunderstood as ‘psychological’ injury? If ableism consists in ‘ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume abledness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised…and largely invisible ‘others’(Chouinards) and if services consist in and promote ableism as much as, or more than, ideas, practices, institutions and social relations prevalent elsewhere then the existence or nonexistence of opportunities for enlightenment is a life and death question.

That the sufferer understands their injury or difference is also important; my mother told me an anecdote about a woman whose son had autism and who sometimes held a card with “My son has autism” written on it so that others would (or at least might) be more understanding. I don’t know whether this was the right thing to do but without knowledge, attempts at courtesy or accommodation would be impossible and misunderstanding more likely. So knowledge is necessary, and so is an understanding of how best to ‘perform’ or express that knowledge. This, in turn, touches on the question of self-authorship and it touches on the question of who has the authority to take part in authoring the world around them.

When a man had a psychotic break, injured himself and disappeared, his daughters mother gathered together friends and family to support her and she showed no, or relatively few, ill effects. (Later, the girl asked me why I hid when she came round). This is another illustration of the importance of emotional literacy and of social and emotional capital.

Organisational forms of the kind discussed have been implemented in sectors as diverse as banking, housing, colleges, retail and manufacturing. For better or worse, my interest in the design of organisations is more abstract than practical. As individuals we don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to help create such structures but knowledge has inherent value and if we understand what a well run organisation looks like then we will, perhaps, be better able to see damaging effects that poorly organised organisations and systems can have and to adjust conduct accordingly. How would we get the measure of things without rulers to compare them to? Drawing parallels with colonialism again, the following account, suggested remedy or alternative to the colonial method, works fairly well - convoluted as it is - as an alternative to current ways of dealing with biopsychosocial suffering: Either axial parts of the world recognise that the trouble at its borders are ‘…not a monstrosity grafted to its breast, a pathological 'after−effect' of underdevelopment…but rather an image…of its own history, and will undertake to confront it and resolve it and thus to put itself into question and transform itself. Or else it will refuse to come to face−to−face with itself and will continue to treat the problem as an exterior obstacle to be overcome through exterior means, including colonization.’(Étienne Balibar)

Also, I suppose it's more about looking for and finding instances that we can learn from, than viewing these examples as ready-made solutions that we simply need to join or re-create. To reiterate, my interest here is fairly abstract and non-commital. I could mention other extant examples of innovation in organizational structure – I could discuss companies like GrantTree, AES, Semco, Valve, Github, Zappos, MorningStar or Buurtzorg, however, as far as I know the status or role of their customers is, in essence, left unchanged whereas, in theory and sometimes in practice, the customer role would be transformed according to the democratic principles of organization sketched and in intentional communities, ecovillages etc. Rent, tax payer and debt strikes, crop-sharing
library economies, credit unions, free schools and community land trusts might also be worth mentioning, Alastair McIntosh likes and has been involved in creating land trusts, and he spoke about one of their benefits as follows: ‘…in as much as the wider problem is tied in with our industrialised mindset, restoration of links to the land is one of the antidotes obviously needed to make a people fitting for the the land’.

The charity model, although rooted in compassion and generosity, creates an asymmetrical power differential between the giver and receiver. In contrast, the justice model focuses on systemic remedies to social problems by focusing on human rights and social change. The emphasis, here, is on reciprocity, mutuality, and human interdependence, premised on respect, dignity, and the belief in the intrinsic worth of all human beings. 

Tracy Smith-Carrier

Blitz (On Heidegger)

Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”

Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”

An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.

It is becoming clear by now that in order to understand the essence of technology we must also understand things non-technologically; we must enter the realm where things can show themselves to us truthfully in a manner not limited to the technological. But technology is such a domineering force that it all but eliminates our ability to experience this realm. The possibility of understanding the interrelated, meaningful, practical involvements with our surroundings that Heidegger describes is almost obliterated. The danger is that technology’s domination fully darkens and makes us forget our understanding of ourselves as the beings who can stand within this realm.

The third Bremen lecture lays out just how severe the problem is. While we have already seen how the essence of technology prevents us from encountering the reality of the world, now Heidegger points out that technology has become the world (“world and positionality are the same”). Technology reigns, and we therefore forget being altogether and our own essential freedom — we no longer even realize the world we have lost. Ways of experiencing distance and time other than through the ever more precise neutral measuring with rulers and clocks become lost to us; they no longer seem to be types of knowing at all but are at most vague poetic representations. While many other critics of technology point to obvious dangers associated with it, Heidegger emphasizes a different kind of threat: the possibility that it may prevent us from experiencing “the call of a more primal truth.” The problem is not just that technology makes it harder for us to access that realm, but that it makes us altogether forget that the realm exists.

Yet, Heidegger argues, recognizing this danger allows us to glimpse and then respond to what is forgotten. The understanding of man’s essence as openness to this realm and of technology as only one way in which things can reveal themselves is the guide for keeping technology within its proper bounds. Early in the fourth and last Bremen lecture, Heidegger asks if the danger of technology means “that the human is powerless against technology and delivered over to it for better or worse.” No, he says. The question, however, is not how one should act with regard to technology — the question that seems to be “always closest and solely urgent” — but how we should think, for technology “can never be overcome,” we are never its master. Proper thinking and speaking, on the other hand, allow us to be...and to reveal being. “Language is…never merely the expression of thinking, feeling, and willing. Language is the inceptual dimension within which the human essence is first capable of corresponding to being.” It is through language, by a way of thinking, that “we first learn to dwell in the realm” of being.

Mark Blitz

Engels

I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means?

And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space.

And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow selfseeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner’s recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner.

During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men call this ‘social murder’, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?

True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-man that it may not be his turn tomorrow? Who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master discharges him tomorrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else ‘to give him bread’? Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness?

No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow. He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.

Friedrich Engels

Engels

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

Friedrich Engels

Allport

 Choice of scapegoats

Strictly speaking, the term "minority" refers only to some group that is smaller than some other group with which it is compared. In this sense the Caucasian race would be a minority, so too Methodists in the United States and Democrats in Vermont. But the term has also a psychological flavor. It implies that the dominant group has stereotyped ideas about some smaller segment of the population which bears ethnoid characteristics, that to some degree it accords this segment discriminatory treatment, with the result that members of this segment grow resentful and often intensify their determination to remain a distinct group.

Why some statistical minorities become psychological minorities is the problem of this chapter. And a difficult problem it is. It might be stated in the form of a simple diagram:

Mere Actuarial Minorities	Psychological Minorities
Designated as minorities for certain purposes but never an object of prejudice	Mildly disparaged and discriminated against	Scapegoats

School children, registered nurses, Presbyterians, are actuarial minorities but are not the object of prejudice. Among the psychological minorities we include many immigrants and regional groups, occupations, colored people, and adherents to certain religions.
As the diagram implies, some psychological minorities are the object of merely mild disparagement; others attract such strong hostility that we call them "scapegoats." What we have to say applies to any psychological minority, whether it is mildly or roundly abused. For the sake of simplicity we shall employ the term "scapegoat" to cover both.
This term, the reader will note, implies a specific theory of prejudice, namely the frustration theory. The implication is that some out-group innocently attracts the aggression engendered by frustrations suffered by members of some in-group. There is much truth in this theory, but we need not assume that it explains all of prejudice in order to discuss why certain groups and not others become targets for displaced aggression.

 

Meaning of Scapegoat

The term scapegoat originated in the famous ritual of the Hebrews, described in the Book of Leviticus (16:20-22). On the Day of Atonement a live goat was chosen by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat's head, and confessed over it the iniquities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the beast, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless. The type of thinking here involved is not uncommon. From earliest times the notion has persisted that guilt and misfortune can be shifted from one man's back to another. Animistic thinking confuses what is mental with what is physical. If a load of wood can be shifted, why not a load of sorrow or a load of guilt? Nowadays we are likely to label this mental process projection. In other people we see the fear, anger, lust that reside primarily in ourselves. It is not we ourselves who are responsible for our misfortunes, but other people. In our common speech we recognize this failing in such phrases as "whipping-boy," "taking it out on the dog," or "scapegoat."

The psychological processes involved in scapegoating are complex. What concerns us at present are the sociocultural factors involved in the selection of scapegoats. Psychological theory alone will not tell us why certain groups are scapegoated more than others.

In each of six separate years -1905, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913,1914 - over a million immigrants came to the United States. The resulting minority group problems were legion, but in the course of a few years most of them began to iron themselves out. The great bulk of this influx was made up of adaptable people, eager to become Americans. The melting pot commenced to swallow them up. In the second generation the assimilation was partly, though not entirely, complete. It is estimated today that there are approximately 26 million second-generation Americans. To some extent this enormous group still suffers certain (gradually diminishing) handicaps. Many, speaking a foreign language at home, find their knowledge of English less than complete. They are ashamed of their parents, who still seem foreign. The sense of social inferiority in status is haunting. Usually they lack a reassuring pride in the ethnic traditions and culture of the parent. Sociologists have discovered a relatively high crime rate and other evidences of maladjustment in second-generation Americans.

Yet most of the psychological minorities arriving from Europe have rubbed along amicably enough in the elastic social structure of America. Occasionally they have been scapegoats, but not persistently so. Yankees in a conservative Maine community may discriminate socially against the Italians or French-Canadians who live there - but the snobbery is relatively mild, and one can seldom see evidences of actual aggression (true scapegoating). On the other hand, a much more serious problem of antagonism exists in the case of other minorities (Jews, Negroes, Orientals, Mexicans) to whom the dominant majority has said, "We shall never accept you as one of us."

Just as it is impossible to tell clearly when a group is a scapegoat and when it is not, so too we cannot find a clear formula that will cover the selection of scapegoats. The essence of the matter seems to be that different groups are singled out for different reasons. We have already noted the contrast between the accusations made against Negroes and Jews, and have discussed the theory which states that each of these two scapegoats "take away" different kinds of guilt.

There seems to be no such thing as an "all-duty scapegoat" although some groups come nearer to this objective than others. Perhaps today Jews and Negroes are blamed for the widest variety of evils. We note that these are inclusive social groups consisting of both sexes (and their children), which transmit social values and cultural traits. They are more or less permanent, definite, and stable. By contrast one finds many ad hoc scapegoats who are blamed for quite specific things. The American Medical Association or the Soft Coal Miners Union may be much hated by certain portions of society, being blamed for evils in health policy, labor policy, high prices, or some particular inconvenience for which they may or may not be partly responsible. (Scapegoats need not be lily-white in their innocence, but they always attract more blame, more animosity, more stereotyped judgment than can be rationally justified.)

The nearest to the all-duty scapegoat then is a religious, ethnic, or racial group. Having permanence and stability, they can be given a definite status and stereotyped as a group.

 

Historical Method

These various generalizations still do not bear on one principal question: why over a given period of time is one particular ethnic, racial, religious, or ideological group made to suffer more discrimination and persecution than can be rationally accounted for by its known traits or deserved reputation?

It is chiefly the historical method that helps us to understand why over a course of years scapegoats come and scapegoats go, and why there is a periodic lessening or intensification of the hostility they receive. Anti-Negro prejudice today is unlike what it was under slavery; anti-Semitism, the most persistent of all prejudices, takes a different form in different epochs and waxes and wanes according to circumstances.

Anti-Catholicism in the United States today exists but in a less aggravated form than sixty years ago. At that time there flourished the so-called American Protective Association, a militantly anti-Catholic organization. Around the turn of the century the Association died out, and at the same time - for reasons that are not clear - anti-Catholic feeling seemed to subside. Even the great waves of immigration of European Catholics did not revive the persecutions of the 19th century. In very recent years, however, alarm at the alleged rise in the political influence of the Roman Church seems again to be increasing. The tide of prejudice may again be on the flood. Only a careful historical analysis can give us an understanding of these waves.
Since the problem of the choice of scapegoats is primarily one for the historical method, we shall work as the historian works, and focus upon concrete cases.

Gordon Allport

 

 

Chul Han

The inwardly turned, narcissistic ego with purely subjective access to the world is not the cause of social disintegration but the result of a fateful process at the objective level. Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.

But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the other hand, is centrifugal, with very destructive effects on social cohesion. If we want to comprehend what kind of society we are living in, we need to understand the nature of information.

In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs. It is Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which every want is immediately gratified. The people are kept in good spirits with the help of fun, consumption and entertainment. The state distributes a drug called soma in order to increase feelings of happiness in the population. Maybe in our brave new world, people will receive a universal basic income and have unlimited access to video games. That would be the new version of panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”).

I am, however, not completely pessimistic. Perhaps we shall develop new narratives, ones that do not presuppose a hierarchy. We can easily imagine a flat narrative. Every narrative develops its own rituals for the purposes of making it habitual, embedding it in the physical body. Culture founds community.

As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we can enter in celebration do not pass away. Without such temporal structures, time becomes a torrent that tears us apart from each other and away from ourselves.

Philosophy has the power to change the world: European science began only with Plato and Aristotle; without Rousseau, Voltaire and Kant, the European Enlightenment would be unthinkable. Nietzsche made the world appear in an entirely new light. Marx’s “Capital” founded a new epoch.

Today, however, philosophy has completely lost this world-changing power. It is no longer capable of producing a novel narrative. Philosophy degenerates into an academic, specialist discipline. It is not turned toward the world and the present.

Byung Chul Han

Upton Sinclair

‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

Upton Sinclair

 

 

Cepdibi (On Arendt)

It would probably not be wrong to say that the 20th century was the most terrifying in human history. What made this century especially terrifying is not only the fact that its means of destruction reached a level of power beyond the imagination of its manufacturers, but also the experience of totalitarianism, which radically destroyed all institutions and structures shaped by mankind for centuries. Hannah Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism strikingly reveals that the origins that make Nazi totalitarianism new and unprecedented are, in fact, “right now happening” in the world. These constructions, relations, and situations that continue in the form of “undercurrent”—as Arendt calls it—did not die out with the defeat of Nazism. Here the idea of the “human condition,” which constitutes the second part of Arendt’s investigation, makes the phenomenological analysis of three forms of activity that underlie it. One of the most important theses of Arendt’s work is that there exists a dramatic relationship between the process of conquest of all human relation by the principles of utilitarianism and instrumentalism, which motivates all work and production, and the social climate in which totalitarian regimes can be shaped.

Kılıç Cepdibi

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy...The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Jean Baudrillard

Milgram

“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”

Stanley Milgram

Common ingroup identity

The common identity group model identifies the potential causes and outcomes of the recategorization process that changes an individual's common ingroup identity. The model assumes that intergroup bias reflects in-group favoritism rather than outgroup derogation. In the model, Gaertner describes the behavior, emotional and social interactions between the group members to be the start of the recategorization process, or the causes (see Figure 1). The outcomes or consequences of those cognitive and motivational processes then changes an individual's attitude to be more positive toward the outgroup. The model also includes representational mediators, or the recategorization processes that change the way we view the group. An example representational mediator would be the recategorization of an individual's ingroup and the outgroup from "us" and "them" to "we".

Diagram of the Gaertner's common ingroup identity model

The causal factors (left) in the model are proposed to influence members' cognitive representations of the whole group. The cognitive representations of an individual such as whether they perceive themselves as one group or two subgroups within one group will then affect the specific cognitive, affective and behavioral consequences (right). The causal factors of the model influences an individual's cognitive representation (center) of their memberships to their ingroup and outgroup that consequently mediate the relationship.

Wikipedia

System justification theory

System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.

According to system justification theory, people desire not only to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and the groups to which they belong (group-justification), but also to hold positive attitudes about the overarching social structure in which they are entwined and find themselves obligated to (system-justification). This system-justifying motive sometimes produces the phenomenon known as out-group favoritism, an acceptance of inferiority among low-status groups and a positive image of relatively higher status groups. Thus, the notion that individuals are simultaneously supporters and victims of the system-instilled norms is a central idea in system justification theory. Additionally, the passive ease of supporting the current structure, when compared to the potential price (material, social, psychological) of acting out against the status quo, leads to a shared environment in which the existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred. Alternatives to the status quo tend to be disparaged, and inequality tends to perpetuate.

wikipedia

Kaba

“Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay. But then you need to test it in the world; you’ve got to be with people. That’s important. And I hate people!

• Abolition is an all-encompassing project of eliminating systems of death and destruction — most prominently, the prison industrial complex — while building new ways of living premised on collective care.
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Mariame Kaba

Milgram

 “It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”

Stanley Milgram

Milgram

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Stanley Milgram

 

“It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness."

Stanley Milgram

 

Aaron Stark | TEDx

I was almost a school shooter. In 1996, Denver, Colorado, I was a student in North High. In a moment of pain and anger, I almost committed a terrible atrocity. Growing up I'd learned early on there was a strange comfort and calmness in darkness. I was always the new kid. My family was violent and aggressive, drug-addicted parents. We were moving from place to place, went to 30 or 40 different schools, always seemed to be going to a new school every other week. You woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning by cops, to run across the country to end up at a school for a couple of weeks and then have to do it all again a couple of days later. I was the perpetual new kid, and since I also had such an unstable household, I wasn't helped by the fact that I smelled really bad because I never had a shower, or didn't really have any clean clothes. All my clothes were dirty and torn. I had a weight problem. I was smart. I liked comic books at a time when kids didn't really like people who liked comic books that much. So every time I went to a new school I was in a new set of bullies. They'd walk up to me and shoot me with a harpoon, like I was a whale, or dump food on my head because they said I was too fat. But the bullying wasn't just at school. It happened at home a lot too. I was told that I was worthless by just about everybody in my life. When you're told you worthless enough you will believe it, then you're going to do everything to make everybody else agree with it too. I wrapped that darkness around me like a blanket, used it as a shield. It kept the few who agreed with me close, but it kept everybody else away. I always had heard in life that there was good and bad people. I must be one of the bad people. So I guess I'd have to just do what I was supposed to do. So I got really aggressive. At 12 or 13-years-old I got really into heavy metal music, and I was the mosh pit when I went to concerts. The abuse just never seemed to stop. I got into cutting around 14 or 15 because I figured that there was all this extreme emotion going on in my life I had absolutely no control over. I had to find some way to find control over something so I took to cutting myself. I still have the scars to this day. At 15, 16 years old, I ended up homeless. My parents had kicked me out because I didn't want to deal with their drunken fighting, so I was living on the streets. I thought I had pushed all my other friends away, shoved them all away by lying to them or stealing from them, doing everything that my family taught me how to react, which was the completely wrong way how to react. But I had no idea. I was just doing what I was taught. Finally, at 16 years old, I'm sitting in my best friend's shed, who I thought I'd already pushed away too by stealing from him and lying to him. Lying in this shed with the roof wide open, with rain pouring down on me into a grungy chair that was covered in cobwebs and dirt which hadn't been touched in months. And I'm sitting there with my arm covered in blood, knowing that if I didn't do something I was going to kill myself soon. So, I did the only thing I could think of to do: I grabbed a phonebook, and I called social services. So I went to social services. Sadly, they didn't just bring me in there, they also took my mom in there too, who happened to be one of the largest sources of my pain growing up. Since she had spent her life running from place to place and dealing with social workers and police officers, she knew exactly what to say to get them to believe that I was making it all up, it was just an act, I was just doing it for attention. Then they sent me home with her. And as they sent me home with her, she turned to me and she said: "Next time, you should do a better job and I'll buy you the razor blades." My heart just got ripped out of me at that point. The darkness I'd been staring at for so long, I ran headlong into it. I had nothing left to live for. I literally had nothing to lose. And when you have nothing to lose you can do anything, and that is a terrifying thought. I had decided that my act of doing something was I was going to express my extreme anger and rage by getting a gun. I was going to attack either my school or a mall food court. It really didn't matter which one. It wasn't about the people, it was about the largest amount of damage in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of security. Both those places were the right targets. So I wish I had a better story about actually getting a gun, but that was actually brother-business-like. There were gangbanger kids near my school back in the mid '90s when gangs were still a major problem in North Denver schools. This kid had seen me, he knew my family and he'd sold drugs to them before. He knew that I wasn't really in school, I was just always at school. He knew I wasn't a narc or anything like that. I didn't know anything but a first name. That didn't take more than that. I knew they had access to guns, they talked about it all the time. I said: "Hey, can you get me a gun?" "Sure, get me an ounce." "All right, give me three days." That was it. I was waiting to get myself a gun so I could kill a lot of people. But thankfully I wasn't alone in that darkness. That best friend who had saved me when I was sleeping in the shed, he saw this place that I was in. Even though I had stolen from him and lied to him and taken his belongings and ruined it all, he didn't care, he still brought me in and showed me acts of kindness. Just simple acts. It wasn't the kind of overbearing kindness where they say: "Is there anything I can do for you? Is there a programme I can get you in? Can I do something to make you better? How can I help you?" It was just sitting down next to me. "Hey, would you like a meal? Let's watch a movie." He treated it like it was a Tuesday. He treated me like I was a person. When someone treats you like a person when you don't even feel like a human, it'll change your entire world, and it did to me. He stopped me with his acts of kindness from committing that atrocity that day. If you see someone who's in that spot that needs that love, give it to them. Love the ones you feel deserve it the least because they need it the most. It'll help you just as much as it helps them. We're in a really dangerous spot now with this trend of arming the teachers, looking out for the kids who might be a threat in schools, and maybe turning them in to the FBI. What's that going to do to a kid who's in the position I was 25 years ago? Who's alone, and depressed, and abused, and is just sitting there hurting, and someone thinks that they're a threat? He gets turned in to the FBI, and one month of pain turns into a lifetime of legal trouble because one person thought he was going to be a problem. Instead of looking at that kid like he's a threat, look at him like he might be a friend, like you might be able to bring him into the fold. Show him that it's just a Tuesday. Show him that he is worth it. Show him that he can exist in this pain even though it's intense, that at the end of it, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I found my light. Now I'm a happy family man. I am a father of four. My wife and my daughter are in the audience today. (Applause) And even bigger than that, the friend who saved my life, he's in the audience today too. Because friendship doesn't ever really die. (Applause) We have to give love to the people who we think deserve the least. Thank you.

Aaron Stark 

 

Discounted bodies are thought to contain no life, as such they are, strictly speaking, bodies at the limit of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and in inhospitable places. The kind of life they bear or contain is not insured or is uninsurable, folded as it is in extreme and thin envelopes. Such bodies on the precipice are the most exposed to droughts, to storms and famines, toxic waste and various experiences of effacement. Their livelihoods made impossible, they are the most likely to sustain the most crippling wounds and injuries. Trapped human subjects often without escape, they are caught in the various death management systems that saturate the contemporary world. They literally bear the brunt of terrestrial life on a damaged planet, at the same time they exceed all attempts to contain them, these bodies are not simply in motion, interactive and generative, they are movements and events in and of themselves. The inside of their bodies is not separated from their outward environments. And from the perspective of discounted bodies, to be alive is, already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the outside entering the inside.

Achille Mbembe