"Pariah peoples...the privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it — starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world — that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness".
Hanna Arendt
“What presuppositions are we living with, unexamined? It seems to me that the point of philosophy is to examine our presuppositions in order to bring to light the ways in which we are living - the principles according to which we are living - and to change them when we see their injustice”.
Henri Tajfel's greatest contribution to psychology was social identity theory. Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s).
Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.
We divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:
1. the differences between groups
2. the similarities of things in the same group.
This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and Serbs.
We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more similar than they are.
Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.
Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed that there are three mental processes involved in evaluating others as “us” or “them” (i.e. “in-group” and “out-group”. These take place in a particular order.
The first is categorization. We categorize objects in order to understand them and identify them. In a very similar way we categorize people (including ourselves) in order to understand the social environment. We use social categories like black, white, Australian, Christian, Muslim, student, and bus driver because they are useful.
If we can assign people to a category then that tells us things about those people, and as we saw with the bus driver example, we couldn't function in a normal manner without using these categories; i.e. in the context of the bus.
Similarly, we find out things about ourselves by knowing what categories we belong to. We define appropriate behavior by reference to the norms of groups we belong to, but you can only do this if you can tell who belongs to your group. An individual can belong to many different groups.
In the second stage, social identification, we adopt the identity of the group we have categorized ourselves as belonging to.
If for example you have categorized yourself as a student, the chances are you will adopt the identity of a student and begin to act in the ways you believe students act (and conform to the norms of the group).
There will be an emotional significance to your identification with a group, and your self-esteem will become bound up with group membership.
The final stage is social comparison. Once we have categorized ourselves as part of a group and have identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with other groups. If our self-esteem is to be maintained our group needs to compare favorably with other groups.
This is critical to understanding prejudice, because once two groups identify themselves as rivals, they are forced to compete in order for the members to maintain their self-esteem.
Competition and hostility between groups is thus not only a matter of competing for resources (like in Sherif’s Robbers Cave) like jobs but also the result of competing identities.
"And Shakespeare said — and this is what I take to be the truth about everybody’s life all of the time — “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion".
"The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face".
"If you think it’s right, then you’ve got to do it. If you think it’s wrong, then you mustn’t do it. And not only do we all know how difficult it is, given what we are, to tell the difference between right and wrong, but the whole nature of life is so terrible that somebody’s right is always somebody else’s wrong. And these are the terrible choices one has always got to make".
"Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less".
"Most people live in almost total darkness…people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which...you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function".
Who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who - alone - have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse?
Michel Foucault
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness...Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.“In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.”
Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil
"Every time we recall a memory, or “re-access” it, we are changing it. When we recall, reflect, and more importantly write about our past experiences and weave them into a personal narrative or life story, we can actually change the way we feel about our life. In every memory, especially highly emotional memories, there are two components: the facts, and the emotions.
Living requires reflection, in days of yore this work was much more integral to our experience as humans. We lived in tribes where constant story telling and socialization led to the immediate integration of pain and traumatic experiences".
In today’s dissociogenic culture it’s important to keep a journal regularly, and to express your emotions on a regular basis, even after you have worked over...past problems".
"If you were able to think and reflect on your trauma, you wouldn’t have DP (aside from anxiety and obsession). In a way it’s almost circular. But being aware of your own life situation can take some study and growth. It may be uncomfortable to face certain elements of your life".
"For people with depersonalization disorder, what usually happens is that a more mild form of stress occurs. This form of trauma is more complex, and occurs over a period of time. In essence, it is accumulated trauma. This could be when a parent puts you in a constant state of guilt for years, it could be when you were verbally abused by someone day after day. Parents who are “too busy” and neglect their children also inflict this abuse.
It could also be not having someone there to support you when...stressed.
In Depersonalization Disorder, the trauma can be extremely subtle, and almost not appear to be traumatic. It could be a mother who was just a “tad distant”, or father who just made you uncomfortable a lot around others.
People with DPD usually have sensitive personality types, or are “highly sensitive people”. (see my Depersonalization and Personality article/video for a further discussion on the topic.) For sensitive people, the threshold stress level for trauma is much lower.
In a minority of DPD cases, people acquire the disorder in their youth. These instances are usually because of more severe abuse, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, or more severe emotional abuse. These types of people may also experience more severe dissociative disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder.
The Hippocampus and Dissociative Disorders
There have been brain studies on people with different forms of dissociation, showing that people with more severe disorders have more hippocampal atrophy. The hippocampus is an important brain region for emotional processing. One of its functions is to put the “break” on the stress response.
When our hippocampus is weak, it can be difficult to stop the fear part of the brain (the amygdala) from firing...Of course I’m generalizing, but this is...what happens in people who suffer from PTSD. They come back from war, and may hear a car back fire. But what happens?...The fear center fires...as though it were a bomb going off.
We have two forms of memory: implicit emotional, and explicit verbal. The startle response is when our fear center fires...immediately. In people with a healthy hippocampus, a contextual and verbal part of the mind says “oh hey, its not a bomb, but a car backfiring!”.
In Depersonalization Disorder there isn’t as much hippocampal damage. In fact, it’s probably extremely mild compared to PTSD. And as I mentioned before, the cells of the hippocampus that have been damaged from excessive chronic stress can regrow".
Depersonalization is a result of complex/cumulative trauma, not single events
One of the big differences between PTSD and DPD is that depersonalization is usually not caused by a single traumatic event, but rather a series of more mild events, or a traumatic life situation. This is why coming from a subtly dysfunctional family is often the cause. You may not have been physically abused, but perhaps psychologically abused or neglected in such a way that you don’t even recognize your own abuse.
This type of complex trauma is a relatively new diagnostic category that is going to be included in the DSM V. It’s called C-PTSD. In many ways, depersonalization disorder is a form of Complex Post Traumatic Stress.
Rumination is different from Trauma Processing
Being constantly filled with regret and pain about the past is not the goal of trauma processing. In fact, that’s the opposite of the goal. The goal is to process your past so that you can move on..."
HH
“The Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears...It demands…passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”
GD
Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives
“To be socially dead is to be deprived of the network of social relations, particularly kinship relations, that would otherwise support, protect, and give meaning to one’s precarious life as an individual. It is to be violently and permanently separated from one’s kin, blocked from forming any meaningful relationship, not only to others in the present but also to the heritage of the past and the legacy of the future beyond one’s own finite, individuated being.”
- Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, 2013, xxi
Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, aptly subtitled “Social Death and its Afterlives,” does an exceptional job of exploring the detrimental physical and mental health aspects of solitary confinement. While she mainly set out to catalog the historical, philosophical, and existential underpinnings of the solitary confinement system within the carceral state, the thread of psychological distress and nefarious, government-run behavioral modification programs runs deep, stretching back to the beginnings of the organization of the penitentiary in the United States. Guenther (2013) notes in her introduction that “deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. They see things that do not exist. They do not see things that do” (p. xi). This brief statement indicates simply that even the objectively sanest of individuals can go insane in solitary confinement. As early as research done in the 1830s at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the oldest penitentiaries in the country, hallucinations and dementia were described in prisoners subjected to solitary confinement. Since then, consistent symptoms have arisen in studies of prisoners in prolonged isolation: anxiety, confusion, depression, fatigue, hallucinations, headaches, paranoia, and uncontrollable trembling. As solitary confinement had its start at the beginnings of the penitentiary system in the United States, the religious ideals of penance and reform, as well as the biosocial medical ideas of criminality during the late 18th and early 19th century shaped the design and implementation of solitary confinement. In fact, at one point, solitary confinement was hailed as an alternative to capital punishment—on the grounds that the anxiety caused by prolonged solitude was worse than certain death. Benjamin Rush, who, as well as being a physician and psychiatrist, was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, lauded solitary confinement as a way of increasing the suffering of criminals, and used the same types of treatments on his own patients. Would that we leave this purposeful induction of anxiety and distress to our predecessors, but Guenther traces a similar malicious intent over the course of the next two centuries.
Jen Rushforth
“To be socially dead is to be deprived of the network of social relations, particularly kinship relations, that would otherwise support, protect, and give meaning to one’s precarious life as an individual. It is to be violently and permanently separated from one’s kin, blocked from forming any meaningful relationship, not only to others in the present but also to the heritage of the past and the legacy of the future beyond one’s own finite, individuated being.”
Lisa Guenther
On the surface, the principles of majority rule and the protection of individual and minority rights would seem contradictory. In fact, however, these principles are twin pillars holding up the very foundation of what we mean by democratic government.
Majority rule is a means for organizing government and deciding public issues; it is not another road to oppression. Just as no self-appointed group has the right to oppress others, so no majority, even in a democracy, should take away the basic rights and freedoms of a minority group or individual.
Minorities -- whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate -- enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove.
Minorities need to trust that the government will protect their rights and self-identity. Once this is accomplished, such groups can participate in, and contribute to their country's democratic institutions.
Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society.
Democracies understand that protecting the rights of minorities to uphold cultural identity, social practices, individual consciences, and religious activities is one of their primary tasks.
Acceptance of ethnic and cultural groups that seem strange if not alien to the majority can represent one of the greatest challenges that any democratic government can face. But democracies recognize that diversity can be an enormous asset. They treat these differences in identity, culture, and values as a challenge that can strengthen and enrich them, not as a threat.
There can be no single answer to how minority-group differences in views and values are resolved -- only the sure knowledge that only through the democratic process of tolerance, debate, and willingness to compromise can free societies reach agreements that embrace the twin pillars of majority rule and minority rights.
Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), U.S. Department of State.
Mr. Chairman, friends and brothers in this first gathering of the National Conference on New Politics. Ladies and gentlemen. . .can you hear me in the back? (No)
I don’t know if the Klan is in here tonight or not with all the troubles we’re having with these microphones. Seldom if ever. . . .has. . . .we’re still working with it.
As I was about to say, seldom if ever has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the egis of politics in our nation, and I want to commend the leadership of the National Conference on New Politics for all of the great work that they have done in making this significant convention possible. Indeed by our very nature we affirm that something new is taking place on the American political horizon.
We have come here from the dusty plantations of the Deep South and the depressing ghettos of the North. We have come from the great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from conscience stricken wealth. But we have come. And we have come here because we share a common concern for the moral health of our nation. We have come because our eyes have seen through the superficial glory and glitter of our society and observed the coming of judgment. Like the prophet of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men. For most of us this is a new mood. We are traditionally the idealists. We are the marchers from Mississippi and Selma and Washington, who staked our lives on the American Dream during the first half of this decade. Many assembled here campaigned assiduously for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because we could not stand ideally by and watch our nation contaminated by the 18th century policies of Goldwaterism. We were the hardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutional image. We were the dreamers of a dream that dark yesterdays of mans inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape, the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered.
The promise of a Great Society was shipwrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, black and white, are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness. I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement.
Now I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my suffering and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking. I finally came to myself. And I could not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I and others like me, have held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about, the not to distant day when they would have freedom, all here, now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted, turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous, in view of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumblings of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppressions to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. And in one majestic chorus they are singing in the worlds of our freedom song, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around”.
And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Billions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.
It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn. Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. The case of CDGM in Mississippi is the most publicized example but it is a story repeated many times across our nation. Our own experience here in Chicago is especially painfully present. After an enthusiastic approval by H.E. W’s Department of Adult Education, SCLC began an adult literacy project to aid 1,000 young men and women who have been pushed out of overcrowded ghetto schools, in obtaining basic [literary] skills prerequisite to receiving jobs.
We had an agreement with A&P stores for 750 jobs through SCLC’s job program, Operation Breadbasket and had recruited over 500 pupils the first week. At that point Congressmen Paccinski and the Daley machine intervened and demanded that Washington cut off our funds or channel them through the machine-controlled poverty program in Chicago. Now we have no problem with administrative supervision, but we do have a desire to be independent of machine control and the Democratic Party patronage network. For this desire for a politically independent approach to the needs of our brothers, our funds are being stopped as of September 15 and a very meaningful program discontinued.
Yes the hour is dark, evil comes forth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance. We cry out against welfare hand-outs to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy.
The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, whose ancesors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.
I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycles of our nation’s life; certainly times of war, times of reaction throughout the society but I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism. Not only is this our nation’s dilemma it is the plague of western civilization. As early as 1906 W. E. B Dubois prophesized that the problem of the 20th century, would be the problem of the color line, now as we stand two-thirds into this crucial period of history we know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization.
Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly professes the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backwards simultaneously with every step forward on the question of Racial Justice; to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans.
The step backwards has a new name today, it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of black power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.
This does not imply that all White Americans are racist, far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion fought long and hard for racial justice nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years. However for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.
Racism can well be, that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization. Arnold Toynbee has said that some twenty-six civilization have risen upon the face of the Earth, almost all of them have descended into the junk heap of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynbee, was not caused by external invasion but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impingent upon them.
If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.
The second aspect of our afflicted society is extreme materialism. An Asian writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms, he says, “you call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery, you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business”.
This tells us something about our civilization that cannot be caste aside as a prejudiced charge by an eastern thinker who is jealous of Western prosperity. We cannot escape the indictment. This does not mean that we must turn back the clock of scientific progress. No one can overlook the wonders that science has wrought for our lives. The automobile will not abdicate in favor of the horse and buggy or the train in favor of the stagecoach or the tractor in favor of the handplow or the scientific method in favor of ignorance and superstition.
But our moral lag must be redeemed; when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly maximize the minimum and minimize the maximum we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth.
Again we have diluted ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that Capitalism was build on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad. If Negroes and poor whites do not participate in the free flow of wealth within our economy, they will forever be poor, giving their energies, their talents and their limited funds to the consumer market but reaping few benefits and services in return.
The way to end poverty is to end the exploitation of the poor, ensure them a fair share of the government services and the nation’s resources. I proposed recently that a national agency be established to provide employment for everyone needing it. Nothing is more socially inexcusable than unemployment in this age. In the 30s, when the nation was bankrupt it instituted such an agency, the WPA, in the present conditions of a nation glutted with resources, it is barbarous to condemn people desiring work to soul sapping inactivity and poverty. I am convinced that even this one, massive act of concern will do more than all the state police and armies of the nation to quell riots and still hatreds.
The tragedy is our materialistic culture does not possess the statesmanship necessary to do it. Victor Hugo could have been thinking of 20th Century America when he wrote, “there’s always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher classes”.
The time has come for America to face the inevitable choice between materialism and humanism. We must devote at
least as much to our children’s education and the health of the poor as we do to the care of our automobiles and the building of beautiful, impressive hotels. We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
We must further recognize that the ghetto is a domestic colony. Black people must develop programs that will aid in the transfer of power and wealth into the hands of residents of the ghetto so that they may in reality control their own destinies. This is the meaning of New Politics. People of will in the larger community, must support the black man in this effort.
The final phase of our national sickness is the disease of militarism. Nothing more clearly demonstrates our nation’s abuse of military power than our tragic adventure in Vietnam. This war has played havoc with the destiny of the entire world. It has torn up the Geneva Agreement, it has seriously impaired the United Nations, it has exacerbated the hatred between continents and worse still between races. It has frustrated our development at home, telling our own underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America and strengthened the military industrial complex. And it has practically destroyed Vietnam and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated and exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare. Above all, the War in Vietnam, has revealed what Senator Fulbright calls, “our nation’s arrogance of power”.
We are arrogant in professing to be concerned about the freedom of foreign nations while not setting our own house in order. Many of our Senators and Congressmen vote joyously to appropriate billions of dollars for the War in Vietnam and many of these same Senators and Congressmen vote loudly against a Fair Housing Bill to make it possible for a Negro veteran of Vietnam to purchase a decent home. We arm Negro soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields but offer little protection for their relatives from beatings and killings in our own South. We are willing to make a Negro 100% of a citizen in Warfare but reduce him to 50% of a citizen on American soil.
No war in our nation’s history has ever been so violative of our conscience, our national interest and so destructive of our moral standing before the world. No enemy has ever been able to cause such damage to us as we inflict upon ourselves.
The inexorable decay of our urban centers has flared into terrifying domestic conflict as the pursuit of foreign war absorbs our wealth and energy. Squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military might destroy cities in a far-off land to support oligarchy, to intervene in domestic conflict. The President who cherishes consensus for peace has intensified the war in answer to a cry to stop the war. It has brought tauntingly to one minute’s flying time from China to a moment before the midnight of world conflagration. We are offered a tax for war instead of a plan for peace. Men of reason should no longer debate the merits of war or means of financing war. They should end the war and restore sanity and humanity to American policy. And if the will of the people continues to be unheeded, all men of good will must create a situation in which the 1967- 68 are made a referendum on the War. The American people must have an opportunity to vote into oblivion those who cannot detach themselves from militarism, and those that lead us.
So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation which will produce a new man, new structures and institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will only be an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact and say, this is not just.
It will look across the ocean and see individual Capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia and Africa only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say, this is not just.
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, this is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, this way of settling differences is not just.
This business of burning human being with napalm, of filling our nation’s home with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloodied battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense then on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
So what we must all see is that these are revolutionary times. All over the globe, men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot of the Earth are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the west must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.
This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. In a sense, Communism is a judgment of our failure to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places plain.
May I say in conclusion that there is a need now, more than ever before, for men and women in our nation to be creatively maladjusted. Mr. Davis said, and I say to you that I choose to be among the maladjusted, as my good friend Bill Coffin said there are those who have criticized me and many of you for taking a stand against the War in Vietnam and for seeking to say to the nation that the issues of Civil Rights cannot be separated from the issues of peace.
I want to say to you tonight that I intend to keep these issues mixed because they are mixed. Somewhere we must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and I have fought too long and too hard against segregated public accommodations to end up at this point in my life, segregating my moral concerns.
So let us stand in this convention knowing that on some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscience asks the question, is it right. And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right. And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our Government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscience, we will not be intimidated and we will be heard.
MLK
rule no. 1
Until further notice, all your rights are hereby suspended. Naturally you should keep the illusion that you still have some for a little while. That way we can violate them one by one, case by case.
rule no. 2
Be nice. Don’t mention laws, the constitution, or any of the lucubrations of another age to us anymore. Some time ago, as you will have noticed, we passed certain laws that put us above the laws, and the rest of the so-called “constitution.”
rule no. 3
You’re weak, isolated, stupid, abused. We are numerous, organized, strong, and enlightened. Some might say we’re a mafia; that’s a lie — we are THE mafia, the one that’s won out over all the others. We alone are able to protect you from the chaos of the world. And that’s why it pleases us so greatly to make you think you’re weak, to make you believe you are “insecure.” That’s what makes our racket profitable.
rule no. 4
For you, the game will consist in you escaping, or at least trying to escape. By escaping we mean: going beyond your dependent state. For now, it’s true, you do depend on us in all aspects of your life. You eat what we produce, you breathe what we pollute, you’re at our mercy for the slightest tooth decay and above all you can’t do anything against the sovereignty of our police forces, which we have given the full range of powers both in terms of discretion and action.
rule no. 5
You’ll never manage to escape alone. You’ll therefore have to start by building the necessary solidarity. To make the game a little harder, we’ve liquidated all forms of autonomous sociality. We’ve only let one thing survive: work; that is, controlled sociality. This will be what you’ll have to escape from, through theft, friendships, sabotage, and self-organization. Ah, by the way: all the ways of escaping have been made into crimes.
rule no. 6
We’ll always say it again and again: criminals are our enemies. But from that you should understand this: all our enemies are criminals. As potential escapees, each of you is also a potential criminal. That’s why it’s a good thing that we keep our lists of the numbers you call on your phones, and that your cell phones allow us to locate you at any time, and that your credit card lets us get to know your habits so easily.
rule no. 7
In this little game of ours, anyone that escapes their isolation will be called the “criminals.” As for those who have the gall to protest this status, we will call the “terrorists.” The latter may be shot to death at any time.
rule no. 8
We are quite aware that life among our society contains almost as much joy as a suburban train ride; that capitalism has up to now produced, in matters of wealth, nothing but universal desolation; that there are no arguments left to defend our worm-eaten “order” besides police flash-balls. But what do you expect, that’s the way it goes! We’ve disarmed you mentally and physically, and we have the monopoly over what we prohibit to you; violence, collusion, and emergence. And after all, frankly speaking, would you do otherwise if you were us?
rule no. 9
You will know prison.
rule no. 10
There are no more rules. All assaults are permitted.
signed,
YOUR GOVERNMENT
Problem definition has a technical element, but is always about power and politics
To some extent, problem definition is a technical exercise conducted with limited resources and in cooperation with others. Problem definition requires analysts to gather sufficient data on its severity, urgency, cause, and our ability to solve it (Dunn, 2017). Recognise that you are not an expert in the policy problem, but don’t define the wrong problem by generating insufficient knowledge (Weimer and Vining, 2017). Recognise the value of multiple perspectives, such as from many stakeholders with different views (Dunn, 2017; Meltzer and Schwartz, 2019: 40-5; Mintrom, 2012: 3; 58-60). This process may begin from a client’s perspective, but avoid defining a problem so narrowly that it closes off discussion too quickly (Meltzer and Schwartz, 2019: 51-2). Place your client’s initial ‘diagnosis’ in a wider perspective (Weimer and Vining, 2017). Define the nature and size of a policy problem, and the role of government in solving it (Mintrom, 2012). Then, frame it as ‘a market or government failure (or maybe both)’, to show how individual or collective choices produce inefficient allocations of resources and poor outcomes (Weimer and Vining, 2017: 59-201). As such, problem definition is a juggling act, containing data, client perspectives, and a professional commitment to a wider view. As Mintrom describes, engage with your audience to work out what they need and when, use your ‘critical abilities’ to ask yourself ‘why they have been presented in specific ways, what their sources might be, and why they have arisen at this time’, and present ‘alternative scenarios’ (2012: 22; 20; 27; 81). Meltzer and Schwarz prompt you to ask yourself if you can generate a timeline, identify key stakeholders, and place a ‘boundary’ on the problem. Establish if the problem is urgent, who cares about it, and who else might care (2019: 46). ‘Map’ causation with reference to individual and structural causes, intended and unintended consequences, simple and complex causation, market or government 10 failure, and/ or the ability to blame an individual or organisation (2019: 48-9). Combine quantitative and qualitative data to frame problems in relation to: severity, trends in severity, novelty, proximity to your audience, and urgency or crisis (2019: 53-4). For Dunn, (2017), ‘problem-structuring methods’ are crucial, to: compare ways to define or interpret a problem, and ward against making too many assumptions about its nature and cause; produce models of cause-and-effect; and make a problem seem solve-able, such as by placing boundaries on its coverage. These methods foster creativity, which is useful when issues seem new and ambiguous, or new solutions are in demand (2017: 54; 69; 77; 81-107). However, problem definition is primarily a political process involving actors exercising power – through argumentation - to make sure that policymakers see a problem from a particular perspective (2017: 79). Policy analysts are not objective observers of this process. Rather, their analysis is part of a narrative to evaluate the nature, cause, size, and urgency of an issue (Meltzer and Schwartz, 2019: 38-40). As such, analysts need to find effective ways to be influential in that context (Bardach, 2012). They also need to reflect on their own biases, and those of their clients, and how they might negotiate problem definition in that context (Meltzer and Schwartz, 2019: 37-8; 50; 279-82). This political process extends to the evaluation of policies, since few problems are solved, and debates on the success or failure of previous initiatives often sets the current agenda (Dunn, 2017: 57). If so, recognise whose evaluations or interests seem to count in such debates. Put most starkly, facts about the impacts of policy on people have little meaning until we decide whose experiences matter, and our values and beliefs influence how we gauge success (Dunn, 2017: 322-32).
Please see the Policy Analysis in 750 words series overview before reading the summary.
Carol Bacchi (2009) Analysing Policy: What’s the problem represented to be? (NSW: Pearson)
Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach prompts us to think about the task of policy analysis in a wider political context. It contrasts with models that take the nature of a policy problem for granted and seek solutions on that basis. Bacchi’s key distinction is between:
Bacchi presents a 6-step process to understand problem definition:
Problem definition can relate to its alleged cause (such as the lifestyle of certain populations), how far a government should go to address it (such as to regulate, fund, or exhort), and which part of government is responsible (if it is, say, a problem of public health, social security, or criminal justice).
WPR focuses on the ‘deep-seated cultural values’ that are taken for granted even though they underpin debate. Examples include the rules we use to categorise populations, distinguish between normal versus deviant behaviour, and the role of government in ‘private’ or ‘family’ life.
Issues may be apparent for long periods before becoming problems for governments to solve. Explanations for intervention can include shifts in social attitudes or attention, changes in government, new information, and new technologies (such as in medicine, transport, or communication) that change social behaviour or make new interventions possible. Further, old ways of solving problems can endure long after the problem seems to have changed.
Note the power to decide who – or what – is a problem (and the powerlessness to challenge that choice). A population’s ‘problems’ could be caused by their lifestyle or the ways in which we interpret their behaviour. The cause of traffic congestion could be over-reliance on cars or the absence of good infrastructure. Comparing problem definitions and cultural reference points, in different countries, can help identify which frames dominate.
Problem definitions can help close off debate. They help alienate and stigmatise some populations. They produce positive or negative material consequences, and intended or unintended effects. Question 5 helps us ask who benefits from the current definition, and who might benefit from a new representation of the problem.
People exercise power to create or defend these ways to characterise problems, in a context in which certain practices and ideas dominate debate. Bacchi argues that researchers have a responsibility to question them, and their ‘origins, purposes, and effects’, rather than ‘buy into’ them as a natural starting point for policy analysis.
Policy analysis in a wider context: the reflection exercise
Unlike most of the books in this series, Bacchi focuses primarily on ‘problem-questioning’, not ‘problem-solving’. Researching the policymaking context raises profound issues including the:
This is a critical perspective with an in-built emancipatory function. The role of policy analysts is explicitly political, based on the assumption that policy benefits some groups and harms others, and taking ‘the side of those who are harmed’. It rejects the idea that policy analysis exists simply to reduce uncertainty with the supply of evidence. Rather, policy actors exercise power to frame issues, reduce ambiguity and determine the demand for evidence.
WPR highlights the relationship between (a) our knowledge of the policy process, and (b) the ways in which we use that knowledge to pursue a policy analysis strategy. Policy analysis is deliberately short and incomplete, often with a focus on what to exclude from discussion. It requires us to consider (a) our audience, (b) what to present and withhold, (c) how ‘manipulative’ to be, and (d) where to draw a notional line between providing evidence and advice, all within this wider political context.
