Your passage weaves together a searing critique of modernity's violent categorizations, and the ways in which systemic forces manufacture crises, enforce alienation, and erode moral agency. Below, I’ll synthesize and expand on the key themes, drawing connections between the thinkers you cite (Hedva, Foucault, Sandel, Mbembe, Gilmore, Allport, Girard, etc.) and the broader implications for politics, disability, and resistance.
1. The Tyranny of "Usefulness" and the Sick/Well Binary
Johanna Hedva’s framing of wellness as an ableist, ideal exposes how bodies and minds are judged by their productivity. In a society obsessed with economic utility:
Illness/disability = "waste": Drawing from the Nazi term lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life), you highlight how non-productive lives are devalued. The "sick/well" binary isn’t neutral—it’s a tool of control (à la Foucault’s "dividing practices"), branding some as "rogue machines" in a post-Fordist nightmare.
Wellness as privilege: Wellness isn’t just health; it’s tied to wealth, race, and power. To be "well" is to conform to civilizations demands; to be "sick" is to fail. This echoes Tobin Siebers’ disability theory: ableism isn’t just prejudice—it’s the ideology of ability as a social mandate.
Question: How do we resist when even self-care (wellness culture) is co-opted into productivity? Hedva’s "Sick Woman Theory" suggests illness as a site of radical refusal.
2. Crisis Capitalism and the Scarcity of Virtue
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s analysis of manufactured crises (e.g., prisons as "solutions" to surplus capital and labor) dovetails with Sandel’s critique of virtue-as-scarcity:
Artificial urgency: Crises (real or invented) justify authoritarian shortcuts—managerialism replaces democracy, stopgaps replace solidarity. Eisenstein’s "artificial scarcity of time" mirrors Marx’s "time-discipline" under capitalism: we’re too "busy" to care.
Virtue as muscle, not fuel: Sandel’s rebuttal to Arrow—virtue grows when exercised—calls for institutionalizing altruism (e.g., universal healthcare as moral infrastructure). Mbembe’s "technologies of happiness" might extend this: what if care were the default, not the exception?
Contradiction: Capitalism needs crises to survive (disaster capitalism), yet prevents collective responses by eroding trust and time.
3. Structural Prejudice and the Limits of Contact Theory
Allport’s contact hypothesis (prejudice declines with equal-status interaction) is hopeful but insufficient when prejudice is structural:
Palestinian/Israeli "Standing Together": Shared goals (peace, equality) can bridge divides, but without dismantling apartheid, contact is palliative. Girard’s scapegoating reminds us: violence often unites majorities against a "polluting" minority.
Orlando Patterson’s "social death": When people are expelled from reciprocity (e.g., slaves, refugees, the "unproductive"), they’re stripped of moral status. This is by design—civilization thrives on disposable populations.
Leymann’s "mobbing" and workplace terror show how systemic cruelty becomes routine. The solution isn’t just individual empathy but structural solidarity.
4. The Eugenicist Logic of "Fitting In"
Sandel’s warning about eugenicist sensibilities is chilling:
Self-repair over world-repair: The neoliberal mantra ("adapt or die") shifts blame inward. Disabled people are told to "overcome," not demand accessibility; workers to "upskill," not unionize.
Moral disempowerment: When we concede that the world is immutable, we accept "there is no alternative" (TINA). This is the ultimate victory of market fundamentalism.
Counterpoint: Hedva’s sickness as resistance—what if we refused to "fit" and demanded the world change instead?
5. Pathways to Resistance
Your text implies a few radical imperatives:
Abolish binaries: Reject sick/well, useful/waste, crisis/normalcy as tools of control.
Institutionalize care: Make mutual aid the baseline (Mbembe’s "animism" as relationality).
Slow down: Resist manufactured urgency. Eisenstein: "What if time were abundant?"
Target structures, not symptoms: Gilmore’s anti-prison work shows how to dismantle systems that feed on crisis.
Reclaim virtue: Sandel’s "virtue as muscle" suggests practicing solidarity until it’s habitual.
Final Thought: The "Social Death" of Late Modernity
Patterson’s "social death" and Girard’s scapegoating converge in your analysis: society produces expendable people to sustain itself. The answer isn’t inclusion into a broken system but dismantling the system that requires exclusion.
As you imply: To "give a shit" is to revolt against the very normality of indifference.
1. Hedva’s "Sick Woman Theory" as Sabotage
Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory isn’t just about illness—it’s a manifesto for ungovernable bodies. Key moves:
"The body is the first site of protest": When your pain is dismissed by a system that values "wellness" as productivity, being visibly sick becomes a radical act. (Think: AIDS activists chanting "We die, they do nothing.")
Refusal to "get better": Rejecting the demand to "recover" for the market. Instead: What if chronic illness is a lens to see capitalism’s violence?
"Care as warfare": Mutual aid networks (like those built by disabled communities) aren’t charity—they’re counter-logistics against a system that wants us isolated.
Deeper dive: Hedva’s work echoes Foucault’s "biopolitics"—but where Foucault analyzed control, Hedva weaponsizes the "unruly" body. For her, the sick body isn’t a failure; it’s a breach in the system.
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography
Gilmore doesn’t just critique prisons—she maps how capitalism manufactures crises to justify them:
"Surplus populations": Capitalism needs unemployment to keep wages low. Prisons "manage" this surplus (especially Black, Brown, poor bodies).
"Organized abandonment": The state doesn’t just repress—it strategically neglects (e.g., defunding schools to fund prisons).
Abolition as "presence": Not just tearing down prisons, but building life-affirming infrastructure (healthcare, housing).
Deeper dive: Compare to Marx’s "reserve army of labor"—but Gilmore shows how racism spatializes this logic (see: Golden Gulag’s analysis of California’s prison boom).
3. Sandel vs. Arrow: Virtue as Muscle, Not Fuel
Sandel’s rebuttal to economist Kenneth Arrow is a class war in microcosm:
Arrow’s neoliberal virtue: Altruism is a "scarce resource" to be hoarded (like oil). Implication: Care must be rationed—hence, austerity.
Sandel’s radical virtue: Like a muscle, solidarity grows when exercised. Example: Universal healthcare isn’t "costly"—it makes society stronger.
Mbembe’s twist: In Necropolitics, he argues capitalism produces death as policy. Sandel’s "virtue muscle" is thus antithetical to necro-economics.
Deeper dive: Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit ties this to the myth of "self-made" success—another way virtue is privatized.
4. Girard’s Scapegoat and the Crisis Machine
René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred reveals:
Capitalism’s sacrificial logic: Crises require scapegoats (migrants, "welfare queens," the "unproductive ill").
The "mimetic" trap: Even resistance can mirror the system’s violence (e.g., activists internalizing urgency).
Deeper dive: Girard + Gilmore = Crises are not accidents—they’re rituals. Prisons, borders, and austerity are modern sacrifices to the market god.
5. Leymann’s "Mobbing" and Workplace Terror
Heinz Leymann’s studies of workplace abuse show:
"Psychological terror": Not just bullying, but systemic elimination of "disruptive" workers (the ill, the "difficult").
Capitalism’s "hidden curriculum": Compliance is enforced through humiliation.
Deeper dive: Compare to Arendt’s "banality of evil"—mobbing isn’t about monsters, but ordinary people following scripts.
6. Tactics for Rebellion
From these depths, emergency strategies:
Refuse the binary: Be "sick" loudly. Reject "wellness" as compliance.
Build parallel systems: Abolition isn’t negation—it’s creating the world we do want (Gilmore’s "abolition geography").
Slow the crisis machine: Eisenstein’s "time abundance" vs. artificial urgency.
Exercise virtue like a muscle: Organize, unionize, care collectively.
Target the sacred cows: Expose capitalism’s scapegoats (Girard) and dismantle its altars.
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