Roger Albert

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 1)

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 1) OR: What criteria would you use to determine whether your society is ok or not?

 

One of the most popular perspectives in sociology from the 1930s until the late 60s was structural-functionalism.  Some people are still functionalists but they’re usually pretty quiet about it these days.  Functionalism has a long history in Western thought but structural-functionalism is of more recent American vintage.  Functionalism was an early European anthropological perspective that was adopted enthusiastically by the American sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton.  Functionalism or structural-functionalism are often uses interchangeably but it’s not my aim here to discuss the distinction or the similarity between these terms.  I have ulterior motives.

 

I start this with a reference to sociology and functionalism and that’s because I’m a sociologist, at least according to the document hanging on my wall in my office.  But functionalism has counterparts in all scientific disciplines.  Some disciplines seem to still embrace the concepts at least at an elementary level and use the perspective in teaching.  As far as I know in human biology classes there is still talk of anatomy and physiology, that is, of the structure of human organs, cells, systems, etc., and their functions.  I know that in anthropology there is still reference to the various aspects or institutions of cultures and their function or role in the lives of those cultures.  In fact, in sociology, that is also true.  Most introductory texts break up society into parts, education, religion, family, economy, polity, art, etc., and the role they play together to keep a society functioning properly or in equilibrium, which is the ideal social state according to sociological functionalists and other scientists too for that matter.

 

There is some validity to the structural-functionalist perspective, but it’s limited.  The perspective has been overwhelmed by much more relativistic perspectives such as the so-called interactionist perspectives but I’ll explore that some other day.  It’s certainly true that human bodies have organs and they function more or less well.  Emile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) actually referred to sociology as social pathology or the study of what goes wrong with societies or how they get out of kilter.  He also referred to sociology as the study of morality but I’ll also leave that for another day.  The point here is that in sociology a major perspective sees society as being composed of parts, which serve a function more or less effectively.   The family is supposed to serve the function of socializing children and providing a warm, emotionally supportive environment in which children grow up.  Religion is supposed to look after our spiritual needs.  Education has the task of preparing each generation of people to undertake their adult roles.  The economy is supposed to take care of our biological needs for food and other material things we need to live in a particular society at a particular time.  If all the parts of society are doing their job, everything is cool and society is working as it should.  Of course, I wrote earlier that this perspective has limitations and it does.  One of the main limitations is that it treats society as an organism that stands by itself and is, in a sense, sui generis (self generated).  I’m being somewhat unfair to functionalism, but not essentially.  But that’s not the only problem with functionalism.  It wants society to be balanced, but it often isn’t and some institutions or parts of society don’t always do what they’re supposed to do in the way that they’re supposed to.  Robert K. Merton understood that and came up with the idea that some things like families are sometimes dysfunctional and the task of the sociologist is to show how things can be put right again.  Well, today I want to look at dysfunction in ‘the economy.’

 

First, I want to be clear that I’m not a functionalist in the least but that doesn’t prevent me from writing about ‘society’ from that perspective.  It’s a simplistic perspective because it’s basically ahistorical, but for the moment just pretend that you’ve gone into your doctor’s office and she’s trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with you.  Pretend that you’re a doctor of society trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with your society.  What criteria would you use to determine whether your society is ok or not?  This is not a rhetorical question.  I’m interested in your answer.  Write a comment.

Citizen, taxpayer, consumer, worker: no wonder people get so freaking confused.

~ Roger JG Albert

So, I’m a consumer, a taxpayer, a worker (retired now), a voter, a citizen…all of these statuses contradict each other in one-way or another.  As a citizen, I get to vote every 4 years or so (woopty- doo) to elect people who are supposed to represent our political interests and pass laws to protect us all and provide a legal framework for acceptable individual conduct.  But, the government (our elected representatives) is dedicated to creating a prosperous and wealthy country and so their goal is to create economic development.  All other goals, for the government, are secondary to or support the first goal.  Kicking the shit out of the Employment Insurance scheme and skimming money from it to general revenue is a goal in support of economic development.

Economic development, of course, means private corporate enterprise.  So the government sees its prime goal as the support and driver of the private corporate agenda.  So we get to vote for the government every four years or so to represent our political/economic interests by promoting, encouraging and subsidizing private corporations so that they can, as the ideology goes, create wealth for all of us.  But there’s a problem here because as workers we suck away at private profit by actually getting paid to work.  Now that’s a problem for private corporations and the government.  Private corporations are dedicated to reducing the costs of labour because they’re a drag on profits.  That means using technology to replace workers as much as possible or reducing the value of their labour (as in McDonaldization).  Governments support that process in countless ways.  One way is by slowly and gradually, one project at a time, encouraging the use of foreign temporary workers or moving manufacturing and some services overseas where the wages are much lower.  As an aside, I read all the time in the newspapers about the ascendency of China with its huge cheap labour force and manufacturing capacity when in fact, it’s not so much China that’s ascended but American, European, Australian, Korean, Japanese and Canadian manufacturers that have set up shop in export processing zones in poor countries all over the world and especially China that account for the growth of the ‘Chinese’ economy.  What we’re seeing here is a leveling out of the value of labour globally.  Chinese workers are steadily getting higher and higher wages (by demanding them backed by lots and lots of labour unrest) while we are on a race to the bottom with our government telling us that we make too much money and that’s why Canada is not competitive.  What a load of crap!  In any case, back to my main theme keeping in mind that as workers we are apparently a burden on corporate profits and all the benefits we receive, including decent pensions are completely unreasonable.  The more I hear these stupid arguments the more I think that the government and corporations would like all of us to be making minimum wages…if that did happen, kiss goodbye to corporate profits because we wouldn’t be able to shop anymore, even at Walmart and they’d have to build bigger bridges so we would all have space to live under them.  What a cheerful prospect! So as citizens, we support governments that support our bosses who would like to get rid of us as workers because we’re too expensive but as I point out, lower wages mean lower profits in the long run.  So how are we doing as consumers?  Well, read on.

On CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio a few weeks ago we heard the President and CEO of the Credit Counseling Society of Victoria exhorting people to avoid getting into debt.  Apparently, we (Canadians) are in more personal debt (not counting mortgages) than in most countries. (at last count about 164% of income)  Well, I think that’s good advice.  By all means stay out of debt.  At the same time, however, we (at home here) get calls every day from credit granting organizations like banks urging us to borrow more and more.  They offer low interest rates and long repayment terms.  Not only that, but we face a daily barrage of exhortations to buy, buy, buy.  Cars, furniture, electronics, software, music.  How can we resist?  We need to feel good about ourselves.  We need to get the high we get when we buy things (more on this in a future post). And to compound the matter we get ‘consumer confidence’ numbers on our daily stock market reports. When consumers stop buying it’s bad for the economy, don’t you know.  So do we go with the banks or the Credit Counselling Society and Marc Carney’s Bank of Canada?  Obviously we buy things and get into more and more debt.  So as consumers of commodities, even debt (which has become a commodity), we are really doing our job.  The tipping point will come, however, when the margins we have between personal debt and the ability to repay get so squeezed that we must collapse, not only as individuals but as a society.

Of course, as a worker, I get paid and taxed on my income.  That makes me a taxpayer.  There’s even an organization in Canada called the Canadian Taxpayer’s Federation (CTF) that is supposed to be protecting us against our governments spending too much money on useless things.  Of course their definition of useless is not my definition of useless, but there you go.  It’s almost as if the CTF seems all the money governments spend on programs etc. as money stuffed into a toilet bowl or down an empty well or mineshaft never to be seen or used again.  The reality is that governments spend money, wisely or not, and that money gets circulated in ‘the economy.’  I was a college instructor for 36 years.  During that time I made pretty good money and it mostly came from taxpayers via the provincial government.  I paid taxes 0n my income and on my property…all of it going to support businesses and local government infrastructure and programs.  So as a worker I paid taxes but got some of that money back in exchange for teaching all those years.  My wages and taxes (now my pension and taxes) go to support business and government.  As a resident of BC and Vancouver Island in particular, I want to see good, well-maintained roads (cleared of snow at the moment) and for that I have to pay.  Every cent the government spends goes somewhere. Ask the contract snow-clearing guy if he thinks the government should spend less.  The more I get paid the more I can pay back to support this kind of thing.  But it seems that the CTF wants us to pay lower taxes so we can presumably contribute more to corporate profits by buying more burgers and fries.  The truth is that governments spend strategically and because of commitments to ongoing contracts have only a certain margin of cash to play with.  They frantically need us to believe their bullshit ideology so we go on seeing ourselves in fragmented ways as either citizens, taxpayers, workers, or consumers.  We are all of those statuses combined in ways that cannot be profitably seen in isolation.  Think about it next time you hear someone ranting about spending way too much money on taxes or about goddamn union members making way too much money and sitting on their asses all day long.

To summarize, it seems we spend too much money and that puts us in terrible personal debt.  We also don’t spend enough money and that’s bad for ‘the economy.’  We get paid way too much (which allows us, of course, to spend so much) and pay way too much in taxes but are dependent on those very taxes to keep government subsidies to business high.   We vote every four years within a system that guarantees the preeminence of corporate profits, much of that going to weakening our national sovereignty.  In that way we continue to weaken our own position as workers or as members of a community with common interests.  Divide and conquer is and has been government policy for decades.  As citizens, we’re supposed to be in charge, but our role there is contradicted by our role as workers because we are a drag and an impediment to corporate profits with our high wages and corporate profits are the main concern of government.  It’s all pretty crazy.  More later.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners meet your Potential Modern Inheritors

~ Roger JG Albert

Yes, the title is a wee bit provocative but let me explain.  In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.  This book, from the back cover on my edition, “…lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly.  Hitler’s Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans.”  Goldhagen systematically addresses many conventional explanations for The Holocaust: 1) the perpetrators were coerced, 2) that they were merely following orders, 3) that they were under very severe psychological pressure, 4) that they were petty bureaucrats needing to perform whatever tasks assigned them for the sake of their own career advancement, and 5) that people performed isolated and fragmented tasks so that they couldn’t appreciate the significance of their actions.  He then addresses each of these explanations and rejects them categorically.  He argues that a great deal of horrifying brutality and genocide was exercised not by insane people, but by ordinary people carrying out their sacred duty to The Fatherland.  This may be hard to believe, and the only real antidote to this scepticism is a thorough reading of Goldhagen’s book, but he is very convincing in his argument.  His book is carefully researched and highly insightful.

For Goldhagen, The Holocaust was not the result of aberrant individuals, bureaucracy, indifference, ignorance or individual pathology of any kind and it was only possible because Germany and Germans, ordinary Germans, were systematically changed  into anti-semites in very large numbers well before the war started. It was, he argues, the culmination of a process by which the German people, ordinary Germans, were convinced over decades that the biggest impediment to Germany’s apotheosis, its rise to true glory, was the Jewish people.  Over decades before the war, Jews were portrayed as the greatest evil that Germany faced as a nation.  So, it seems that Germans in their passionate love of The Fatherland were not only willing executioners of Jews (and other groups of people seen as a threat, either to The Fatherland, as in the case of Jews, or the Aryan race as in the case of people with mental or physical disabilities, the Romany, etc.), but enthusiastic, gleeful, inventive, proud and patriotic perpetrators of unbelievable brutality towards Jews.  There is a photograph in Goldhagen’s book of a German soldier, an ordinary German soldier, shooting in the back of the head a young mother while she holds her child in her arms.  He did it in front of the camera, proud of his patriotic deed.  Obviously, human beings are capable of incredible personal barbarism but that barbarism is more often than not released against ‘the other,’ the perceived source of all evil and danger to the group, whether it be the marriage, family, community, town, city, province, country or ideology (pick any one).  The soldier who shot the young mother did not see his deed as barbaric, but rather as patriotic, as one more step in the elimination of the Jewish evil infecting glorious Germany and threatening to weaken the Aryan race.  From this viewpoint, every time a German kills a Jew, man, woman or child, Germany gets stronger.  Essentially, the Jewish people were offered up as a sacrifice to ensure the future prosperity of the German nation. From here on, my argument gets a little complex and much of it arises in Ernest Becker’s work summarized in his posthumous book Escape From Evil (1975) in which he writes:

…the psychology of the Nazi experience, […] served as a grim refresher course on the metaphysics of mass slaughter.  Leo Alexander, in his outstanding paper on the SS, points out how much the Nazis were animated by what he calls a ‘heathen concept’: they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life.  This was ‘heathen’ indeed: we recognize it as the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life flow more plentifully…Goering, for example, made a statement early in the war that ‘with every German airman who is killed by the enemy our Luftwaffe becomes stronger. (p.103)

So the logic of mass murder becomes clear. The ‘cleansing’ of Germany of the ‘dirty’ Jews was supposed to make Germany stronger, an idea that had been brewing for a long time in the German mind.  In essence, Goldhagen’s insistance that Germany was infected long before the Nazi era with a profound antisemitism fits in perfectly with Becker’s observation that The Holocaust was not an ‘event’ in history, but a consequence of a profound and longstanding insecurity that ordinary Germans had regarding the state of Germany.  Relief from this insecurity culminated in the execution and torture of masses of Jewish people.  It became the duty of all right-thinking, patriotic and heroic citizens to participate fully in the elimination of the Jewish evil, an evil inherent in every sub-human Jewish man, woman and child, the evil that threatened, in their minds, the very source of their life and power, The Fatherland.  Of course, the whole enterprise was a lie.  No amount of killing could save the German nation.

So, what can we now make of Goldhagen’s contention that it was ordinary Germans who were the perpetrators of Hitler’s program to eliminate Jews from Germany (and everywhere else given enough time)?  What we can say is that most evil in the world is not the result of the actions of aberrant individuals -although they definitely express their aberrance when permitted  to or encouraged by the state – but of ordinary people expressing their love for country or idea (racial purity, the uselessness of the poor, God, the glory of money, etc…).  As Becker states it, “…evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil.” (p.136)

What lesson can we learn from Goldhagen (and Becker – but more on that later)?  That blind nationalism and unquestioning faith in God and country have, and can still, lead ordinary people into committing the most atrocious, genocidal actions possible.  The Rwandan massacre of 1994 is an example of just such a thing and let us not think for a moment that it will never happen again.  From the vitriol I’ve been reading in comments following articles on the Idle No More movement, I expect that ordinary Canadians could be led into the same genocidal frame of mind as ordinary Germans were during the Nazi era.  Canadians are not anywhere close to becoming genocidal now, but systemic racism, scapegoating and a profound ignorance of the actions of their own government towards aboriginal people can set the stage for popular descent into crass racism and incivility.  When the government’s agenda are dominated by the private accumulation of capital, any perceived impediment to economic growth such as treaty negotiations will be seen by some as a threat to Canada as a nation and it’s sovereignty.  Once aboriginal people are openly scapegoated and blamed for a poor economy we will have to be doubly vigilant to ensure that the situation does not get out of hand and degenerate into widespread and open hostility towards First Nations.

Why is Kevin O’Leary so smug about being on the right?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I’ve long been interested in the way language embodies class and power relations.  Obviously, our language embodies much of our culture, so it’s not surprising that it would embody class relations.  The word ‘poor’ is used to describe many conditions of inadequacy.  ‘Rich’ can describe a chocolate cake or a wealthy person, both desirable components of a valuable life.  ‘Right’ does not only indicate a direction in it’s most obvious sense, but also correctness.  To be correct is to be right, as in right-handed.  In contrast, to be left-handed is to be sinister.  The ‘proper’ adjective used to point to my left-handedness is ‘sinistral.’  Left-handers are sinister.  Of course ‘left’ indicates nothing good.  The sun is bright and right, the moon dark and left . Both these terms in turn are symbols for men and women respectively.  The moon is the domain of women, the sun belongs to men.  After all, who is at the right hand of God, and who at the left?  It’s fairly clear that Jesus sits to the right of God, but there’s a great deal of uncertainty among Christians about who sits on His left. Probably better not to go there.  Where are women in heaven? Not particularly evident, at least not in the heaven I learned about as a young Catholic boy.

Turning this discussion to politics it’s clear what we can expect.  Any conservative political party is on the right of the political spectrum and the socialists, liberals and communists occupy the sinistral left.  Now, isn’t that convenient?  Right is correct, left is just plain wrong, isn’t it?  Our language pre-conditions us to think about conservative (Republican in the US) parties as being right, as in better than those on the left.  Kevin O’Leary, that obnoxious and rude commentator on the CBC about business and finance has no doubt that he is right because he’s on the right.  After all, he represents the interests of business and finance, the natural elements of conservative thinking and of what C.B. Macpherson called possessive individualism.  After all, who can be against business success?  Our prosperity depends on it, or so the argument goes.  The poor are immobile, the walking dead, the wealthy have money to allow them mobility.  The poor are what’s ‘left,’ and they get what’s left when we’ve finished eating.   The wealthy always eat first and are always on the right path…don’t you know?

The new globalized assault on labour

~ Roger JG Albert

The first link below is to a CBC news article about the influx of Chinese miners in Canada and the second is about ‘right to work’ legislation in Michigan, but in other American states too.   Both stories are from yesterday’s National.  These stories may not seem to be linked at first glance, but they are.  They point to the internationalization of labour and the degradation of its value.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/12/10/chinese-miner-investigation.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/12/10/f-rfa-macdonald-right-to-work.html

I’ve written about this in previous posts, but it’s worth repeating Thorstein Veblen’s observation that countries are subservient institutions to private capital accumulation, which is currently our dominant mode of production along with it’s modus operandi, business entreprise and the factory system.  The concept of private property is the legal expression of power over commodity production and accumulation.  I repeat: countries are now and have always been subservient to the capitalist mode of production.  Initially, they were created in Europe as a way of opening up markets for commodities and to ‘free up’ labour to move around beyond the confines of their feudal estates.  Countries are just another step in the historical trend towards the global consolidation of political power.   Still, countries have often been a focus of group loyalty, nationalism or patriotism.  This is not always pro-capitalism.  The problem for capitalism is that once countries are created they become more than what was first intended.  People soon consider them home.  They fall in love with them.  They aren’t entirely sure why, but they do.  Well, we’ve been told forever that countries are the way the world is organized.  Our citizenship defines us.  We are proud to be Canadians, Americans, Australians, Indians, etc… We don’t question this, it’s just the way the world is.  So we get upset when we find out that our governments seem to be doing things that we perceive as harmful to us and to our country.  We can’t figure out why our politicians would do such things.  Why, when the unemployment rate in Canada is fairly high, it would encourage the importation of labour?  Why would the state of Michigan attack collective bargaining, guaranteeing a reduction of average wages there, like it has done in other states?  It’s not that surprising, really.  Some governments, not all, are more business oriented than others.  The Canadian government, for example, is extremely pro-business.  As pro-business, it buys into the argument that lower wages are generally good for business.  The cost of labour is a large part of what it means to do business, so any way of reducing the costs of labour becomes government policy.  Attacking collective bargaining rights, as in the US, is a way of reducing average wages, and it will eventually reduce the costs of labour globally, so will importing cheaper labour from other parts of the world to developed countries.  Ironically, reducing average wages will reduce our capacity to buy commodities, the essence of the capitalist mode of production.  So, go ahead boys, cut our wages, cut our pensions. By doing so you’re cutting your own throats.

So, Canada came into existence officially in 1867.  When do you think it will die?  There’s no question that it will. When and how are the questions, not if.  Will the death of Canada come from the outside, from invasion?  Not at all likely, unless it’s the US over water.  No, Canada will come apart at the seams, much like the US will, bit by bit.  Omnibus bill by omnibus bill.  Harper decree by Harper decree.  But don’t worry, it won’t happen for a few years yet.  A hint might be though that 95% of the petrochemical business in this country is foreign controlled.  Now with the Nexen and Progress deals paving the way, outright ownership is on the way.  And don’t believe a word Harper utters about tightening the rules.

Labour has always been a necessary part of the capitalist mode of production, but labour is being replaced by capital (by the use of technology and automation) or cheapened by the same process.  The inevitable result locally and globally will be a few very rich people and the rest of us.  How far do you think we are away from that outcome?

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless

~ Roger JG Albert

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless.

Interesting approach to dealing with homelessness in Surrey, British Columbia. To have a look, click on the link above to The Tyee, one of my favourite sources for news.

This approach seems to be working, at least for some people.  I’d like to see a proper evaluation of it, but then I’d like to see a proper evaluation of all programs organizations advance in the cause of ending homelessness.  Evaluation is the key to determining whether a program is successful or not.  Of course, once a program, any program, gets off the ground and survives its first 2 or 3 years of operation it gets a life of its own and that’s hard to give up, even in the light of ‘thin’ success on the ground.  But programs can change rather than die and become more relevant and successful with a new approach to evaluation called developmental evaluation that includes the evaluator in a dialogue with the program to get its practice in line with its goals and objectives.

 

Bullying

~ Roger JG Albert

Bullying.

This post is in response to a query from one of my former students asking me for my sociological opinion about bullying.

So, what about bullying?  Well, I suspect it’s not just one process, and people will experience it differently depending on many social and individual circumstances, and I mean bullies as well as those bullied.  We used to call bullying, being ‘picked on.’  It always includes picking out, singling out a person for rejection by the group.  Rejection is sometimes expressed verbally but also in many other ways.  Bullying tactics include taunts, name-calling, exclusion for regular group activities, and even physical assault.  The goal of the bully is to render the person singled out to be bullied helpless and vulnerable.  But none of this is new to the world.

 

Bullying is a social institution, a way that people attempt to self-aggrandize while diminishing others.  And because there is a lot of diversity in the population, some people are virtually immune from bullying or being intimidated by others while others are highly vulnerable.  Some people fight back when bullied, others shrink back into themselves.

 

Bullying, in effect, is the individualized equivalent of scapegoating.  Bullies are more or less adept at gathering support for their ‘cause,’ which is the shunning of a person, or sometimes of a group of people, because of certain characteristics they target as socially unacceptable.  Sometimes these characteristics are real, sometimes contrived.  The effect is the same, either way.  It’s the old solidarity thing again. Durkheim wrote about it ad infinitum and others like Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, Norbert Elias among many others, carried on the tradition.  In fact, that’s what sociology is all about.  Durkheim correctly argued that sociology is the science of morality.  Solidarity is achieved in many ways and at many levels.  It’s not too difficult to get people to think of themselves as being an important part of a group.  Group life is necessary for human survival.  Our very lives depend on the power of our groups.  One way we do that is to try to diminish the ‘other.’  Governments do it all the time (as in the ‘evil empire’ crap) but so do many other organizations, even high school cliques.

 

I remember distinctly a time when I was a student at a private Catholic boarding school in Edmonton, Alberta (50 years ago now, sheesh), one of 40 kids from British Columbia in a school of 350.  We had a real we/they thing going with the kids from Alberta and Saskatchewan, most of whom we considered hicks.  I doubt if they spent a lot of time thinking of ‘us’ as a group.  In any case, we shared a sense of being in this together.  I’m not saying it was rational, but that’s the way it was.  Strangely  though, in one period of a couple of months, I found myself leading a group of kids taunting this poor kid from rural Alberta who had some personal hygiene issues, but who otherwise was like the rest of us.  (We slept in a dormitory of 125 beds.  Lots of boys had personal hygiene issues.  The odor in that room was sometimes choking and even the huge wall fan at the back of the room couldn’t deal with the stink).  He eventually left the school because of it and I remember us feeling triumphant about it.

 

At another time, I was singled out for special bullying attention.  That lasted a couple of months before I finally broke and got physically violent with one of the other boys.  The priests who were in charge of the place had a practice of dealing with inter-boy aggression by putting both boys in the boxing ring and letting them go at it in an officially sanctioned way.  Interestingly, that often worked to diffuse bullying because the boys, like me and ‘my bully,’ could go maybe 3 rounds before falling together in an exhausted heap, finally breaking out in laughter and hugs. (Boxing is really hard work!)  These bullying incidents were situational.  One day a bully could easily become the bullied.  The feeling I got, though, when I was bullied was complete helplessness and I remember writing my mother and asking her to get me out of there.  She urged me to stick it out and that’s when I struck back.  When I was the bully, the sense of power that gave me and my co-bullies was pretty significant.  We smirked and laughed and felt strong, even playing hockey more aggressively (and better, some would say).

 

We can all be aggressive: men, women and children.  But there’s a lot of variation in the population so that some individuals are more resistant to bullying than others.  But that’s on an individual level.  On the social level, bullying will happen as an inevitable playing out of power struggles as each of us tries to find our place in the world, much like chickens in a coop find their pecking order.  We can never do away with bullying as long as we are individuals living in societies where each one of us dances between expressing our individuality and living within the group’s moral wall.  Big problems would ensue for a society if no one were safe from aggression or bullying, if morality broke down to such an extent that we were all individuals on our own.  That, of course, is not possible for our species, so we try to put mechanisms in place to mitigate the damage caused by too much aggression or bullying.  We pass laws, we use guilt and shame.

 

Sometimes, things get out of hand.  A particularly vulnerable person like Amanda Todd, needing like we all do to be a meaningful part of a group, is shunned by more and more people (smelling blood) making for an increasingly constricting scope of activity, for extreme isolation.  Todd was not even safe in her own room at home where she was vulnerable to bullying online.  Bullying, like scapegoating, can happen just as easily at a distance as it can face-to-face.  Todd ended up committing suicide, in Durkheim’s terms, egoistic suicide because of the isolation she experienced and her perception that she had no one to ‘be’ with.

 

Bullying is a consequence of the dance we all experience between self-aggrandizement (ensuring that we take up valuable space in the world) and self-effacement (respect for the fact that we owe everything to our group and that we’d better not step out of line).  For some of us, sometimes, the dance turns deadly.  Most of the time, nobody pays attention to suicide, but every so often one incident gets a lot of publicity.  If the suicide is ‘caused’ by bullying, then, with the right set of circumstances, the social reaction can be severe.  People are calling for the arrest of the bullies in the Amanda Todd case.  Politicians are threatening to enact anti-bullying legislation. That’s a sign that we’re all feeling vulnerable and helpless these days.  We want our society to protect us.  And that’s fine, until we are ‘protected’ so effectively that we no longer have any room to move, to express our individuality.

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems

~ Roger JG Albert

Click on the link below for an interesting follow-up to my last blog.

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems.

Homeless People, Mental Illness and Brain Injuries

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a front line worker when it comes to homelessness.  I have spoken with many homeless people, heard their stories and, yes, given them money, often in the face of disapproving glances from passersby, as if it were any of their business.  Homeless people are often thought of as threatening, loud, dirty, uneducated, lazy and drunk or drugged out.  There is some truth to these thoughts.  However, homeless people don’t have a monopoly on them.  

Homelessness forces people into the street where their every gesture, their actions, their conversations and their very beings are constantly visible.  If they are street bound, that is, if they have no temporary accommodations, no shelters to sleep in or no tent in the bushes, they are visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Being observed all the time, without privacy has to be very emotionally taxing, to say the least.  If the homeless person has mental health issues, a brain injury or an addiction (most of them) , the vulnerability of constant exposure must be enormously distressing, compounding any problems they might already have ‘behaving’ themselves and relating to other people.  Constant surveillance by the police and other agencies cannot but add to the stress of living homeless.  

Most of us, if we have too many drinks, get a little raucous, loud, or a little unruly, can catch a cab home and crawl into bed, secure in our isolation and out of the public eye.  Our homes are our refuge, a place where we can do things we wouldn’t dream of doing on the street or anywhere in public. In fact, if you can afford to rent or own a home, many behaviours and activities not for public consumption become viable.  Drinking to excess, getting stoned, walking around nude, all these things are possible if you live in a home.  Those are the things that make it so liberating when we move out of our parental homes into our own pads.  Privacy is precious and it’s obvious that the more wealth we have the more privacy we can buy.  

Privacy is not something homeless people can afford.  The public life that homeless people lead makes them incredibly vulnerable to being targeted, scapegoated and unfairly characterized as morally unacceptable and less than worthy in the eyes of many.  Mental issues, brain injuries, addictions and other problems are spread throughout the population, but the wealthy can buy themselves into expensive treatment programs and privacy.  Street people don’t have the same advantage.  Our attention is drawn to the homeless because of their visibility.  If we were subject to the same surveillance intensity they are we may not be so quick to judge and reject.  

Strombo | The World’s Oldest Gymnast: 86 Years Old And Still Rockin’ The Parallel Bars

~ Roger JG Albert

Strombo | The World’s Oldest Gymnast: 86 Years Old And Still Rockin’ The Parallel Bars.

This story from Strombo is most inspiring.  Seems I need lots of inspiration lately and thankfully, I’m getting it.   This ‘old lady’ is twenty years older than I am.  I’ve got no excuses and lots of time.  Get out to the gym!

Click on the link above!