Freire's Pedagogy: 2. Breaking The Sadistic Cycle

This post is a continuation of meditations and explorations of Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  To me, the consideration of this book follows logically from the consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance which I set forth in the series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  The first post in the current series on Freire's Pedagogy laid out the necessity of our present consideration.  To repeat some statements from that post, freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize - especially when the organizer discovers that it is often very hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.

So we begin once again with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it thus: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  Freire describes this pursuit as "the pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person."  However, this pursuit of self-affirmation requires the pursuer to shoulder the necessary costs of the pursuit, the necessary costs of being a responsible person.  It is the desire to have the self-affirmation without shouldering the costs which leads some people to become the oppressors of their fellows - that is, the owners of their fellows and of the fruits of the labors of their fellows.  

An example of this is found in the book Garden Graces written by George Grant, a white American evangelical author with Dominionist leanings.  In that book, Mr. Grant celebrates the life and intellectual accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson.  What is especially ironic is Mr. Grant's celebration of Jefferson's accomplishments in the realm of farming and gardening.  For while Jefferson is credited with being a master strategist and inventor in the realm of agriculture, the actual work of implementing Jefferson's ideas was done by African slaves.  Jefferson had the opportunity to develop and express his intellectual talents in the realm of husbandry, but his slaves, on the other hand, were forced by the threat of violence to simply do as they were told.  By that threat of violence - the threatened violence of the oppressor - these slaves were deprived of the opportunity to develop their own humanity, including the intellectual dimension of that humanity which Jefferson got to develop in himself.  

And so we come to a series of key statements made by Freire in his description of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed: 

• "Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human." - Pedagogy, page 55.

• "Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized." - Pedagogy, page 55.  Two observations regarding this statement: first, that in order to deaden their own consciences, the oppressors must convince themselves that their intended victims are not persons and are not human.  Second, consider the abundant historical examples that prove the statement that it is the oppressors who throw the first punch and initiate the violence - from the unprovoked murder of Abel by Cain to the unprovoked conquest of the American continent by Europeans to the unprovoked colonization of Africa and Asia by the European "great powers" to the most recent example - the unprovoked attack and invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

• The corollary to the previous statement: "For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things.'" - Pedagogy, page 57.

• "This behavior, this way of understanding the world and people (which necessarily makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime) is explained by their experience as a dominant class...Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence—initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness—possessive of the world and of men and women." - Pedagogy, page 58.  This possessive consciousness can be illustrated by examples.  A personal example is the experience I had several years ago at a technical office where I worked, in which I came in contact with a white South African man who had left South Africa shortly after apartheid ended.  It quickly became clear to me that he could not bring himself to see me as a fellow human being (I being a Black man), but rather as one of his former possessions who had somehow been stolen from him.  The daily sight of me - a degreed technical professional who had the same job rank and privileges as him - must have given him ulcers!  Another example, both contemporary and historical, is the warped Russian desire to possess and dominate the Baltic nations (not to mention the entire world), an attitude beautifully illustrated by Olga Doroshenko in her posts on Russian narcissism.

• "As beneficiaries of a situation of oppression, the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men. This is why their generosity is false. Humanity is a "thing," and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the "others," of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion." - Pedagogy, pages 58-59.  Not only is this a corollary to the previous statement, but this explains why oppressors consider the struggle for liberation to be an act of subversion - for that struggle subverts the supposed "property rights" of the oppressor.

• "If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism." - Pedagogy, page 59.  This statement is the central point of today's post.  To define sadism, Freire quotes from Erich Fromm, who writes that "The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive."  This sadistic drive seeks to turn the animate, with its freedom and unpredictability, into the inanimate - thus killing it.  This is why the language of oppressors "smells like death," to paraphrase Srdja Popovic.

So Paulo Freire asserts that a central pillar of the oppressor's thinking is the desire to treat other human beings as mere objects, and to wholly possess these "objects", to bring these "objects" entirely under his control.  I say right now that the only Being who has a genuine right to call us His possessions is our Creator.  Allowing fallen, fallible men or women to have that right over us leads us very quickly to the experience of sadism.

This is why, in the struggle for liberation, the oppressed must not be led into the fallacy that says that oppressor and oppressed are merely two sides of the kind of bilateral disagreement in which each side shares blame and in which each side must make some compromises.  Such a fallacy will be preached by the oppressor the moment the oppressed succeed in mounting a challenge that seriously threatens the domination of the oppressor.  If you are in a disagreement with another person because you want to just live your life and mind your business while the other person wants to roast you over a barbecue and stick you between two pieces of bread, what sort of acceptable "compromise" can you reasonably work out?  What concessions should you make?

And this is also why in a struggle against an oppressor, appeasement will never work.  For if you respond to the threat of oppression by attempting to appease the oppressor, you will sooner or later come to a situation where, in the limit, you are totally dominated by the sadism of the oppressor and you find that you have become a masochist.  That is living death.

Freire's Pedagogy: 1. On Becoming Fully Human

In this post, we begin to explore a theme which logically follows from our consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance, as outlined in the series of posts I wrote on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  Freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize.  

The answer to this question has been explored by various people from various angles.  Marshall Ganz has developed the story of self/story of us/story of now framework as a means of activizing people.  This method relies on crafting an organizing call that resonates with the values of the people one is trying to organize.  On the other hand, Jack DuVall has pointed out the necessity of appealing to the reason of the people one is trying to organize, so that they may know exactly what is the substance of the cause they are being asked to join.  According to DuVall, it is this appeal to reason which leads to passionate commitment among those who are organized for the cause of liberation, as they see a cause which reflects their deeply-held values.

These viewpoints provide valuable instruction, yet they may not adequately explain why it is so often so hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  I believe that this explanation is provided in large part by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.  Thus today's post begins the exploration of Freire's Pedagogy, starting appropriately with Chapter 1.

So we begin with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it as this: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  However, the reality of living in a fallen world is that some people don't believe they can reach their full human potential unless they steal from others the ability to fulfill their human potential.  

(A present-day case of this theft is the move by Russia to send 100,000 troops to the Russia-Ukraine border in order to invade Ukraine.  Why has Putin done this?  Because he's gotten it stuck into his evil head that he can't fulfill his ontogeny (or Russia's) unless he seizes the entire world as his possession.  Ukraine was the intended first morsel of his feast - but the brave Ukranians have not allowed themselves to be swallowed so easily, so it's taken Putin over seven years to try to swallow them.  Putin (and his familiar spirit Aleksandr Dugin) assign pretentious possessive names to the regions of the rest of the world - terms like "the near abroad" and the "far abroad," by which they really mean "our near abroad" and "our far abroad."  Putin and his fellow travelers believe that unless Russian "influence" has unrestrained reach throughout the world, his identity will suffer an intolerable insult.  Russian "influence" in this case amounts to sadism as defined by Freire.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Message to Putin: Yo, dude - the rest of the world doesn't want to be Russian!  I'd like to say a few choice words to that thieving little man in his bunker - but I must restrain myself...)

Freire states that while humanization is the people's vocation, that humanization is stolen from the people by those who oppress.  This theft constitutes dehumanization - dehumanization of those who are victims of this theft, because it is a distortion of their humanity.  This theft also dehumanizes the thieves, turning them into something less than human - for they must be less than human in order to mistreat their fellow human beings the way they do.  The oppressor becomes so dehumanized by his oppression that he cannot free himself from it.  Only the oppressed have the power to free both themselves and their oppressors.  Freire sounds a hopeful note, however, in the following statement: "Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so."  

However, at first, many members of the oppressed population do not see freedom as a new collective possibility, nor do they recognize the healthy new identity of freedom which they are being called to express.  Instead, the experience of the oppressive environment in which they live conditions them to internalize the oppressor, so that they mistakenly come to believe that becoming more fully human means to become like the oppressor.  Thus we have people among oppressed communities of color whose disease is so far beyond mere "Uncle Tom-ism" that they inhabit the land of Stockholm Syndrome - people like Larry Elder, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Clarence Thomas.    We also see those who seek to become "courtiers" to the oppressors by becoming part of the apparatus of the oppressor's "false generosity" - a generosity which actually is designed to cement the oppressor's control over the oppressed society.  As members of the oppressor's organs of false generosity, they seek to become brokers and middlemen between the oppressors and the oppressed.  In these and in other ways, some members of the oppressed look for hierarchal ladders to climb so that they can become big shots.  To quote Freire again, "But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors'...Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.  This is their model of humanity."  

Freire also says that "The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom."  This fear of freedom deserves further exploration, but that exploration will have to wait until the next post of this series.  However, those who want to see an example of the conditioning of the oppressed by an oppressive environment and their consequent fear of freedom can refer to a post by Cynthia Kunsman on her blog Under Much Grace.  The title of the post is "The First Step Towards Understanding Jill and Jessa Duggar’s Fox Interview: Second Generation Adults in Cultic/High Demand Religion", and it deals with the effects of high-demand, highly authoritarian religious cultic groups on children of adult parents who become involved in such groups.   

The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  As they grow, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
• "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
• "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
• It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
• It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
• As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression.  To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla."  ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.

Research Week - Late November 2021

In my most recent post, I mentioned that I am in the process of drafting a critique of Erica Chenoweth's latest book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  I also admitted that I have dragged my feet in getting through her book due to the fact that, while much of her book contains valuable insights, there are yet significant portions which present morally questionable advice for those who need to engage in strategic nonviolent resistance.  Writing a worthy critique therefore promises to involve a significant amount of research, a more than fair amount of blood, sweat and tears in writing an accurate rebuttal to some of her statements, and a few dozen hours of my time.  Which is why this past week I again procrastinated.  I'm almost halfway through the book.  (Some day, I'm going to have to finish eating that frog.  Maybe if I tell myself that frog meat tastes like chicken...)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking on and off again about Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his educational philosophy, as his philosophy has a direct bearing on the question of how to recruit and organize oppressed people into a liberation struggle.  The biggest hurdle an organizer or would-be organizer faces is how to begin to activize people who have been submerged all their lives in oppression.  Freire developed a method of what he called "critical education" or "problem-posing education" in which each participant could function at times as both student and teacher.  The focus of his education effort was adult literacy among poor Brazilian peasants.  But for Freire, the development of literacy always had an end goal that was larger than merely learning to read, namely, to move the peasants to begin to see their situation of oppression not as a fixed element of their fate, but as a problem to be examined and acted upon by the peasants themselves.  His educational methods and strategy were so successful that the CIA-backed Brazilian government "honored" him in 1964 by arresting and imprisoning him for "preaching communism".  The government also "honored" his teaching methods by banning them.

Freire wrote a book titled Pedagogia do Oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), a book that first caught my attention as a result of an interview of Dr. Soong-Chan Rah which I recorded for The Well Run Dry back in 2017.  After hearing about Freire's book, I decided to get a copy and read it.  Freire's book is short - only 140 pages, not counting the preface - yet it is densely packed with statements that require deep thought.  I read it while commuting to and from work on the light rail train, and my attention was frequently divided between the book, watching to make sure that my bike didn't get jacked, and watching to make sure that I didn't miss my stop.  Therefore I did not retain very much of what I read.  But the concept of conscientizacao (loosely equivalent to consciousness-raising or "critical consciousness") by means of problem-posing education stuck with me, and intrigued me over the past few weeks to such an extent that I bought an audiobook copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed to supplement my print copy.  (Audiobooks are good companions when uprooting blackberries, pruning trees, cleaning the yard, etc.  Just one word of warning: DO NOT buy audiobooks from Audible or Amazon!  They will sell you an audio file that is in a proprietary format and force you to download a proprietary app to listen to it!)

Chapter 3 of the book has always been hard for me to grasp.  In this chapter, Freire describes how to set up what he calls "culture circles" in which participants can collectively examine the "generative themes" which frame the perceptions which oppressed people have of their oppressive situations.  It would have been nice (although practically impossible at the time Freire wrote his book) for readers to have a set of videos showing these culture circles in action.  If a picture had been worth a thousand words, a short video would have been worth much, much more!  As a result of my renewed interest in the book, this weekend I scrounged YouTube to see if I could find any videos which showed such culture circles in action.

I did not quite find what I was looking for.  However, I did find a couple of videos that either came close or were intriguing for reasons of their own.  The video below illustrates the contrast between what Freire calls the "banking concept of education" versus the "problem-posing education"which Freire advocates.  (Although the video seeks to make a serious point, it has a certain goofy humor...)

I think the second video was included in the YouTube search results only because it had "Paulo Freire" in the title.  The video is not a picture of a Freireian culture circle, but of something that seems rather similar, and it takes place at a Brazilian school named after Freire.  (It seems that since Freire's death, the Brazilian government has decided to confer on him the status and recognition that are more appropriate to honor - although Brazilian society remains under the control of oppressors.) 

Although this video does not illustrate a Freireian culture circle, I was intrigued for a few reasons.  First, it is a good present-day example of real, in-the-flesh, boots-on-the-ground community organizing in the age of COVID.  Note that almost everyone in the video is wearing a mask, and the one woman who is not masked is there to serve as a visual prop to illustrate what the presenters are talking about.  This indicates an implicit (and perhaps unspoken) covenant between the participants to respect this public space by acting for the common good.  There are no selfish, reactionary anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers here!  Second, note that the circle is intimate - that is, the total number of participants is manageable enough for people to ask questions and to begin to form relationships with each other if they so choose.  Third, note that a wide range of ages is represented in this group.  Last, note that although the group is not collectively exploring a problem of their lived situation (instead, a few presenters do most of the talking), the group is still confronting a societal problem that needs to be addressed.

I am still searching for visual examples of Freireian culture circles in action.  What I want is examples of oppressed people and their self-chosen leaders engaging in these circles.  What I am not interested in is circles formed and organized for the "disadvantaged" by so-called "saviors" who are not from among the oppressed.  Nor am I interested merely in the use of Freireian methods or culture circles to help to shore up the rotting structures of American primary education.  Rather, I am interested in the use of problem-posing education as a means of activizing people, as a means of fostering nonviolent revolution.  Maybe I'll have to make my own video.  That should be quite a project...