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.

In Search of Good Work, Or, A Right Autarky

I'm glad to report that the work I've had over the last few months is winding down to a more manageable level.  (Not that I want it to disappear entirely - I still like eating and having some spending money!)  So today I thought I'd write a post that continues to develop some of the thoughts I've tried to expound in my series of comments on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  One thing that Gene Sharp says in his book is that "a liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  This notion of self-reliance and internal strengthening reminds me of a Bible verse which has struck me repeatedly ever since I noticed its occupational context over ten years ago.  The verse reads as follows: "And let our people also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful."  (Titus 3:14)  In the margin of my Bible, the word rendered "deeds" has an alternate rendering of "occupations."  It is the rendering of that word as "occupations" which first arrested my interest.

Now if you Google "Titus 3:14", you will encounter a huge number of emotive commentaries by people who tell us that the "good works" mentioned in Titus are primarily deeds of church-style charity to those who are in need, such as picking up elderly Sister Gladys from her house in the country so she can come with you to church on Sunday, or helping Deacon Weatherly pull weeds in his front yard on Saturday so he can have more time to be a servant to the church.  Carried still further, those who interpret the verse in this way begin to talk eloquently about the huge amount of work that is needed to run a church with multiple services - from running the sound system to making the coffee to mowing the church grounds to cleaning the bathrooms, etc., etc.  (Not to pick on anybody, but here and here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.)

But to interpret that verse in an occupational sense opens up an entirely different window - a window through which many people have never attentively looked.  For this interpretation begins to illuminate the spiritual dimension of the work, and of the kinds of work, which we choose to do for a living.  So let us consider this dimension as we read the words "good deeds," or in the King James version and other versions, "good works." Those words in the original Greek are "καλός ἔργον," which can be translated literally as "beautifully good work".  And the purpose of the work is to provide for "necessary, urgent, indispensable needs, necessities or uses" (ἀναγκαῖος χρεία).  If we take Titus 3:14 as part of a body of New Testament teaching on the spirituality of work, we are drawn to other Scriptures such as 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, which says "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing."  

The quiet working with our own hands is a key pillar of the Biblical definition of righteous autarky.  The other element of righteous autarky is contentment with what one has, as described in 1 Timothy 6:6.  But there are many in the world who seek autarky in a perverted way because they insist on living in a world that places no limits on them, and because they are addicted to consumer culture, national narcissism, and the love of money.  For them autarky means going to war against those who are both content and self-sufficient in order to knock them over the head and take their stuff.  The wealthy of most nations fit into this category - including много вороватых русских человечков в бункерах as well as many rich American thieves in their own bunkers.  This evil kind of autarky is a hallmark of earthly empires.

Righteous autarky is a hallmark of those who are escaping from the global system of predatory capitalist domination and exploitation which in Revelation 18 is called "Babylon", for those who practice this kind of autarky depend on their own beautifully good work and their own ability to live simply as a means of breaking their reliance on their oppressor, that is, Babylon (and providing themselves with a clear conscience as part of the bargain - Revelation 18:4).  I submit to you that engaging occupationally in "beautifully good work to meet indispensable needs" is a key part of righteous autarky.  Ain't bad work if you can get it, but ya gotta know where to look!

So let us consider the search for occupations that are beautifully good and that meet necessary needs.  And here we must consider the things which make this search difficult.  First of all, there is the distraction of the worthless - that is, the distractions served up by a society that exalts the worthless.  By this I mean particularly celebrity culture, the culture which exalts the best and brightest performers in those fields which are crowded precisely because they are fun, they don't require much effort, and they are entirely optional.  Here we have those who want to follow in the steps of rich as YouTubers and lottery winners, those who want to become famous podcasters like Joe Rogan, those who are wanna-be actors and other celebrities, and those who would like to become members of the British royal family - in short, people who seek to be like those individuals who have managed to get a lot of something for nothing.  We are told to imitate celebrity because celebrities are held up as a model which the rest of us can and should imitate.

An acute example of the distraction of the worthless is the celebration of worthless business.  By this I mean the rise and excessive valuation of many "tech" companies whose chief executives (like Mark Zuckerberg) are celebrated as inventors of engines of "wealth creation."  But to credit these people with "wealth creation" is actually false, for what they have actually achieved by means of tech platforms such as Facebook is parasitic wealth transfer - a transfer of the last remaining distributed wealth of the non-wealthy into the pockets of the wealthy.  In other words, men such as Zuckerberg (and, I would suggest, Elon Musk) are merely really good examples of efficient parasites.  The same could be said for the CEO's of many major retail chains such as Walmart and Home Cheapo which have driven smaller retail operations out of business.

The activities of these parasites has given rise to a third difficulty, namely the impacts of a changing society on our ability to find meaningful, beautifully good work.  This change has two causes:

• The change in the occupational landscape wrought by the deployment of artificial intelligence and task automation.  AI is an interesting subject in that there are two camps of human opinion regarding its use.  One camp consists of those who look critically at AI in order to determine and define its limits and adverse effects (such as the sometimes disastrous effects of automation-induced complacency).  The other camp is enthusiastic about the ability of AI to transform the workplace by automating repetitive tasks or tasks that require a lot of brute force calculation, thus freeing humans to focus on tasks which require "creativity."  A barely noticed corollary to this assertion is the fact that software and hardware development teams are trying hard to push AI into realms of human "creativity" as well.  (Case in point: if you use AutoCAD for engineering design, you will have known for a long time that Autodesk has automated many design tasks which used to take a fair amount of skill on the part of a designer!)  This push is being driven by owners of capital who would much rather use AI to continue their concentration of capital by paying an upfront capital cost for a piece of machinery in order to do more with fewer people.  As the push for task automation progresses, people will need to engage in a constant re-skilling in order to keep from being run over by the robot juggernaut of "progress".

• The impact of resource depletion on the kinds of economic activity which a society can sustain.  I will not say much tonight about this subject, since much has already been written on this subject.  (Some of what has been written actually makes sense.  On the other hand, I removed from my bookshelf all books by Dmitri Orlov or James Howard Kunstler and threw them into the compost bin.  Those books have better uses as fertilizer than as guidance.)  But I will say that there are forward-looking societies run by leaders who know how to play a long game, which have begun to respond to resource depletion by investing in progressive responses such as circular economy principles.  On the other hand, there are nations like the United States.  If you live in the USA, you may find yourself needing to navigate situations and invent solutions which Asian nations (and I don't mean Russia!) have long since collectively figured out.  

To close, then, let us look at the characteristics of the kind of work we should be looking to do.  It should be beautiful - that is, it should have an element of craftsmanship, of mastery, and of increasing rewards for the acquisition of increasingly rare and valuable skills.  It should be good - that is, genuinely beneficial to humankind.  And it should be necessary - that is, indispensable.  As Asef Bayat says, "An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world-class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry.  Excellence is power; it is identity."  This is how the church of the New Testament - composed largely of poor people and slaves - began to liberate itself from Rome.  This is how we of the African-American diaspora will liberate ourselves.  To  borrow some language from the study of artificial intelligence, let these characteristics define the "objective function" you seek to optimize in your search for paying work.