The Stories Prophets Tell

My apologies to anyone who may have been disappointed by the sparseness of my recent posting.  I have come into a season in which once again, to use a favorite expression of mine, I am working like a dog.  But I thought I'd take time tonight to write a few words about something that recently came to my attention.  And I have some upcoming posts in the oven - soon, hopefully, they'll be "ready to eat."

In a previous post I mentioned that I have recently been enjoying some of the fiction of David Cornwell, who became famous under the pseudonym of John le Carre.  (le Carre gave us a kind of spy fiction that is actually palatable.  For a long time I had regarded the genre as simply about a bunch of guys in business suits trash talking each other while brandishing semiautomatic pistols.  Boring after a while...)  The most famous of his stories involve a character named George Smiley, through whom le Carre portrays the psychic cost of trying to achieve good ends by bad means.  The same theme runs through many others of le Carre's stories, particularly A Small Town In Germany.  Naturally I grew curious to learn more about Mr. le Carre, as I listened to BBC audio dramatizations of these stories, and later, as I watched the BBC video dramatizations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  What I discovered about le Carre was both intriguing and deeply refreshing - especially his political perspective.

For in describing the outcome of the Cold War, le Carre has often said that "the right side lost, but the wrong side won."  By this he means that the totalitarianism and autocracy of the Soviet Empire had to fall apart.  But in the West, there was nothing to replace it - no grand humanitarian vision that could have elevated all the peoples of the earth.  The West certainly offered nothing that could fill the vacuum left in Russia by the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Thus what happened was a shift from hyper-socialist economic and political control into hyper-capitalism.  Russia became an illustration of the Scripture which says, "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and does not find it.  Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.  Then it goes, and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first..."  For the best-positioned members of the Russian ruling class became the oligarchs and kleptocrats of the new order, and Putin became the chief kleptocrat.

Thus the ruling elite of Russia became very much like the wealthiest and most powerful denizens of the West - especially the wealthiest and most powerful Americans.  For the United States had long been in the process of losing its soul.  And so we come to an interview of Mr. le Carre which was conducted for the Fresh Air show on NPR in 2017.  In that interview, John le Carre said the following:

"Let's look, first of all, at the operation influence, if you like, and how that's exerted, what we suspect the Russians are doing, not only in the United States, what they did in Britain for the referendum, maybe in Britain for the election. They certainly interfered in Macron's election in France. So who are these forces? And what is really spooky, I think, and profoundly disturbing is they come from the West as well as the East - that there are oligarchs in the West who are so far to the right that they make a kind of natural cause with those on the other side of the world. Both of them have in common a great contempt for the ordinary conduct of democracy.

"They want to diminish it. They see it as their enemy. They see - they've made a dirty word of liberalism - one of the most inviting words in politics. They've - and so they're closing in on the same target from different points of view..." [Emphasis added]

Note le Carre's assertion - that the oligarchs of both the East and the West have begun to come together in common cause to destroy freedom throughout the world.   This was blindingly obvious during the reign of Donald Trump.  It has become even more blindingly obvious within the last two months.  For Fox News attack dog/talking head Tucker Carlson has boldly spoken in support of Vladimir Putin and against the independent sovereignty of Ukraine.  And a number of Republican politicians - who were historically well-known for their anti-communist and anti-Soviet stands - have suddenly gone quite soft (if not actually silent) on the crisis of Russian aggression against Ukraine and against the West. 

This has some rather interesting implications.  I would suspect that pro-Putin sentiment is quite high just now among many members of far-Right or white supremacist groups in the United States, as pro-Putin spokespersons managed to make significant headway among many white American evangelicals before and during the reign of Donald Trump.  These people should perhaps learn a lesson from the experiences of the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who got what they were asking for in 2015, and have had to live with the consequences ever since.  Their initial support for Putin has soured, as they have discovered that Putin has not led them to the Promised Land.  They have discovered instead that they have been enslaved by means of sophistry.  (Isn't that frequently how slavery begins?)  The supporters of Putin in the United States will find the same experience waiting for them in due time.  For "the wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands."

But a more interesting complication awaits those who support this unholy joining of oligarchs.  For China and Russia have published a joint statement of intent to remake the world according to an image of their liking.  And that will very soon pose problems for those rank-and-file working-class rubes in the United States who hitched their wagon to the the Republican Party, to Donald Trump, and to the Global Far Right.  Under Trump, they were taught to hate China.  But under the coalescing leadership of the emerging league of global oligarchs, they will be forced to love China - not the rank-and-file people of China, mind you, but the autocratic leadership of China.  That is bound to induce some serious whiplash in the souls of many white supremacists and racists in the United States.  Ambulances should be standing by.

Putin's Trojan Horses

I have been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings for a while now.  I like her style and her clear-headedness regarding current events and the hucksters who drive many of these events.  She has done admirable work tracking the shenanigans of the right-wing/white supremacist doofuses who have infected not only the United States but the entire Global North as well.  Her latest post describes the increasingly violent threat posed by these idiots against decent people everywhere.  

I thought it good to add a reminder that the source, the main engine and the leadership of many far-Right/white supremacist organizations nowadays is Russia.  I suggest that the reason for the recent uptick in trouble from these groups is tied closely to the fact that Putin is no longer winning his geopolitical games, and wishes to expand his use of hybrid warfare in his assault against the West.  As I mentioned in my last post, Putin's Russia is now good for nothing.

What We All Are Getting From Your Tax Rubles

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of pride as the deadliest of the sins.  And he notes how proud, arrogant people tend to turn off everyone they encounter.  As he puts it, "I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals.  There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else' and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit..."  I must confess that I myself am guilty of pride, and so I must temper my tendency to condemn pride when I see it in others.  And yet when I encounter those people whose pride - whose narcissism (both personal and national) - moves them to try to turn the world into their own special possession, I do tend to regard as guilt-free pleasure the eventual humiliation of such people.  So we come once again to Russia.

At the time of this writing, Ukraine still exists as a sovereign non-Russian country.  And the events of the last several weeks have shown that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not quite the chessmaster he had made himself out to be.  In fact, he has stumbled rather badly.  Now in the West, many of us have been brought up to believe that the governments of nations exist for the purpose of providing for the common good of their citizens, and that this purpose is the reason why citizens pay taxes.  So I thought it good to enumerate for you who are of the Russian people the things you are getting for your tax rubles.

First, you all know - just from looking around yourselves in day-to-day life - how things are going for you.  I too have some idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  What those sources tell me is that things are not going well for you who are citizens of Russia.  There is the botched response to COVID-19, there is the staggering wealth inequality, the surge in death rates across all regions in Russia, and the death of the Russian middle class.  There have also been awesome ecological disasters, such as the huge wildfires of 2019, 2020 and 2021.  I fully expect that this year, 2022, will see outbreaks of wildfires whose size and extent of damage will dwarf the damage done by the previous years' fires.  I also fully expect your government to do nothing to address these wildfires or any of the other crises I have mentioned.

So then, what exactly are your tax rubles buying?  Perhaps not for you, but for the rest of the world?  Here again I have a fairly strong idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  I know that from at least 2010 until 2020, your tax rubles bought the destabilization of liberal democracies throughout the world.  I also know that your money bought the breaking of sovereign governments in many nations which had been part of the Soviet empire and had managed to break free and re-establish their own national identity after the Soviet collapse.  Such nations include Georgia, Belarus, and Montenegro, among others.  In each of these recaptured nations, the pro-Putin puppet governments have managed to reproduce the same little bits of Putinesque hell on earth that characterize daily life for most Russians.  Your government tried to do the same thing here in the United States, and so for four years we endured the piece-of-garbage presidency of Donald Trump.

Your government has been especially active in the wrongful spending of your money during the last twelve months.  During that time Putin has sent troops into the Czech Republic in order to destroy Czech defense plants.  He has sent troops into Kazakhstan in order to put down a civil resistance uprising against the pro-Putin government there.  Those troops have shot unarmed protesters.  Kazakhstan is interesting, because it is an oil-producing country whose mineral wealth is being stolen by Russia as the pro-Putin government rapes the country to enrich that thieving little man in his bunker.  (It is only natural that ordinary Kazakh citizens would object to this sort of thing.)  And he has sent troops to the Ukraine border in what he thought would be an easy bid to conquer Ukraine.  That bid has turned out to be not so easy.

For Putin has begun to buy a few unexpected things for himself along the way.  His soft power (as well as the soft power of Russia) has begun to erode.  Soft power is at its maximum when a people or nation genuinely demonstrates itself to be a model worthy of imitation because it brings genuinely good things to the world.  I think of Japan as a case in point.  I am a small business owner and recently I discovered some fascinating Japanese commercial cultural practices that make me think that Japan has some really cool people who are worth getting to know because they have something to offer.  I also think of Indonesia and the musical inventiveness which I have seen in some of the artists from that nation.  For instance, there is an Indonesian fingerstyle guitarist named Alip Ba Ta who in my opinion is the current reigning king of those who play an ax.  In short, there are nations which produce cultural or scientific or commercial artifacts which bring genuine pleasure or benefit to the world.  On the other hand, there is Russia as it now is under Putin.  Putin's Russia seems genuinely to be good for nothing.  Rather, to Putin, the rest of the world exists solely as a source of supply of living human victims to sacrifice on the altar of his narcissism.  We are not interested.

What I Said In My Haste

Today's post is a short break from my essays on the personal, pedagogical work that organizers need to do in order to organize people for liberation.  The title of today's post is a nod to Psalm 116:11, and my use of it is triggered by a few personal events from the last year or so.  While the events are not earth-shaking, they are indeed thought-provoking - as is to be expected when a person loses around $1,000 within the space of a few months.

It started at the end of 2020, when the smartphone I had owned for over five years became hard to charge due to the wearing out of the charger cable and charger port.  That phone had been a budget phone without a lot of bells and whistles, yet it had proved extremely reliable.  When I began to consider replacing it, I looked on my service provider's website for a suitable candidate.  I found that most of the budget smartphones looked extremely clunky and had very poor user ratings.  I also found that the cost of most of the highly rated smartphones was on the order of $1,000.  I hate spending money, but I have been told that buying things that are cheap can cost as much as buying things that are more expensive, due to the cost of regularly replacing the cheap things.  So I narrowed my search to phones in the $500 price range.

This led me to the Google Pixel 4A 5G, a phone whose features included 128 GB of memory, awesome speakers and sound quality, a stunning set of cameras capable of stunning photography even at night, impressive battery life, and a durable front composed of tough Gorilla Glass 3.  I plonked down $500 and soon the phone was delivered to me.  I did not want to take chances with breakage, so along with the phone I bought a highly rated phone case for added protection.

I had hoped that the phone would last me four or five years, but it actually lasted from January to October 2021, when it was destroyed by a drop of less than three feet.  Its tough phone case provided no protection at all, and its Gorilla Glass 3 screen shattered along with the tempered glass screen protector I had installed.  Seeing $500 shattered like a smashed bag of potato chips quite naturally perturbed me, so I contacted Google to find out what recourse I had.  I was directed to an authorized Google repair shop where one of the employees told me that the screen could be repaired for $300, but that the repair shop could not guarantee that the phone would function as it had before it was dropped.  The employee also informed me that in the future I could lower any potential phone repair costs by purchasing either "phone insurance" or a "phone protection plan."  I gave that employee an earful of clean, yet disapproving language, then left.

Finding myself once again in the position of needing a phone that could be reliably charged, I visited one of the stores of my telecom service provider to see what I could find.  I told  my tale of woe to the employees at that store and asked them if they sold a reliable smartphone that could stand being dropped without breaking or being used in the rain without being ruined.  They led me to a phone sold under the Cat brand.  (That's "Cat" as in Caterpillar - you know, the company that makes gas turbines, standby and prime power generators, and earth-moving equipment.)  The particular phone in question was the Cat S62, a phone advertised by Caterpillar as "...the pinnacle of innovation, functional design and rugged durability. Designed primarily for extreme work conditions..."  It too cost around $500!

I was still under the influence of cultural conditioning that told me that I "needed" a smartphone, so once again I parted with my hard-earned cash for a new phone.  I found that the Cat S62 had only a mediocre camera and mediocre speakers.  However, it was possible to hand-wash and hand-disinfect the phone without damaging it.  And the service provider who sold it to me had a 14-day no-questions-asked return/refund policy.  Moreover, Cat had a 30-day no-questions-asked return/refund policy.  Unfortunately for me, my troubles began at about day 60 of my ownership.  I found that the phone would suddenly and randomly change settings without being touched.  Alarm settings, Bluetooth settings, connectivity settings, media playing settings, volume - all would randomly change from time to time - regardless of whether I was holding the phone or not.  At first this happened only occasionally.  But over time, the number and extent of seizures this phone was having began to escalate.  Soon it was turning its flashlight on and off randomly.  The last straw for me came last night, when all by itself the phone called a friend of mine after 11 pm, when he, his wife, and his kids were all in bed.  I realized that once again, $500 of my money had been turned to garbage.  (Perhaps that phone needs an exorcist!)

Today I have bought an old-fashioned flip phone for less than $100.  Once I have waited the obligatory 3 days for any COVID-19 virus particles to die from the packaging, I will try out my latest new phone.  God willing, it will either break within 14 days or last several years.  But buying three phones within a year has got me thinking - first and foremost, about the smartphone industry as a symptom of an unsustainable economy.  For the companies that comprise the tech sector are largely publicly traded.  And as I understand things, that means that like all publicly-traded companies, their share prices on the open market are a function not only of profit levels, but of profit growth.  It is profit growth that drives the passive income streams that form the basis of the retirement incomes of most people and the revenue streams of those aspirational souls who seem to be disciples of people like Tim Ferriss.  Profit growth causes rising share prices and rising dividends.  Profit growth is also the backbone of an economy built on usury.

The problem comes when profits cease to grow.  Slowing or stagnating profit growth can have a variety of causes, but one prime cause is that eventually companies that make durable things face market saturation - that is, they reach the point where if a widget costs $1,000 and lasts 10 years, a stage is reached in which by year seven or eight of a widget-making economy's life, almost everyone who wants a widget now owns one.  That means that the market for widgets declines rapidly to a level in which companies sell only enough widgets to replace the widgets that are wearing out.  This phenomenon is what almost drove the Ford Motor Company out of business during the 1920's.  That means that companies must resort to ever more creative (and unnatural) strategies in order to maintain some semblance of profit growth.

One such strategy is the emergence of a throwaway culture, a culture of restless dissatisfaction with the status quo.  Another such strategy is the strategy of planned obsolescence.  Both these strategies tend to lead to increasingly feature-packed, yet fragile and unreliable products.  The rate of increase of prices of these products tend over time to strongly exceed the rate of inflation.  Thus most cars nowadays cost as much as a four-bedroom house used to cost in the 1970's.  And the price of smartphones has risen to the point that you can buy a smartphone for $2,000 if you so choose.  (That $2000 phone is, not surprisingly, easy to break and hard to fix, according to one source.)  Oh, by the way, have you bought a cutting-edge model of a new home appliance like a washer or dryer lately?  Along with the strategies of throwaway culture and planned obsolescence, there is the rise of "influencer culture" - the creation of armies of paid, immaculately coiffed shills who pretend to be ordinary people who just happened to become famous and who wish to share their tastes in consumerism with the rest of us.

Yet another unnatural and unsustainable strategy is the strategy of rent-seeking.  This is especially prevalent in the world of software nowadays, with the rise of the "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) model of commerce - a model which actually contributes no real value to customers, but which makes businesses vulnerable to data loss and data theft.  Rent-seeking is also now a feature of that portion of the "knowledge" industry that sells textbooks - Pearson, for instance, has begun to offer rent-only versions of textbooks that can only be accessed by an online subscription.  Titles offered under such terms usually cannot be obtained in hardcopy form.  

I believe that a feature of "late capitalism" (as in, "late-stage capitalism") is the seeking of ever-more unnatural and perverse mechanisms and strategies to maintain profit growth.  This is leading to an increasingly distorted society and the creation of ever-higher mountains of freshly obsolete junk.  These mechanisms are the last desperate ploys of the few who have amassed ungodly amounts of capital by fleecing the many who are not rich.  And I believe that the society resulting from these ploys will one day come to an end.  When it does, the times that emerge will require a very different sort of person - one who can be satisfied with living on the fruits of an honest day's labor.  Unfortunately, many people may have a very hard time making the transition.

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...

Strategic NVR In Action: The Colorado Trucker Boycott

As I mentioned in my last post, my blogging schedule for the next few months will usually be bi-weekly, so that every two weeks a post will be published.  The posts will usually be on Sundays.  However, should there be an event which merits commentary, I may write a short post in between the major biweekly posts.  Today's post is one of those short posts.

I want to call attention to the case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States.  Mr. Aguilera-Mederos was employed as a semi truck driver (for those who use British English, "semi truck" means "lorry"), and was recently sentenced to a 110-year prison term for the deaths of four people in an accident in Colorado in which the brakes on the truck driven by Aguilera-Mederos failed, preventing him from safely stopping.  The sentencing was determined in large part by the prosecutor in his trial, a Ms. Kayla Wildeman, who "celebrated the harsh verdict" according to one source.  This same Ms. Wildeman reports to a chief deputy district attorney named Trevor Moritzky.  Moritzky gave Wildeman a trophy for the harsh sentence handed down, yet Moritzky managed to obtain only a misdemeanor conviction for a Colorado police officer who raped a woman in the back seat of his police car.  According to another source, Aguilera-Mederos' case also differs from that of a white motorist in Texas named Ethan Couch, who received only ten years probation at his initial sentencing after he killed four people while speeding and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  His parents were wealthy.  (See this also.)

I must say now that while many posts on my blog have condemned white supremacy, I do not believe that all white Americans are evil.  There are examples of good men and women who do not believe that they and they alone should rule the earth and that they have the right to treat the rest of us as their slaves or punching bags.  However, the prosecution of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos is yet another example of how much of the American "justice" system is corrupted by right-wing white supremacists who seek to use the power of the state to vent their unresolved rage.  Not only do these supremacists want to dump that rage on people of color, but they even rage against those of their own people who do not share their monstrous sense of entitlement and their malignant narcissism, as is seen by the murder of two white people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse.  It seems that Mr. Rittenhouse took exception to the fact that his victims were standing in solidarity with people of color.  Mr. Rittenhouse is, in my book, a pile of human garbage, as is the jury which miscarried justice by acquitting him of murder. 

To repeat, the "justice" system in the United States at present is merely the tool of those who are rich and white and who wish to dominate.  Therefore, many of the verdicts rendered by that system are actually a miscarriage of justice.  Among the victims of that miscarriage of justice, the standard response to that miscarriage over the last several years has consisted of things like mass protests, listening sessions, bumper stickers proclaiming that our lives matter, petitions, and attempts to have conversations about "race".  In other words, our strategy has looked much like trying to convert our oppressors by trying to have conversations with them.  

But the case of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos has begun to show something different.  Aguilera-Mederos was not drunk or intoxicated, and did not willfully and deliberately kill people, but was involved in an accident.  (Note to Kayla Wildeman and Trevor Moritzky: go find a dictionary and look up the word "accident."  The job of a prosecutor is no place for doofuses.)  His sentencing was harsh and unfair.  And while there have been protests in response, there has also been something else - something with teeth that can bite.  Truckers have begun to boycott Colorado.  This boycott has begun to produce results FAST.  When you can't get things in a certain state because truckers refuse to make deliveries to your state, you tend to sit up and take notice.

And this is the power of strategic nonviolent resistance when it's done strategically.  Effective resistance is NOT protest (at least, not solely or even mainly protest), because protests by themselves do NOT impose coercive costs on an oppressor.  Effective resistance is the coordinated, unified withdrawal of economic and political support from an oppressive system.  If that withdrawal is done according to a wise strategy, the oppressed can cripple the system which is oppressing them.  For effective resistance to have long-term staying power, communities of the oppressed need to build their own self-sufficiency by means of what one writer calls "self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement."  This is how one can engage in long-term strikes and boycotts which inflict pain and which strike fear into the heart of anyone who wishes to be an oppressor!  For those of us in communities of color, it is this kind of power which we need to build.  

Let's see how Mr. Aguilera-Mederos' case goes.  If Colorado does not commute his sentence (and fast!), I may post a list of companies which are headquartered in Colorado, so that boycotts can be organized against them.