The spirit of Occupy kicks "learned helplessness" to the curb

given my penchant for pattern recognition and the work that i do with complex systems, i learned to recognize the dynamic of learned helplessness almost twenty-five years ago... i first ran into it, interestingly enough, while working on my own issues when i had to confront a deep-seated belief about not being able to change myself... once i was able to get past that barrier, i opened up to a much bigger playing field in working with organization change... i could see that much of the resistance of people to doing things differently - and, hopefully, better - springs from that same belief system which, loosely described, says, "what's the use, nothing's going to change, why bother...?"

in the process of discovering that "helplessness" is a belief system, i also discovered that, like most belief systems, it isn't genetic, it's learned, which, in turn, led to the realization that complex systems (families, corporations, governments, organizations of all types) often consciously or unconsciously promote feelings of helplessness...

as my learning continued to expand, i began to see how feelings of helplessness were often deliberately fostered by those whose power and influence depended on the compliance and passivity of those over whom they exercised that power... i also began to realize how complicit we all are - or certainly can be - in abdicating the power we have as our birthright...

we are constantly implored to give up our power to teachers, bosses, police, politicians, government officials, scientists and experts of all stripes who, we are told, know more about what's good for us than we do or, worse yet, portray themselves as having access to power and authority that we don't have access to and probably never will... in the course of this brainwashing, we eventually lose sight of the fact that our power is something that is ours by birth and that giving it away is a choice, maybe not a choice we consciously make, but a choice nonetheless...

i've been involved with "empowerment" efforts in organizations which i've always thought were misnamed since the whole notion of "empowering" someone smacks of condescension, implying giving something to someone to whom it belonged in the first place... however, the term does have a positive ring to it and i haven't been able to come up with one i like better... "empowerment" is even featured on my business cards...

moving to reclaim our power is a heady experience... as the article snippet below states, it's positively "liberating," the term relating back to"liberation theology" and "liberation psychology"... when people move to take back their power, is it any wonder that the catholic church came down so hard on clergy in latin america who were pushing "liberation theology"...? is it any wonder that the 1% are so determined to squash the occupy movement...? people reclaiming their power scares the shit out of those who think they should have it all...

bruce levine in alternet...

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover how demoralized people can regain the energy necessary to take back the power that they had handed over to illegitimate authorities.

The Occupy movement has tapped into the energy supply that many oppressed and exploited people ultimately discover. We discover it when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy.

With liberation psychology, we no longer take seriously the elite’s rigged games that had sucked us in and then sucked the energy out of us. We move beyond denial and depression that the U.S. electoral process is a rigged game, an exercise in learned helplessness in which we are given the choice between politicians who will either (1) screw us, or (2) screw us. We begin to engage in other “battlegrounds for democracy.”

it's a very good article and worth reading in its entirety...

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Is Wisconsin the United States' Egypt...?

ya know, that would be infinitely cool if it was... god knows, we're long over due...

katrina vanden heuvel...

A friend e-mailed me this morning, "Do you think events taking place in Wisconsin might be as important as what's happening in Cairo, if the media really got the word out? Might it be the spark to halt the Tea Party Express?" Another friend e-mailed, "It's possible that this labor strike in Wisconsin could become our Uncut." (In response to Britain's draconian public spending cuts, citizens there formed UK Uncut, a Twitter-organized movement, to protest wealthy tax evaders. If the rich paid for their fair share of taxes, the movement argues, the pressure on the state budget would diminish or disappear.)

Wisconsin's Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are moving to destroy organized labor, moving to abolish democratic rights that were the essence of the New Deal, and treating working-class Americans as though they were meaningless in our country's mosaic. Meanwhile, those who are responsible for the catastrophic financial crisis are riding high--and in the name of deficits they largely caused, they insist that those who worked a lifetime to build and own their homes, to send their children to public schools, to have security in their retirement years, to have decent medical care--that those citizens should pay the price for budgetary crises in honor, dignity and decency.

john nichols...

David Vines, a University of Wisconsin student joined the mass protests against Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights on Monday. The political science student marched on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. He slept overnight in the Capital to make sure that the legislature did not approve Walker’s plan without a fight.

Why? “This is what the founders intended,” says Vines.

And he is right.

When Democratic members of the Wisconsin State Senate walked out on Capital on Thursday – denying the Republican majority quorum that was necessary to pass the legislation -- they were attacked by Walker and his cronies. The governor called the boycott a “stunt” and claimed the Democrats were disrepecting democracy.

After all, Walker’s backers noted, the governor and his Republican allies won an election last November.

That is true.

But Wisconsin’s greatest governor, Robert M. La Follette, declared: “"We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now, there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative. Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated."

La Follette’s point, apparently lost on Walker, is that democracy does not end on Election Day. That’s when it begins. Citizens do not elect officials to rule them from one election to the next. Citizens elect officials to represent them, to respond to the will of the people as it evolves.

i'm at the airport, headed off for southern africa and won't be back until the end of may... however, you can be absolutely sure i will be following developments closely... i can't think of anything i'd like better than to see my fellow countrymen rise up to reclaim the power that has consistently been grabbed, wheedled, poached and stolen... and when i say "reclaim," i'm totally serious... every human being is born with that power but, through on-going manipulation and deception down through the ages, many of us have come to believe that power is something that belongs to other people... it's the phenomenon and the myth of learned helplessness and it's way past time to drive a stake through the heart of that sucker...

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We've learned how to be helpless

some pointed questions...

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

a simple answer - yes...

a bit more thoughtful answer and it's something i've posted on before (here)...

we are very carefully schooled in countless ways to see ourselves as helpless... in my professional life, which is the place where i see "learned helplessness" play out on a daily basis the most is today's workplace... it matters not whether we're talking about the private sector, for-profit, non-profit, government, health care, education, or organizations inside or outside the u.s., they're all the same... you quickly learn that there's absolutely NOTHING you can do to change your situation... i'm actually experiencing this right now with a project some colleagues of mine and i are trying to move forward, a project that, imho, would contribute something positive to the mess in afghanistan... and what am i hearing...? the same things i've heard all my life... "that's just the way it is... deal with it..."

what choices are we told we DO have...? what options are we given to exercise our personal power...? you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure that one out... our options are all focused on how we spend our money, if we're lucky enough to have any... we're given very few options on how we GET that money but zillions of options on how to spend it... the spending and the act of acquiring become synonymous in our minds with exercising our personal power - spend, acquire, appear powerful...

going back to the article quoted above...

[M]ost U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

[...]

Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. [...]

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

and then there's television...

[T]elevision helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. [...]
(1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is;
(2) separates people from one another;
(3) creates sensory deprivation;
(4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought;
(5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising);
(6) centralizes knowledge and information;
(7) eliminates or "museumizes" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and
(8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

i've made many choices in my life, particularly over the past few years, to shake off the common elements of forced compliance imposed on us by our society and our culture... i am not a full-time employee... i have virtually no "assets" - no house, no retirement nest-egg, and very few possessions... my lifestyle is based on interactions with authentic people as opposed to cardboard cutouts and my work is focused on spreading the knowledge and wisdom of how to be authentic in the workplace... nonetheless, i am still subject to these same forces, just a lot less now, thank goodness...

i am, however, at the point of cutting some more cords, not in the "heading off to live in a cave" direction, but rather in the "let's take some bold steps to actually make something HAPPEN" direction...

i'll let you know how that works out for me... HA...!

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Oh, yay... Learned helplessness...

a societal and organizational dynamic that i've observed for many years is what i have come to call "learned helplessness"... many of us develop that mindset when, over many, many years, we've come to believe that no matter what we do, our employer won't change a damn thing, our society will still be off the rails, and our government will still feel perfectly within its rights to do whatever it goddam well pleases no matter what we, the people, think about it...

now, i come to find out that very same dynamic, using the very same name underpins the oh-so-euphemistically labeled "enhanced interrogation techniques," known to you and me as torture, methods have been - and probably still are - so liberally applied at our < snark > club med-style < /snark > "detention" facilities, known to you and me as prisons and to our friends in russia as gulags...

well, at least panetta isn't sitting on his hands...

CIA Director Leon Panetta fired Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and all other contractors that aided the CIA in its interrogations of alleged terrorists, the New Yorker reported this weekend.

The firings took place in April, around the same time the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on the role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in developing "countermeasures to defeat" the resistance of captured enemy detainees from whom intelligence was being sought.

Mitchell and Jessen, who run the firm, had worked on a Pentagon program that taught U.S. service members how to survive harsh enemy interrogation methods. They relied on elements of that training in proposing an interrogation program for the CIA. It included methods such as sleep deprivation and other actions based on "theories of 'learned helplessness,' " the New Yorker reported.

our minders have worked long and hard to instill in us the learned helplessness mindset... we're ever so much easier to control when we feel and think that way... nothing to see here, folks... just move along...

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