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nokingsonlyfooles · 2 years ago

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The Dark Secret of Zootopia? (Part 1, Identifying the Problem)

What? If you're a fan, you already know Zootopia's "secret."

It was originally a dark dystopia where the predators wore "tame collars," but the Zootopia team got nervous about how depressing it was and did a last-minute rewrite that used most of the old assets and plot points! Right? So are we gonna do a deep dive on that?

Not quite.

What if I told you that despite the rewrite that took out the obvious metaphor for systemic oppression, more evidence of systemic issues remains and... it probably doesn't make any difference?

So that half-assed poll I put up suggests more than one person would like to see me take Zootopia apart, and that probably means delving into the racism metaphor, but, man, I don't have the headspace for that today! So I took a spin through the Headscratchers page, hoping to find something a little more compact. There had to be something other than the racism metaphor that a lot of people had trouble with, right? Sort of an appetizer for a busy Tuesday?

Nnnot really.

Here's an obvious Libertarian voter who can't fathom that people would be racist when it runs contrary to good business practices! We go through quite a few tropers positing non-racist or less racist reasons to refuse Nick service - including one who believes prejudice against predators "wasn't a thing" until Judy's press conference, and before that people just didn't like foxes - before some hero arrives with a fire extinguisher and says, I'm paraphrasing, "Racism isn't rational! End of story!"

Then we got this question, which has the answer contained in it already!

I've trimmed the first response, from someone who apparently sees nothing wrong with just rolling up and asking to pet a sentient being. "It doesn't have to be a metaphor for anything"!? They go on to posit that maybe it's a taboo in funny animal society. 'Cos, you know, you don't have to read Zootopia as a metaphor for human society if you don't wanna.

(The Author! He's already dead! Why you gotta desecrate the corpse like that?)

It takes a few more self-soothing responses from evident people-petters before, again, someone rolls up and says, "It is exactly white people wanting to 'pet' black people's 'weird' hair, something that is unfortunately a fairly common patronizing occurrence in the U.S., at least."

And after that, we still get this:

"I have a Black friend and he lets me pet him all the time! Cut white people some slack! They're just curious! Let us pet you!"

Zootopia is racism lite, folks. Zootopia calls out racism primarily as something an individual does when they make decisions based on their preexisting biases - which, in Nick and Judy's cases, stem from childhood traumas that we get to see on-screen.

This is a version of racism that a child - with a little hand-holding from a caregiver - could understand. All but the most toxic conservatives ought to be okay explaining this kind of racism, including the toxic neoliberal centrists! "You see, little Kayden, there is no such thing as 'society.' 'Racism' is what happens when a lot of individuals make bad decisions. All you have to do to stop it is make better decisions, and encourage others to make better decisions too! Why, when I was your age, we chose better hairsprays without CFCs in them, and that fixed global warming and the hole in the ozone layer forever!"

"Auntie Margaret Thatcher, isn't climate change still a..."

"WE FIXED IT FOREVER, LITTLE KAYDEN." *strained smile* "So just don't buy fox spray! If enough people don't buy it, they'll stop making it."

"Why is it okay for someone to make a spray specifically to hurt foxes in the first place?"

"...If you don't stop asking questions, I shall bury you under the Aberfan coal tip with all the rest, little Kayden. Eat your popcorn."

But even that's too much for some folks! They retreat behind the ambiguity of the metaphor and wonder why the funny animals make such odd decisions, in the willful absence of context. With no context, why would a bunny be able to say, "It's okay if we call each other 'cute,' but you shouldn't." That's blatant hypocrisy. Bunnies don't own "cute." It's just a word!

Don't apologize, Benjamin! Why would you do that?

This entire movie is a modern Aesop fable and you need that human context. "Cute" privilege to "n-word" privilege is a one-to-one correlation, like petting a sheep is to petting a Black person. It only makes sense because you live in human society and you can fill in the blanks - because you have seen similar manifestations of bias and you already know they're not okay. You don't even have to know why or agree. To get the joke, you just have to know this stuff happens and people think it's rude. That is not a high bar to clear!

And that is, apparently, the level of anxiety we have about unpacking our own racism. Not even the systemic kind. Not even the big issues those scary "woke" zombies are trying to "cancel" you about. Just, "An individual - including you, for you are an individual - can make bad decisions based on their experiences."

Whaaaat? No I don't!

"These animals have nothing to do with me and therefore, this movie makes no sense."

These are the people Zootopia needed to reach. Not the ones who already had a clue, the ones who were so scared of getting one that they buried their heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge reality itself. So here's a cheerful little film with an animal metaphor and an optimistic resolution! Surely they must feel safe enough to unpack racism in this context?

But they didn't. Much like Green Book, this film was safe and simple enough to walk away with an Oscar from an Academy that's mostly white, male, and terrified of minorities - and the people who didn't want to get "woke" slept right through it. I don't think that's what they were going for, given that V 1 of this film had systemic oppression worn around the neck of every predator with a blinking light on it.

Remember, they reused assets and plot points from the original and rewrote everything fast. Traces remain. But if the ostriches in the audience can't understand "cute" privileges, do they have any hope of noticing Judy's bathroom at the police academy has a toilet that can kill her and no accommodations for a species her size?

Well, they might have. But the way the film handles it gleefully assassinates everyone's chance to see the systemic issues and respond to them appropriately.

Tune in next time, for Judy Hopps, bunny cops, "Black Excellence" and our old friend Barack!

#zootopia #deep dive #racisim #judy hopps #nick wilde #social issues

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expfcultragreen · 1 year ago

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"Who are the democrats compromising with even when theyve had a supermajority and still blablabla" ok really simply? They dont want to get shot in the head by bigger nazis. They hold progressive values loosely enough that they wont die for them by being controversial; theyve taught themselves to believe that its no ones job to die for a truly better future, lets alone theirs (think of their children! These pols claim they do). So vis a vis these progressive values they faintly hold to: theyre trying to not lose ground in terms of cementing these gradual structural changes that are harder for the fash to finesse apart, by getting assassinated.

You get that global history has hinged on jfks death since bobby got shot too, right? Thats how we got lbj and vietnam, which is how we got nixon which is how we got reaganomics/thatcherism and the kissingerian global agenda

One dead dem, doesnt matter who shot him or why, and that was the outcome. We're still trapped in neoliberalism "because one member of the public wasnt compromised with", supposedly. LHO might as well have been a nazi for all the good he did for the left*. And no one wants the next 80s style yuga on their head so no one knows what to do besides "vote" or "bitch about people who vote", because assassination on grounds of compromising too much with the wrong people and not enough with whoever "us" is, feels like a pointless crapshoot....but you never know when that might change. The dems dont know; it feels soon, right? So many school shootings, hard to believe jan 6 wasnt lethal (flouride zombie nation sure rose up huh). The republicans mostly sing themselves to sleep with little lies about how their guys are the only ones with the balls

(*Thats how you "know" he was a patsy, the motorcade was a set-up, there were possible secret service bonus shooters, etc)(realistically, he was just one radical who was fed up with the nazi-complicit liberalism of the dems, and he couldnt have guessed at the cascade of reactionary conservativism that would follow his death for decades and decades; its not a great allegory in terms of the benefits of political assassination. Neither is the franz ferdinand thing. Feels like we never hear about czolgosz because his direct action didnt cause a bunch of fucking wars)

Anyway can we honestly focus on the greater evils? Dont be a lee harvey oswald when you could be czolgosz

We should be doing this shit IN PRIORITY ORDER!!!! not ad hoc attacking everyone to the right of ourselves personally

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 4 years ago

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What My Thoughts On Morrissey Today

In response to my writing idea someone gave me I picked this.

So basically, Morrissey’s nationalism in recent years has gotten in the way of me being able to appreciate much that he comes out with. This is wild because a few short years ago, I stood up for Morrissey and actually still feel very moved by a portion of his music. It got me through some really rough patches in my twenties.

I realize he’s human and has faults and I don’t know him completely but just eh, living in Portland and having seen the stuff going on I’m kind of not in the place in my life right now where I want to even try to dissect him. It’s not just a fact that he’s wrong, but that it seems altogether very much in rejection of the things that made his music so special. It was difficult for me to come to terms with it or fully make sense of why someone who’s unashamed expression of witty despair in the 80’s and 90’s, someone who was outcasted from the overall closed mindedness lower working class post ww2 world of northern England, unafraid to be gay and completely the antithesis of some Tory ideal could be bought by some tired nationalist agenda. It’s even more difficult to realize where his alegianced lie in a world that is starting to reject democracy, embrace anti intellectualism in the guise of some form of selective politically motivated skeptism, and I see the world move farther and farther into fascism.

Margaret Thatcher attacked The Smiths. Morrissey was taken in for questioning more than once out of fear for what he represented. Morrissey and The Smiths has some subversive element that really did threaten the establishment and cultural norms, in a way that I feel was a little more multidimensional than even a lot of bands in the English punk scene. I guess for me, even though I grew up in the Inland northwest of the US, I felt there was a lot of parallels in common. I too detest a culture based around animal consumption, was really not a part of the world I grew up in and didn’t want to work in the factories, I liked art and music and nobody around me was really into that stuff.

I still like the Smiths and most of Morrisseys old music. I read his autobiography. I know he is a dramatic self involved individual but I did feel that up till somewhat recently his heart was in the right place and he just liked to be controversial, which is somewhat true still, but now I think there was more to it, some nationalistic self preservation instinct kicking in. Its actually more prevelant than I even realized and I honestly think it’s getting the best of anyone with money or power, even those who once stood for something counter culture. It’s hard to think of him as racist in the traditional sense with his adoration for Latin America, but he might just be so self involved that his popularity in those regions gave him a bias. He probably separates the racism from the nationalism, blindly not wanting to see how the two concepts are quite inseparable. Falling right into it.

Him saying “everyone prefers their own race”, is kind of wild to me. I genuinely even try to entertain this as a possibility like a philosophical thought experiment or a deep dive of some kind into my own subconscious part of me I am avoiding somehow, and it’s not true for me or a lot of people. Who the fuck is he to say who prefers who, and how backwards and dehumanizing. It’s pretty repulsive, and being he is bisexual and felt the discrimination of homophobia growing up, I’m inclined to think he’s not able to see that he’s become the enemy he once represented the antithesis of.

The guy I’ve kinda been with is Mexican. I totally love him. I look into people’s eyes and I talk to and open up to people and if I connect with them I connect with them. Not like I’m trying to play the I gotta friend who is this or that as some kind of example of much, or that I don’t see color or some faulty implication, but I have been in situations where I’m the only white person at a party and I prefer them because they are my friends and I love them, and the idea of classifying who I prefer is to imply that the white race should be my main concern as they are the same as me and therefore superior and they aren’t. There is nothing inherently special to me or a kinship felt with other white people for either their appearance or cultural background. It’s nice to compare notes of pop culture but a lot of stuff people go through is universal. I don’t take too much issue with multiculturalism. My white skin is meaningless to me. I can’t imagine being so inept as a person that the color of my skin actually defines my identity rather than my autonomy or ideas or relationships and what I stand for and my ability to appreciate and connect with other people.

What gets me is that in his support of the far right is not even in line with his hatred of police, or the hatred he had a few years ago. I mean, he has always gone on and on about police brutality, he’s been harassed by them on multiple occasions. He shows them on giant projectors at his shows. Police are a very important staple for fascism and nationalism, and he is now on their side after all this time? What changed? The lost young man he once was in 1981 feels very very different from who he has become and piecing together that transformation has been something I’ve been trying to do for awhile. I try to embrace both but they seem like similar but different people at odds with one another, like an uncle and nephew.

Here is what I imagine happened, and I could be wrong about that but I was a Morrissey fangirl for quite awhile. I literally had his signed autograph above my bed with dried flowers around it like a shrine for a few years, and got a grasp of Morrisseys personality in some ways.

To start off, Morrissey is a very poetic and sharp guy but he’s very miopic about his interests and has always had the tendency to see the world in a black and white framework. This in and of itself is not necessarily bad, but it’s the core framework of who he is as a person. When he was young it was very much more a reflection of his hatred for authoritarianism and deceitful people and phony artists. It’s not bad and it contributed to his music and lyrics and became the thing he was loved/hated for. The way he goes about it really has always been the double edged sword of his charm and vileness all in one and something people have mocked time and time again. He likes to be the guy in the corner that looks fine and smug and believes he sees the virtues/dispicable attributes of everyone in the room and there have been times in his life where he was, and though he won’t ever attack anyone face to face he’s quick to speak his mind about it.

Morrissey is also a very vain person. It’s subtle but he is very singular on certain aesthetics. At times it made him brilliant and poetic and a visionary. The Smiths album covers are beautiful. His look is both elegant and absurd in its grasp for purity. It also makes him seem like a twat and a pretentious prince. The fact that he seems to be these two things at once is what gave him that kind of controversial star quality at times.

Those are just two natural traits he has always been obvious with. And he struggled with it and focused on his passions and dealt with depression in the 80’s. Then fame happened and the smiths ended. He kept to himself more or less in the 80’s and 90’s aside from his disdain for Margaret Thatcher, but he kinda lost his mind a bit when his drummer took him to court in the nineties. Right or wrong he fought for two years and lost a good chunk of his money from The Smiths and when that happened he kind of was forced to start again. He lost his home. He developed that early personalized sense of self preservation and victimhood. I think he lost faith in many of his more naive ideals when he was younger. When you read his autobiography and know what happened it’s like he had to step out of his old life and into something else.

Then, he’s always been a vegetarian superiority type. I liked that he calls it as he sees it but because of his need to black and white think everything he came off as deluded and smug. I mean, to be fair you can’t seem to win with people who want to eat meat and I agreed with a portion of his message, but he never questioned himself. He’s not good at that, or doesn’t appear to be. My personal interpretation of him was to agree with part of it and give him the cred for being not afraid to be a dick and say it, but to see also that he was so dramatic and self absorbed about it to also laugh at him and the way he said it.

Now to go into fascism and why it grew on Morrissey. I see the world as kind of falling into polarization and flux because of the failures of neoliberalism. It’s a long political explanation, but essentially the systems that are in place do not provide answers to a lot of catestrophic issues. Democracy, though the best thing we have, is flawed. I really like philosophy and have studied this and the various arguments that are made, and I don’t have the answer either but fuck if I will ever side with nazis.

People are seaking solace in new ideas that are actually quite old, namely socialism and fascism that provide answers that democracy fails to. Capitalism eats itself and created monopolies and unfair wealth distribution, technology is making human labor obsolete and therefore not a stable means to base our economic system on, those with wealth are hoarding it and trying to separate themselves from the world they helped ruin. We are destroying the planet, running out of natural resources, many of our leaders in the last three or for decades have been flawed, there isn’t a universal safety net for things like natural disasters and pandemics and there are still places stripped of their natural resources where human slavery is prevalent and children starve to death. Neoliberalism has promised some great answer but has actually been the contributor to this entire mess.

We are seeing the beginning of the end now, and I am sure Morrissey isn’t going to waste that without putting himself in the victim shoes, the white traditional quintessentially Englishman of wit, who sees his beautiful world he grew up in disappearing in multiculturalism and seeing himself and the culture of old England as a dying breed, that needs to be preserved at any cost. He probably was on the fence about it for some time, weighing out his disdain for authoritarianism, having a bougouis experience with the seemingly left leaning media that he never managed to win over and called him out for his every misstep. I bet he had a friend who opened him up to the idea that we don’t know about who changed his mind. I bet cuts in taxes for the rich helped him preserve his wealth that he definitely feels entitled to after losing the first portion of it in the court case. He’s rich, famous and old and often times that leads to being quite out of touch, even to the best intellectuals. He lost his mother who was dear to him and I can imagine, even though it’s not political, it created a deep sense of emptiness and dis ease. Nationalism often times gives people a sense of security and identity and purpose. And the idea of having an unpopular opinion excited him just as it always has, gave him the opportunity to be the smug poet in the corner of the party, and he sold out. Hard. And he’s probably proud of it.

He’s irrelevant now. Honestly his latest album wasn’t good, and I like later Morrissey. He doesn’t have the same energy. I just feel like he’s grasping at something that he never fully ever had. What’s weird to me is that I’m writing about him like this when honestly, I could also easily write about how beautiful and meaningful the Smiths and Morrissey has been to me. I can’t explain how it cut through the extreme isolation I’ve been in, not to mention how the Smiths really changed music for the better. There’s always going to be a part of me that wants to defend him. I’m not saying we cancel him. I kinda think he canceled himself. I’m not going to try to not enjoy the smiths or morrissey when I hear him, and I will still hear it and enjoy it but I’m not ever going to spend my own money on filling his pockets. I still nostalgically enjoy the person he was a very long time ago and what he used to represent. I realize at the end of the day he’s just a flawed person. But also fuck fascism, and fuck Morrissey for caving into it.

I mean, at the end of the day the hardest part is that I made him a part of my identity and I just had to stop doing that in a simplistic way. I tossed out a morrissey shirt I had (it’s was a cheesy shirt anyway), and I found new genres of music and while I still love the smiths it’s not like I can’t do without them every day. I break down and listen to them sometimes. I know the songs so well. I listen to Xiu Xiu which is a modern day similar equivalent in some ways but is absolutely better and the singer Jamie Stewart is fucking gold.

#morrissey

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Once upon a time, we almost solved climate change, but then human nature got in the way. This is the thesis of novelist Nathaniel Rich’s new article on climate change, comprising an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine, entitled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”

The decade in question is the 1980s, when, in Rich’s telling, a “handful of people” — a small group of scientists and policymakers, based entirely in the United States — nobly tried to save the rest of us from the doom now approaching. The story follows the environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and the climate scientist James Hansen as they try to raise the alarm about the greenhouse effect, with help from some surprising allies — the occasional Republican senator and concerned representatives of oil companies. The climax comes in 1989 when the United States, under the “environmental president” George H. W. Bush, torpedoes a promising effort to reach an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

From this narrow look at a brief period of American history, Rich draws the conclusion that we are all — “we” as in humanity, “we” as in the human species — to blame for the catastrophe that we failed to prevent. Interspersed with pictures of our beautiful, wounded planet, the thesis is laid out in stark pull quotes — “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

It is not the right conclusion. The 1980s were an important decade, but not for the reasons Rich thinks. He’s rightly gotten flak for letting the fossil-fuel industry and Republicans off the hook. But even beyond that, his narrative misses what actually happened in the decade in question: the eighties were when the new right consolidated power and limited democratic control over economic processes in order to reorganize capitalism in service of renewed growth. To turn around and lay the blame on democracy is perverse.

Rich strains mightily throughout the piece to tell a story about climate that will seem revelatory, but mostly he just comes across as naïve. In Rich’s telling, Margaret Thatcher cares about climate change because she studied chemistry as an undergraduate; a handful of Republicans’ occasional support for some kind of action on climate change renders the entire party blameless; and the occasional smooth-talking oil industry executive means that fossil-fuel companies once acted in good faith.

It’s not that the oil industry is inherently evil in the way some other industry isn’t. Like all corporations, oil, gas, and coal companies are driven by the need to make a profit, and they act accordingly. It just so happens that the fossil-fuel industry traffics in a very valuable commodity with very high social and environmental costs — costs that it does not want to pay, and that it cannot afford to. Climate change is the most costly of all.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is mentioned only once — by, of all people, an Exxon representative who acknowledges that the free market may be flawed and pledges support for clean energy, two years before he announces that Exxon will in fact be doubling down on its traditional oil and gas investments.

It’s clear from Rich’s own reporting that the industry has only ever been proactive when state regulation seemed imminent. Oil executives are explicit about this: Rich cites a memo from a researcher at Exxon stating that “[i]t behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.’’

The same thing happened a few years later in the late 1980s, when some momentum built around a climate bill; it happened again in the mid 2000s, when another bipartisan climate bill was on the horizon. Whenever it looks like climate change will start costing them money, that is, companies either try to get ahead of regulations or block them, depending on what they think they can get away with. So far they have gotten away with even more than they themselves anticipated.

Rich recognizes that the problem is political, but again, he draws the wrong conclusions. At one point, he wonders, “if science, industry and the press could not move the government to act, then who could?” I don’t know — how about the people? They certainly seem more likely to act as a countervailing force to corporate power than corporations themselves. But “the public” enters this story only peripherally; they are either going obliviously about their mundane lives or being manipulated into a frenzy by a sensationalist media. This, it would appear, is the basis for the claim that “we” failed to do anything; that “we” are to blame. In the epilogue, Rich uses the political scientist Michael Glantz to ventriloquize what seems to be his own position: that “democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem.”

But the period Rich examines, when democracy is ostensibly getting in the way, is one in which the Right systematically decimated the only force historically capable of holding capital in check — that is, the labor movement — and overrode democratic constraints on capital in favor of free-market fundamentalism.

So there’s a story to tell about the 1980s and climate change all right, but it’s not this one. The story that matters is one about an ascendant neoliberalism being put into practice: about the crushing of trade unions and the loss of counters to corporate power; the insistence on market solutions to replace regulation by governments being actively starved of resources. It’s about inequality and ever more conspicuous consumption; about the replacement of public with private goods, propped up by private debt instead of wage growth. It’s about moving more goods made with cheaper labor further and further around the globe, all while trumpeting the end of material limits. It’s about efforts to restart stagnant growth by removing all politically imposed constraints on capital, and moving the costs of doing business back onto people and the planet.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #climate change #environmental justice #capitalism #neoliberal capitalism #neoliberalism #privatization

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redorangman · 2 years ago

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Thatcherism: What We Get Wrong About Neoliberalism

#youtube

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raygoodwinmajournal · 4 years ago

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Industrial Society and its Future - Theodore Kaczynski’s Manifesto

Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomer is a convicted domestic terrorist, anarchist and mathematician. Ted is renown for his actions, which constituted of himself living in a shack in the Montana wilderness, creating and sending postal bombs to various universities and airlines (un = universities & a = airlines, creating unabomb). Ted is an incredibly intelligent man, with an IQ of 167 making him a certified genius, with Ted also attending Harvard at 16 and obtaining a PhD in Mathematics at 25. But, how can a man this smart with an intense intellect become one of the America’s most renown terrorists?

Ted was a particularly tormented individual, with multiple rejections and estrangements from an early age. Whilst at Harvard, it is said that Ted fell into the grips of physiological experiments ran by Henry A. Murray, with those experiments performed on 22 other students within Harvard. These experiments targeted the unwitting students to a torment of stress and attacks on their very ego and beliefs, making them crumble under great stress and distress. These sessions were filmed and then played back to the students to further break them down. Ted was humiliated over three years, with these experiments potentially being linked to the Project MKUltra experiments, which was the CIA’s research into mind control.

After years of torment, embarrassment and torture, he finally resided into a wooden cabin that he and his brother built in rural Montana. Ted would live a secluded and isolated life, living off of the land and sometimes venturing to the local town to volunteer at the library. Ted became angry about the society he was placed and the technology it created, which caused him to start sending postal bombs to various addresses, which he made in his shack. A quick side note, I do not condone what Ted undertook, with the crimes he committed being completely heinous and twisted. Yet, I feel ones actions shouldn’t mar their ideas and thoughts. Ted may have acted wrongly, and the people he injured and killed are sadly a victim of a damaged individual. But, Ted’s ideas of our modern society - for the most part - are correct within my opinion.

Industrial Society and Its Future is Ted’s manifesto, with himself being referred to as We and F.C (Freedom Club). F.C was also inscribed onto pieces of metal within the shipped postal bombs. What Ted’s manifesto outlines is where society went wrong and the implications of it. We have lost touch with nature and the real problems of it, instead creating problems for ourselves within society that we aren’t equipped to figure out, creating stress and psychological issues. We undertake surrogate activities - activities that feature an arbitrary goal with little to no meaning, which includes sports, bodybuilding, mountain biking and the like. Within our society, we have become so detached from our origins that our lives are controlled not by ourselves, but by the society itself. What is good for society, must be good for it’s citizens. We are controlled by every facet of life - if it isn’t the stop signs or traffic lights telling you when to go or stop, it is the select few people at the very top telling the population what is acceptable. What Ted is saying here, is that we are subjugated as a whole within society. We aren’t able to do what we want to do as it has to be socially acceptable to do so. And if we do something that we think is of free thought, it probably isn’t because of our susceptibility of advertisements and propaganda. Our lives are ran on rails which society has laid down for us, and there is no way of derailing that unless we do what Ted does, and live completely remotely and isolated from society, which most people aren’t equipped to do as they’re so ingrained and subjugated by the industrial society with little to no knowledge of how to escape it.

What this manifesto really says is the dangers of modern society, and how it has twisted and skewed how humans live, and how they have adapted - or not - to cope with technology. It is clear to see that Ted is an incredibly alienated and estranged man, even from his own family as well as society. And from my point of view is an extreme case of what can happen with someone is estranged from modernity and angry because of what has happened to them because of our society. The end of paragraph 18 “Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly”, which in context speaks about how leftists view someone who is inferior blames society rather than one’s lack of ability or skill. In contrast “heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields (science, engineering & mathematics). It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study” on paragraph 115. This reflects on Ted’s own upbringing, using his intellect to skip grades and attend Harvard whilst being grossly emotionally underprepared. Ted was brought up normally in a normal American household, but because of society has strayed and caused a trail of destruction, but certainly not being seen as inferior.

Ted also mentions that leftism has something to do with it too, referring to the neoliberal policies being brought in since the 1950′s, and becoming more apparent in the 1980′s with Reaganomics and Thatcherism, with “almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society”, which is true but somewhat subjective, as some might not even think about how we live as a whole, yet Ted attributes this to leftism - the politically correct types who are usually university professors with secure employment, comfortable salaries and mainly being white, middle aged heterosexual upper middle class men who are usually within the stronghold of being P.C, instead of the usually oppressed minorities such as African Americans or Asians. Ted also calls the politically correct types as “feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the likes”, paragraph 7. The two phycological tendencies that Ted outlines is feelings of inferiority and over socialisation, with feelings of inferiority being “low self esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self hatred, etc. And over socialisation being, “avoid feelings of guilt...have to deceive themselves about their own motives...find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin”, paragraph 25. This again is reiterated at the end of the manifesto: “Anyone why strongly sympathises with ALL of these movements is almost certainly a leftist”, paragraph 229. That being said, even Ted says it hard to underlie what really is a leftist, showing that he doesn’t have all of the answers, sometimes being vague and admitting that his knowledge on a particular subject isn’t up to par, and can’t comment.

An interesting note that Ted brings up is how technology has subordinated us, making us compliant and subjugated. Technology is at first, completely optional. We don’t have to drive a car to get around, we can get to destinations just fine by walking. Yet, as it is more accessible to us, it becomes harder and harder to get around until we have to get a license and a car. The car is seen as a sign of freedom as we can go where we like, but in order to do that we have to own a license and drive where we are permitted to drive, with most cities being designed around the car or motorised transport. Soon enough, all technology becomes forced upon us until we cannot live without it. Another example - which is more contemporary - is the mobile phone. Back in 1995, we could get away with not having a mobile phone, as we either had a landline or even a pager. Since then, the mobile phone has evolved into a pocket computer, with it become a ‘smartphone’, where it can do everything and anything. Now, we cannot live without it as it is so deeply ingrained within our society, and trying to get along without one would be an uphill struggle. This can also be said for the internet, as in 1995 it was still in its relative infancy in terms of the general population using it. But, now it is incredibly hard to get by without even using the internet on our mobile phones, let alone having it at home where it is seen as a necessity: “When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.”, paragraph 127. What Ted is saying is, that we have no choice but to give in and use certain technologies forced upon us by the society, whether that is by advertisements or eventual progression: “The average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom...It is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated”. paragraph 190.

This brings up an interesting point. Are we to blame for allowing us to be led along by flashy adverts, or blaming the advertising industry for the flashy adverts and making us into victims? What Ted is bringing up here is the issue of control, and where that lies. There is no doubt that these conglomerates control the population in such a way in which they have to buy that certain thing. Because we most certainly are controlled by higher ranking people such a politicians, business executives, bureaucrats and the like, as we live in a society which subordinates and controls every aspect of our lives: “You need a licence for everything and with the license comes rules and regulations. The individual has only those technological powers with which the system chooses to provide him”, paragraph 197. Just because we are told we can drive a car, doesn’t mean we can do what we like. We have to stop when the light says stop, go in that direction, follow this road until the next until we stop again when told to do so. It is no wonder we are so depersonalised driving home from office jobs where we are reduced to slaves working for someone with a higher wage just to do the same thing tomorrow 9am to 5pm. Yet that can be fixed with the magic of anti-depressants, which are just a way to modify a person’s behaviour to “enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable”, paragraph 145. This is another example of how we have created more problems than a society can deal with and overcome. The need for such a drug only came about because of the rise in depression within the industrial society, because the conditions that it breeds just aren’t healthy for us. How can it be acceptable that we live our lives working jobs that we hate and have to take a drug everyday to make us happy again? And this won’t go away until the society that we know completely collapses and we have to start again, which probably won’t happen as historically, we have only progressed as a species and technologically. The only way this could happen is a revolution against technology and with all of us collectively acting against it.

Ted mentions that this could happen similarly to the French and Russian revolutions respectively, with the people overpowering, and overthrowing the controlling governmental powers, but in the case against the industrial society: “The two main tasks for the present are to promote social stress and instability in the industrial society and to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system”, paragraph 181. This would be massive undertaking and as the vast majority of the Western World is so connected and ingrained within technology, would be impossible to do. Imagine asking people now to go against what they have ever known, overthrow the society that subjugates them and go back to a hunter/gatherer mentality. All of the mod cons that we have grown up with simply wouldn’t exist. Ted uses the refrigerator as an example of this with the two main types of technology: “smallscale and organisational”, paragraph 208, with smallscale used by small communities without outside assistance, and organisational depending on large-scale social organisation. “Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a postindustrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator...imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration?”, paragraph 209. In a sense, this revolution against technology would send society back to the dark ages, but can you imagine the waste that would fill up the land if this happened? Ted already mentions the damage that we have done to the planet, yet suppose this revolution happened. Where would all of this technology go? We have already harmed the planet with enough pollution since the industrial revolution. Imagine the mess that would ensue of we completely disregarded all of the technology that currently resides on Earth? Our planet would be a wasteland of trash and junk, whilst we live off the land being polluted by more of our rubbish. As much as I admire Ted’s philosophy on revolting against society, it simply couldn’t happen.

A coda. It feels rather odd reading a manifesto written by a domestic terrorist, and much caution has been taken to not come across as if I have been radicalised by Ted’s writing and ideas. If anything, I share a lot of these ideas and philosophies with Ted, but unlike Ted writing: “In order to get our message across before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people”, paragraph 96, I think going as far as mailing homemade explosives is extreme. Yet I don’t think that Ted should be judged on the brash and extreme measures he undertook to make people see his views. He is obviously an incredibly intelligent and well read individual with actions put aside, has written a well articulated and easily readable summary of our modern condition. I can also see how Ted came to these conclusions, and strangely admire him going against the society and living in a secluded cabin in rurality. I do agree with Ted on most of his points, with society making is sick, subordinate, subjugated and obedient, this is clear to see when you look at society as a whole and realise the truth of it. This is why I found Ted so alluring, as it is someone else who is obviously alienated from society but also an extreme case of what can happen when one is estranged from a society and angry towards what it does. I think it is a shame that he did what he did, which is completely heinous and abhorrent, because without those actions, I think he could have been one of today’s great thinkers and philosophers. Industrial Society and its Future is a well rounded summary of our modern world, detailing how it controls us and how it could be changed. I would recommend this text to anyone who is critical of how we live today compared to how we lived before the industrial revolution. Ted’s manifesto is a key piece of writing for this project and underpins how modernity can make one feel alienated from modernity, late capitalism and the industrial society.

Bibliography

Richard Barnes (no date). [Online]. Available at http://www.richardbarnes.net/projects#/unabomber-1/. [Accessed on 17/02/2021]

Kaczynski, T. J., (1995). The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. Jolly Roger Press.

#101

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/tiktok-and-the-future-of-less-american-technology/

TikTok and the Future of “Less American” Technology

Some phenomena occur and become highly visible in the wrong place, at the wrong time. TikTok, an app created in China, came into prominence as a major source of expression and entertainment for the youth of the United States only in the past two years but rose, in that short time, to the status of an app that could rival the mastodons Facebook and Twitter in popularity.

The NY Times: Liberal or Neoliberal?

In an article titled “TikTok Was a Wasted Opportunity,” New York Times technology columnist Shira Ovide sums up the impact of the company’s meteoric rise in these terms: “TikTok, an app for short videos that took off in the United States and other countries, is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. It’s one of the first popular global internet gathering spots to have originated in China, and that has caused consternation in the United States and some other countries.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Consternation:

The feeling of anxiety and incomprehension that spontaneously seizes Americans in the 21st century when they realize something that they get easily get hooked on comes from a place that doesn’t belong to their own heritage or conform to their own system of social control.

Contextual Note

“Consternation” is a strange word in English. Words like “legislation” or “obliteration” are built from the verbs “legislate” and “obliterate.” Consternation, though visibly derived from a verb, seems to exist on its own. The verb “to consternate,” although it existed in the 17th century, has disappeared from linguistic use. And yet “consternation” remains an active part of everyone’s vocabulary. All literate native speakers understand the particular feeling it represents.

In another article this week concerning the latest skirmish in the conflict between the UK and the European Union, Business Words relates that “[Boris] Johnson’s UK government has caused consternation in the UK, Brussels, and Washington after revealing an explosive plan to unilaterally determine elements of Northern Ireland’s trade with Great Britain from January next year.”

These two examples could lead cultural analysts and even serious analytical linguists to wonder whether the fact that the word ends with the two syllables, “nation,” hasn’t subconsciously imposed the idea that consternation has come to be associated with threats to national identity. This may point to another historical truth: that the moment in history we are living in is propitious to the angst associated with the destabilizing of national identity in a globalized world.

The TikTok drama appears to reflect America’s well-ingrained sense of national privilege. Ovide acknowledges this feeling of privilege when she asks the question: “And what should the United States do about a future in which technology is becoming less American?” According to consumer society logic, it has never mattered where an article that gives joy to individual consumers comes from. But technology, especially social media technology, addresses vast groups of people, not just individual consumers. That some of that technology may be “less American” evokes not just concern but consternation. It’s perceived as an assault on American preeminence.

Americans have been conditioned to suppose that any popular innovative technology must be American. The fact that TikTok is Chinese automatically provokes consternation. This apparent paradox challenges Americans’ idea of what their nation is, what it owns and what others, and especially perceived adversaries, have the right to own. It calls into question a particular form of white American privilege, the privilege possessed by the leader and arbiter of everything that has to do with consumer electronic technology. The Danes can dominate the market for rectangular plastic toys (Lego), the French can master the marketing and distribution of wine and champagne, but no other nation has the right to dominate the technology behind social media toys.

Concerning the consternation in Britain, the reaction to Johnson’s extreme and downright illegal policy initiatives — justified by his absolute belief in Brexit as a divinely ordained fact of history — calls into question what in the golden age of nationalism many considered to be the divine right of a sovereign nation. The use of the word “consternation” in this example appears to convey an expression of the collective unconscious of a nation wondering who it is and who it will become in a period of historical transition.

Historical Note

Among the threats to the civilization of consumer capitalism developed in the 20th century, none has been greater than the ever-increasing destabilizing of the perception citizens have of their nation’s status in the world. For centuries, it has constituted the basis of their identity. The rise of nationalism in Europe since around the year 1500 and the consequent race for colonial domination provided the basis for a post-industrial culture of economic expansion sometimes called growthism. It led to the concept the marketers of capitalism perfected when they built the foundations of the consumer society. In economic and political circles, growthism has attained the level of religious dogma.

With GDP as the principal index for measuring a nation’s economic success, growthism has become directly associated with the status of national identity. Stimulating the growth of certain sectors has allowed nations to define their approach to the eternal problem of managing their competitive advantage. No nation can respectfully exist as a nation without having some form of competitive advantage to flaunt.

Because consumer technology is subject to the logic of growthism and at the same time provides the key to a nation’s ability to manage its population by controlling available data, Shira Ovide raises some serious questions that politicians, loath to acknowledge the tyranny of growthism, have refused to consider in the ongoing debate about TikTok, China and the American corporations (Microsoft and Oracle) put forward to Americanize the control of the technology.

Ovide writes: “Secret software formulas derived from databases of our behavior also drive Facebook, Google and many other internet companies. It appears that nowhere in the political fighting about TikTok did anyone in the U.S. government or industry take the opportunity to ask what should U.S. lawmakers, regulators and the public do about this software power of persuasion.”

As Vance Packard revealed 70 years ago, consumer society is built around the practice of hidden persuasion. Ovide has reminded us that the carefully obscured mechanics of persuasion are not only assumed to be a legitimate goal of markets as well as being essential to the growth of the consumer society, but they make up part of a nation’s strategy to define its power over other nations.

Furthermore, the nature of the power and the way it is used must remain hidden from sight. According to the rules of the technology-based consumer society we now live in, the easiest way to hide anything from sight is for governments to offer the technology and its management to corporations. They have no obligation to reveal to the public what they know and the secrets behind the power they wield. This has become the guiding principle for US legislators ever since the Reagan and Thatcher tandem in the 1980s rewrote the rulebook of democratic governance for the Western world.

Ovide concludes her article with this observation: “It should have been a moment for engaged debate about what Americans should expect out of our technology and our government. Instead, the big questions went unasked and unanswered.” That seems to worry her to the point of finding it contradictory. But there’s a simpler explanation. Big questions will always go unanswered when keeping the workings of the system hidden remains a crucial objective.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

#american #future #technology #tiktok #Technology

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years ago

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Amazon is the poster child for everything wrong with post-Reagan anti-trust enforcement

Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century's shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong -- and, unexpectedly, this law student's longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles.

The article is called Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, and you should read it, because Khan is a sprightly and gifted writer with a talent for squeezing some exciting and relevant juice out of dry and abstract subjects.

At its heart is a critique of the neoliberal "Chicago School" and its new orthodoxy about when monopolies are a problem -- an orthodoxy that is at odds with much of the world and hundreds of years' worth of US lawmaking and enforcement.

The Chicago School is notorious for its emphasis on profits ahead of all else, its complicity in tens of thousands of death-squad executions in Chile, its influence on Thatcher, Reagan and their contemporaries in their belief that "there is no such thing as society" and "greed is good" -- the belief that behaving as selfishly as possible will make everyone richer and happier.

It's this school and its adherents that John Kenneth Galbraith was speaking of when he called economics "the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." As you might imagine, if you owe your fortune to selfishness, ruthlessness and greed, you might want to fund and elevate this kind of exercise. Nothing confers empirical respectability to manifestly immoral behavior like a lot of inscrutable mathematics that purportedly shows the self-perfecting nature of a system of greedy, "rational" actors.

The Chicago School holds that monopolies are only bad when they result in higher prices ("price theory") and that everything else -- the "structuralist" worry about rich people amassing political power, or making inferior goods, or screwing their workforce, or holding back innovation -- is just a distraction.

This model rose to prominence in the 1980s with Reaganomics, and it coincided with catastrophic collapse in small business in America(especially minority-owned businesses); since Reagan, Republicans and Democrats alike have been enthusiastic proponents of the idea that the only thing a competition watchdog should keep an eye on is the prices charged to consumers, not "integration," be it vertical (one firm owning the factory, the trucks and the stores) or horizontal (companies buying out their direct competitors).

Using Amazon as her poster-child, Khan argues that whatever problems this approach had in bricks-and-mortarland (she highlights several), the combination of networks, digital goods, data-oriented retail, and huge pools of investment capital willing to float businesses like Amazon using their profits from one area to sell goods below cost in others to the detriment of their competitors, make mincemeat out of price-theory. The digital world -- where each customer might pay a different price, where retailers can use algorithms to price their competition out of existence -- is one where costs of one category of goods can't possibly capture the wider harms of monopolistic practice.

Related to this is On the Formation of Capital and Wealth, by Stanford's Mordecai Kurz, who proposes a means by which digital commerce can drive a winner-take-all phenomenon that makes the rich much richer, at the expense of the general welfare.

The question, then, is what to do about it. Khan suggests some modest reforms in anti-trust enforcement, which, despite their modesty and the extremely unlikeliness of seeing them enacted under Trump or any future establishment Democratic administration, have provoked howls of outrage from Chicago School economists.

More radical approaches have been proposed, of course. Paul Mason's Postcapitalism points to Amazon's very monopolism as the reason to believe that capitalism has outserved its usefulness. If a monopolist like Amazon can use customer surveillance and algorithms to decide what to make, where to put it, and how to deliver it, why do we need imperfect markets? Just nationalize Amazon and its datasets (for the record, I think Mason was unduly optimistic about the problems of anonymizing large data-sets).

But if the internet supercharges inequality and monopolism while delivering many undeniable benefits in coordination, culture, and material production, can we simply divorce technology from the economic and social context that created it? Can we have the internet without douchey Silicon Valley jerktech and its lucrepaths, vulgarati, uberization, mom-as-a-service, and *-bait?

It's not without precedent: the Protestant reformation gave us religion without the unified Church; the Enlightenment gave us alchemy without superstition; and Wikipedia and GNU/Linux gave us encyclopedias and operating systems without a single corporate overlord. As Leigh Phillips wrote in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts, the belief that Chicago-style sociopathic capitalism is the sole proprietor of technological change and improvement is one of the Chicago School's most successful projects, one that convinced large swaths of the left that you either have to be pro-technology or pro-human, that being anti-corporatism meant that you had to oppose the technical feats of corporations.

Science fiction's best move is cleaving a technology from its social and economic context, as steampunk does, when it imagines industrial-style production without the great Satanic mills where people become part of the machines, moving through scripted and constrained tasks in unison to the ticking of a huge time-clock. In steampunk, individual inventors and small groups produce things with the polish and awe-inspiring innovations of the industrial revolution, without the surrender of individual autonomy that industrialization demands of its workers. In steampunk -- to quote Magpie Killjoy -- we "love the machine and hate the factory."

The problem with Amazon isn't that it's now really easy to get a wide variety of goods without having to shlep all over the place trying to find the right widget (or book). The problem is the effect that this has on workers, publishers, writers, drivers, warehouse workers, and competition.

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/07/economists-so-fragile.html

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hallhub6-blog · 5 years ago

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The Trouble with "Shop Local"

As we near the October 22 public hearing for the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, I want to think critically about the use of the phrase "Shop Local."

First, let me be clear, I am not critiquing the act of shopping locally, which is important and necessary. I am critiquing the use of the injunction "Shop Local" by city leaders, which I believe is sometimes weaponized against the real possibility of systemic change to help save small, local businesses in the city.

It is, quite simply, a way to deflect blame from the system and onto the individual, stopping progressive change in its tracks.

I was struck this summer by the appearance of this deflection at a town hall meeting with Mayor de Blasio and City Council Member Helen Rosenthal on the Upper West Side.

When an audience member asked what can be done to stop New York's mom and pops from vanishing, the mayor said that, while he supports a vacancy tax to stop landlords from leaving storefronts empty, "We don't have...good tools to protect small business in a free-market system... But there's a citizen piece of this, too, and I don't mean to minimize the problem, but people need to go to those stores and patronize those stores."

To this, the audience member responded off mic, possibly saying, "They do," to which the mayor replied, "They do and they don't. My experience is...a lot of people who value those stores could also be part of the solution by going to them more often."

Helen Rosenthal concluded, "Mr. Mayor, I'm with you. We all need to step up and shop local. It's very frustrating."

Again, shopping local is necessary, we all can do it more, but it won't solve the main problem. And when we hear it in response to the question "what can be done?" we are often in the grip of neoliberal ideology. Sometimes, the people saying it don't even know they're part of that ideology. For decades, it has been the air we breathe. We have all become, to some extent, brainwashed by it.

Many of us say to each other, "If only we shopped there more often." On this blog, commenters inevitably accuse, "When was the last time you shopped there?" As if we are the main problem and not the landlords who quadruple the rent or refuse a new lease.

Neoliberalism, in short, is a free-market capitalist ideology and approach to governance that uses the policies of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal austerity, redistributing wealth and other resources from the lower, working, and middle classes to the wealthy.

It's not new and it's not liberal.

It began in the U.S. in the late 1970s, kicked off as a response to New York City's fiscal crisis, and went global under Ronald Reagan (trickle-down economics) and Margaret Thatcher. Whenever you hear "it's the free market," you're hearing the voice of neoliberalism. It is the reason for the 1% and why we have such massive income inequality.

It is also the way New York City has been governed since about 1979. It's why we have gentrification as public policy, with tax breaks and incentives going to big real-estate developers and corporations, private parks, etc., while our public resources suffer. In this system, celebrated by former Mayor Bloomberg, the city is run like a corporation and its citizens are consumers.

This brings us to the "neoliberal individual."

In the neoliberal worldview, there's a philosophical shift from state responsibility to individual responsibility. Now, there's nothing wrong with individuals being responsible for each other and their own actions. But when we're talking on the level of systems of power and governance, it's another thing altogether.

From the point of view of the neoliberal individual, if climate change is causing death and destruction, well, it's your fault for not recycling plastic bags, and don't blame the deregulation of polluting industries (read this). If you're a woman and you're sexually harassed in the workplace, it's your fault for not reporting it, and don't look to the system of patriarchy. And if small businesses are shuttering by the dozens, it's your fault, New Yorker, for not shopping local enough, and don't dare blame the big real estate machine that is supported by our neoliberal state and city government.

In short, the problem lies with you, the individual. If we hear this enough, we might become convinced that the problems of society are all our fault. If only we were better. If only we tried harder.

That idea is toxic enough, but it goes further.

If the problem lies with individuals then there's no point in trying to change the system. The system is blameless! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

This is a clever way to make us feel guilty and hopeless, and thus to render us passive. It makes us squander our power as citizens and give up on democracy. Don't fall for it.

In so many cases, small businesses are not closing because we didn't shop enough. In over a decade of writing this blog, I have walked the streets of this city talking with countless small business people. Over and over, they have told me that the number one force shutting them down is a landlord who demands a high rent increase or who refuses to renew a lease. Thriving, beloved, successful businesses that were staples of their communities for 20, 40, 80 years are pushed out by rents that double, triple, quadruple, and more.

No amount of "shop local" is going to fix that.

We need systemic change from the top. The first step? Pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. It's getting a public hearing on October 22. So act like a citizen. Show up and speak your mind. Click here for a list of easy, quick things you can do to tell the City Council you want this bill.

Source: http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-trouble-with-shop-local.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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fycanadianpolitics · 7 years ago

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When Margaret Thatcher famously crushed the 1984-85 miners' strike, she symbolized the start of a new order that would be imposed on nations across the Western world: that the post-war pact between capital and labour, where co-operation and friction would create an equilibrium that balanced (some) workers’ rights with corporate prosperity, would soon tilt more and more in the favour of capital.

The Welfare State offered hope for working classes to exit poverty and have some access to power. It would be slowly unraveled over the next three decades.

Thirty-three years later, the West is fundamentally changed. We exist in a world where the fossils of the past remain part of our collective vocabulary, but are less and less reflected in our political and economic realities. What has emerged is a left that believes it can float into power using the tactics and the promises of the right. Confronting power is no longer our primary goal.

Social movement organizing should have transferred knowledge and experience across this divide. That, through multigenerational friendships and common organizing, we should have been able to resist the weaknesses that our opposing experiences have manifested. But our social movements were crushed during this transformation, too. Neoliberalism infected the institutions of the left and destabilized, confused and demobilized progressive organizing.

Today, this can be seen in every corner of the Canadian Left: strategic voting as a tactic to win less terrible governments, conservatized social democracy, very few province-wide movements and nearly no true pan-Canadian organizing, and so on. We all know this; it's fundamental to understanding the limits that we face as progressive Canadian organizers.

Rebuilding must include strategies to reach past these divides, whether regional, generational or jurisdictional.

I write this during a particularly incredible week that demands introspection -- the kind of introspection one engages in when one desires to develop the correct lessons to break past the limits listed above. Not the kind of introspection that paralyzes action, that leaves us so desperate and sad about the state of things that we decide to do nothing, rather than do anything, because if we can't do everything perhaps doing nothing is better for our own personal health.

Social movement organizing that educates average people in their workplaces, on the street, in churches, mosques or temples or in their schools, is the only way to create long-term social change. Literally: the only way. Collectively, we forget this.

And when social movements are weak, it's harder for political parties to keep their heads on straight. They fall into the abyss of the old political tricks that might offer short-term gains, but which will always fail, eventually.

It leaves progressive people in a double-bind: what comes first: an NDP that veers to the right, or a social movement that slowly dies?

The funny thing is that the answers to many of the problems facing us, are easy to see, despite what some will claim. You always go back to the social movements and take their lead.

This isn't easy to do when there's an old order in the driver's seat; an establishment comprised of individuals who are cynical about the power and strength of social movements. Criticism within the left is so often marginalized and then dismissed.

Jeremy Corbyn's win reminds us that Blairite politics are a dead end. That without roots to social movements and people on the ground, a progressive party will fester.

But part of the fake enlightenment of some on the left is an appeal to do things the way they must be done; to play the game the way it must be played: don't offer too much, the media will jump all over us; the Liberals are stealing our ideas; we can't get too radical: no one wants to be called a Communist, etc.

It's stupid obvious that these are the wrong lessons to learn.

At the heart of this problem is the misconception of our relationship to power. It seems that some think we can tango with power to influence it. But power always leads.

Progressive people, movements or parties must confront power, not chase power. When they chase power, they fall into the trap set by the traditional parties. They will always lose because that's how the game was designed.

I think we're in a revolutionary moment, and there are examples of revolutionary confrontation to power everywhere. And perhaps this is the litmus test to decide where you stand on the spectrum of this problem. Are you actively using your time, your resources and your social capital to advance these movements?

The old social contract has fallen away and we're left with a population that is deeply divided, struggling and disenfranchised. If progressive people's actions or campaigns further exacerbate this disenfranchisement, they're no better than Liberals.

Last week, a student activist propelled into the public eye by a movement of hundreds of thousands, took his oath to Queen Elizabeth II as he assumed his seat in the National Assembly in Quebec. Before he took the oath, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois modified the oath by saying in French, "While waiting for the emergence of a free republic forged in partnership with First Nations..."

This is the new order that all progressive people must strive for: a New Canada that divests from Crown land and gives back traditional territory to Indigenous nations; that refuses to continue the colonial project that harms and kills so many people; that refuses to exploit land, air and water in the name of greed and profits; that refuses the racial and religious hierarchy on which the Old Canada was built.

Revolutionary times require a revolutionary reaction from the Left. If all we do is chase power, rather than reconfigure that power from the ground up, what exactly is the point of our work?

#don't agree with all #but the sentiment is largely good

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years ago

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THE ESSAYIST IS MANY THINGS: egotistic is definitely one of them. This cuts both ways, however. Essays can be focused on the writerly self, but they can also offer an escape. As Montaigne said well over 400 years ago, one gets rather wrapped up in oneself. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” Yet the essayist also retreats. Emerson saw his reflections as solitude, where “all mean egotism vanishes” and he becomes “a transparent eyeball,” a “nothing.” The essay is much more than that too, of course. A riff or a sally, a fight or a laugh. A journey, a ramble, a wandering about. Beyond such meanderings — the digressions on which the essay thrives — the nature of the form is itself formless. It might be “short or long,” as Woolf wrote in 1922, “serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza,” or — recalling Samuel Butler — “about turtles and Cheapside.” But so often, as she wrote on Montaigne, the essay turns back to oneself, “the greatest monster and miracle in the world.”

Fast-forward almost a century and we have Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby, which takes up (and takes down) his own monstrous ego with delicious panache. You probably know of his work. He’s a crusading hero for twenty- and thirtysomething UK renters who frequently lambastes the hellish property market in his regular “London Rental Opportunity of the Week” column for Vice. From an exposé of a toilet jammed inside a shower at the foot of the bed, to a Beckettian litany going over and over the nature of a bedsit with multiple sinks but no adequate space for a mattress, Golby wages a single-handed war against that peculiar subspecies of human: the landlord. He’s massively popular, not least with those of us destined to forever move from one overpriced grief hole to the next. Golby does absurdist humor on other themes, too. A piece asking questions about why Pete Doherty was seen “aggressively eating” a massive breakfast outside a greasy spoon in Margate; 101 ways to ruin a party; “deep dives” into property TV shows; the likelihood of certain celebrities eating worms if they go on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! One recent column on “The New Rules of Being a Millennial” is both caustic and community-building. If Lena Dunham (as a “voice of her generation” — that now somewhat hackneyed joke in Girls) was a member of the precariat and grew up in Chesterfield, she might turn phrases like this:

The problem with the “us” thing is that we (Us) do not have a collective term for ourselves which isn’t wildly inaccurate or painfully cringey. “Hipster” suggests a level of effort that I think we’re all big enough to admit we don’t subscribe to. Does “millennials” work? Sort of, but not. It’s too broad. Plus, “millennial” is more-or-less a slur these days, isn’t it. Nobody self-identifies as one. It’s just something your dad calls people with university debt. It’s nothing. The people I’m talking about are the ones who know what De School is and don’t really know what a “James Arthur” is.

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant is a gathering of 21 new essays and three updated pieces, and arrives at a time when emerging writers are voicing their histories and outlooks in hilarious and poignant ways that befit modern anxieties. The Chicago-based blogger-turned-writer Samantha Irby’s debut collection, Meaty, and her second, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, both offer takes on bad sex, Crohn’s disease, life as a woman in her mid-30s, loss, and more, and recent collections from Hanif Abdurraqib, Chelsea Hodson, Scaachi Koul, and others reflect an exciting boom in the genre in the last few years alone. The essay has made a comeback, but it was always powerful. Again, Woolf said it best. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other,” she wrote in “The Decay of Essay-Writing” in 1905: “its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities.”

There’s definitely something about essays, in their long-held comic tradition — “the joke” of literature, as G. K. Chesterton framed them — that resonates strongly today. After all, they are easily digestible, and in turn digest ideas. They are often simply “brain soufflés,” as David Lazar puts it in After Montaigne: a “walk-in closet of self or selves” ever more popular in our era of selfies and accumulations of followers on social media. Indeed, contemporary essays are often thoughts that gestate online, developed from blogs or one-off pieces: the sort of text with “14-minute read” under a byline for the crushing commute to work. They can also be surprisingly long and detailed, putting pay to the redundant idea that millennials cannot focus on anything beyond a shakshuka brunch, or — as the Daily Mail might interminably trot out — avocado toast. Caity Weaver’s epic quest to eat limitless mozzarella sticks as part of a TGI Friday’s promotion requires a good chunk of your time. John Saward’s classic reflections on Mike Tyson are as astute and amusing as Hazlitt. But with Golby we’re treated to two things at once: the pleasure of his wit and style as he ranges his themes, and a sustained, near-Swiftian satire on the very real and material challenges driven by the United Kingdom’s housing crisis. It’s not as simple as just laughing at £1,894 for a fold-out bed in Marylebone, or hedonism gone wrong; in Brilliant, we find a writer gunning for a fight.

In “PCM” (“Per Calendar Month”), Golby lays out the vagaries of dealing with the feudal overlords that might kick you out or take your deposit at the drop of a hat:

The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means “I am insanely deranged,” but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate.

Golby intersperses his stories of the worst offenders with brutal, bloody fantasies of decimating each and every one: “The sound a landlord makes when you nail their toes down into the wood floor beneath them is, ‘This isn’t the definition of normal wear and tear.’” This is followed by an adroit move to his notion of “capsule coziness”: the kind of Scandinavian homely warmth called hygge that people were raving about a few years ago that in actuality equates to a herbal tea, a candle, and a “heather-colored blanket” you have to pack and move with every time the tenancy is up. Yet for all his inherently socialist leanings — this piece includes a well-researched outline of the real estate sector going back to 1986 — Golby is the first to admit that he is a slave to late capitalism’s charms. “Monopoly is the best game because the Actual Devil lives inside it,” he writes in another piece, before confessing to his rapacious greed and inhuman dealings on the board. “When I play Monopoly,” he writes,

I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring-drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multimillion-pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200K into my own private account, I am wearing a panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note.

In the United Kingdom there is a generational moniker: “Thatcher’s children.” If you were born in the ’80s, so the tag implies, you’ve been raised on rampant conservatism — the assumedly money-grabbing offspring spawned by her regime. But in truth we’re more conflicted. Society has raised us to believe getting on the property ladder is of paramount importance, but the reality of life-long renting and being pushed out of the city draws a big line between those who gained and those who lost under and after Thatcher. That Golby spins comedy gold from such a sorry state of affairs is testimony to how much we need a voice like his. Given his toothsome fight against oppressive property-owning profiteers, it is tempting to ascribe a cohesive political drive to Brilliant’s author. I asked him over email if he was interested in the horrors of capitalism, given how much of a theme it is in his work. “Mm, yes and no,” he responds. “My politics are, like baby-level deep. I was on a podcast the other week and everyone kept saying ‘neoliberal’ in a natural, casual air that made me sweat. I know the right and the left and vaguely where I fall on that spectrum … but beyond that I don’t feel qualified to talk. I don’t have the vocabulary.”

A similar modesty emerges with the very title of the book, even in its absurd egotism. “The title was initially there to make me laugh,” Golby explains, “then over time it became supremely annoying. It’s hard to pronounce without counting the Brilliants on your fingers: naming the book in this way has become the ultimate self-own.” One also finds this “ultimate self-own” in Golby’s approach to the book’s other major theme: masculinity. He riffs on the ineffable quality of “Machismo” (Golby’s brand is “soft knits and high necks” and a complex skin-care regime that includes the joys of an eye mask), offers an exhaustive, obsessive overview of all the Rocky films ranked in order of greatness, and marvels at Lenny Kravitz’s ability to pull off a leather jacket. (Golby decidedly cannot.) This deconstruction of masculinity accounts for some of the book’s funniest moments:

I realized a way of upgrading myself from a 5-out-of-10 to a solid 6 is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: “£55 for a moisturizer? Hell fucking yes!”

I asked Golby why masculinity can be so funny. “Well, because it’s absurd,” he replies, “but also it’s been one of the overriding influences on culture for the past million years, and we’re only just — just! — cracking out from that shadow … A lot of the things every man who has ever lived or ever died, a lot of what he has ever done, has been due to some deep roiling well of masculinity.”

I wonder if Golby is quite apart from the hegemonic masculinities (as initially theorized by R. W. Connell) that he decries. Brilliant arrives on the shoulders of gender theory: generations of feminist work with which emergent men’s studies became conversant in the 1980s, in works by Peter Schwenger, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynne Segal, and many others. A major subject of such studies was the “New Man” figure that appeared in popular culture in that decade — an emotionally more intelligent, respectful of women, post-yuppie incarnation — which in turn led to the “New Lad” of the 1990s. Integral to the British “lad culture” associated with the Britpop musical genre, the “New Lad” has been characterized by Rosalind Gill as an ironic, “beer and shagging,” Nuts- or Loaded-reading, cheeky manchild. We found him in David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s comedy and the “Three Lions” football anthem, for instance, in the TV series Men Behaving Badly and in the fiction of Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. “Ladlit,” as Elaine Showalter named it, is a direct forerunner of Brilliant, which — over 20 years after the classic “lad” film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and in the light shined on shameful male behavior by the #MeToo movement — inherits and plays with its own genre heritage.

On the one hand, Golby retrenches old notions of manhood. “The Full Spectrum of Masculinity as Represented by Rocky in the Rocky Movies” tangent is a somewhat limited list that veers between brute force and fragility, relying on tired myths as the joke. There’s a familiarity in this move, a well-worn trope. After all, as Steve Connor wrote in 2001 (in “The Shame of Being a Man”), talk about being a man usually has “tucked into it a snicker at its bumptious presumption”: “[W]e find it hard to take masculinity as seriously as we suppose.” That Golby turns his comedy on this theme so frequently suggests a reiteration not wholly free of its antecedents. On the other hand, however, he’s doing something utterly new with the late 2010s permutation of “lads.”

Golby’s Instagram is often one long stream of captioned images sending up exhausted “haway the lads” lager-swilling clichés with a belligerent repetition of “love and appreciation to the lads” — men and women — until it goes from funny to irritating to funny again. He’s also aware of the ways in which, as Connor puts it, “to write is to be unmanned, meritoriously to unman oneself.” Golby embraces such “unmanning.” He explores his own sensitivity and offers a catalog of “All the Fights I’ve Lost.” He’s part of a new generation that knows (yet still laughs) at how, as Connor again writes, “[m]en are spent up: masculinity is a category of ruin, a crashed category. It’s a bust.” Golby is also aware of its persistent homosocial nature: the values and relations exchanged between men, as Sedgwick’s ground-breaking work revealed. “I have to have a very small-voice conversation with myself every time I put a selfie on Instagram,” he tells me. “‘Is this … lame? Will the other boys … mock me?’ It’s an insane and stupid thing to be under a thrall to.”

The homosocial dimension of Golby’s thoughts on masculinity might explain the book’s main oddity. Brilliant has no women in Golby’s love life to speak of. No formative crushes, sex, dating stories — nothing except an encounter with a man in Barcelona selling state-of-the-art sex dolls. The cringeworthy, non-erotic nature of these scenes made me wince with the uncanny feeling Ernst Jentsch and later Freud associated with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton doll Olympia in The Sandman. They are, as Golby puts it, “eerie”: “balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaw w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberized vagina, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill.” Again, we’re less in the realm of sexuality and more in gendered constructs. Golby offers a feminist take on AI and consent, yet feels disquietingly shorn of “the pulsing core of straight masculinity” when surrounded by these uncanny valley robots. He has it both ways: exceeding the “busted” category of manhood, yet circling back to it for a laugh. Is this a new new laddism? The book provokes such a question.

There’s an adolescent immaturity to Golby’s writing, to be sure, but a joyful one, with a comedic suaveness that demands attention. He consistently delivers the jokes through distinctive stylistic moves. Words and phrases pile up in heaps until bam! — the thing tips over and you’re laughing, rereading. He even manages to pull off some comedy in the opening essay, the moving yet funny “Things You Only Know If Both Your Parents Are Dead” that appeared in an earlier form on Vice and more recently the Guardian, about being orphaned at 25. He repeats “My parents are dead” no fewer than 22 times, yet still finds humor in grief, in um-ming and ahh-ing over which kind of beer basket to plump for for a neighbor, or buying vol-au-vents at Tesco. (There was more about the ubiquitous supermarket Tesco, but it was subbed by the US editor for being a bit too British. Other Britishisms include: the cheap pub chain Wetherspoons; the cigarette papers Rizla; tights.) This is perhaps one of the most powerful things about the book: people have reached out to Golby after that essay’s first publication, “as if I am some sort of griefsaver,” but, as he says to friends, “no two griefs are the same. They are always different spikey, awkward shapes. There’s no clean, easy way to vomit grief up out of your system. It just works its way through you in whatever way it chooses to.”

In some ways, as with his romantic life, Golby keeps a lot back, but aspects of Brilliant, like his loss, are totally up front — a juxtaposition that gets us back to the question of ego. I wonder if he considers himself private. “I don’t know if I’m wildly private,” he tells me. “I tend to tweet every thought I have, Instagram my dinner with a forced hashtag and wrote an essay [“Ribs”] about attempting auto fellatio — so let’s not worry too much about that.” Golby still harbors a strong, endearing desire to go to America and “hole up in a motel room with every snack I’ve ever seen on TV and watch 24-hour news.” (He’s wanted to do this since he was about eight.) He admits that his book is all about him, as he has had to convey what it’s about to many an editor’s bemusement with “a blank stare and say something along the lines of: ‘things that I like. I am the theme.’” Ultimately, he confesses, “more than anything else it is, still, fundamentally, just an ego trip thing. I have an enormous ego. An insufferable one.”

In the end, it is Golby’s satire that carries most weight. I ask him one final question, which was always on my lips as I read his columns and choice bits of the book. Is it possible for a human being to become a landlord without turning into a monster? “No,” he replies, firmly. “It’s not possible to become a landlord without turning into a monster. It’s not even possible to conceive of the idea of becoming a landlord without some hollow part of you already being monstrous. No landlord can escape the curse of their own landlordism. Their soul is condemned before they even pull up outside the auction house.”

Cathryn Setz is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

The post The Ultimate Self-Own: On Joel Golby’s “Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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vitalmindandbody · 7 years ago

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‘It was quasi-religious’: the great self-esteem con

In the 1980 s, Californian legislator John Vasconcellos set up a task force that promoted high-pitched self-esteem as the answer to social ailments. But was his science based on a lie?

In 2014, a heartwarming character sent to year 6 students at Barrowford primary school in Lancashire exited viral. Handed out with their Key Stage 2 exam upshots, it reassured them: These research do not ever assess all of what it is that realize each of you special and unique They do not know that your best friend count on you to be there for them or that your laugh can brighten the dreariest era. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, participate boasts, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your fucking brother or sister.

At Barrowford, parties learned, teaches were deterred from questioning beatings, characterizing small children as naughty and promoting their voices. The institutions guiding logic, said headteacher Rachel Tomlinson, was that kids were to be treated with unconditional positive regard.

A little more than a year later, Barrowford obtained itself in the news again. Ofsted had given the school one of its lowest possible ratings, find the quality of education and exam outcomes insufficient. The institution, their report spoke, emphasised developing pupils emotional and social wellbeing more than the achievements of quality standards. Somehow, it seemed, the nurturing of self-esteem had not be converted into higher achievement.

The shortcoming hitherto virulent notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80 s. Since then, the self-esteem crusade has helped transform the behavior we parent our children prioritising their appears of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences.

One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the chief executive of British exams regulator Ofqual admitted the value of GCSEs and -Alevels had been gnawn by years of prolonged point inflation. In the US, between the late 60 s and 2004, the proportion of first time university students claiming an A median in high school has increased from 18% to 48%, despite the fact that SAT scores had actually fallen. Nothing of this, alleges Keith Campbell, prof of psychology at the University of Georgia and expert on narcissism, provides our children well. Burning yourself on a stave is really useful in telling you where you stand, he speaks, but we live in a world-wide of accolades for everyone. Fourteenth region ribbon. I am not making this substance up. My daughter got one.

Campbell, with his colleague Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, has argued that this kind of parenting and teaching have led to a discernible rise in narcissism: witness the selfie-snapping millennials. Although their findings are disputed, Twenge points to other investigate done in the US and beyond twenty-two contemplates or tests[ that] demonstrate a generational increase in positive self-views, including narcissism, and merely two[ that] do not.

How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John Vasco Vasconcellos. That time, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to money a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco remained convinced that low self-esteem was different sources of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational downfall, child abuse, domestic violence cases, homelessness and mob warfare. He became remain convinced that causing specific populations self-esteem would act as a social inoculation, saving the state billions.

But Vascos plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day. I wasted a year trying to find out why and discovered that there was, at the very heart of his job, a lie.

***

John Vasconcellos grew up an submissive Catholic, an altar boy, the smartest boy in his class, whose mom blaspheme that he never misbehaved. But, being such a ardent Catholic, he knew that no matter how good he was, he could only ever be a sinner. At primary school, he flowed for class chairwoman. I lost by one vote. Mine, he eventually replied. He didnt vote for himself because Id been drilled never to use the word I, never to visualize or speak well of myself.

After a charm as a lawyer, Vasco participated politics. In 1966, aged 33, he was elected to the California state assembly. But “theres a problem”: his professional success was at odds with how he thought of himself; he felt he didnt deserves it. At 6ft 3in and over 200 lb, he would stalk the Capitol building in Sacramento, glowering and agitated in his smart black clothing, perfect white shirt and arrow-straight tie, his whisker cultivated with armed precision. I learnt my identity and my life starting utterly apart, he eventually enunciated. I had to go and seek help.

That help came from an uncommon Catholic priest: Father Leo Rock was a psychologist who had studied under the innovator of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, a soldier who believed that the Catholic had it absolutely wrong. At their core, he fantasized, humans werent bad; they were good. And in order to thrive, people needed to be treated with unconditional positive thought( Rogers coined the phrase ). Vasco began contemplating under Rogers himself, a soldier he afterwards described as virtually my second father. Through intense group therapy workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Vasco became a adherent of the human potential shift, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do to live well is discover your authentic inner self.

Portrait: Franck Allais for the Guardian

Around the state capitol, Vascos colleagues began to notice the buttoned-up Catholic was unbuttoning. He flourished his mane and wear half-open Hawaiian shirts on the floor of the senate, a gold series nuzzled in his chest “hairs-breadth”. One reporter described him as looks a lot like a cross between a boulder starring and anti-retroviral drugs smuggler. He became a human potential evangelist, urging the innate goodness in human beings and handing long notebook directories to peers. His self-hating Catholic self had washed away, and in its neighbourhood is a major, glowing note I.

Vasco knew he was in a unique slot. As a legislator, he could take everything hed learned about human potential and transform it into programme that would have a real effect on thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. He decided to campaign for a state-financed task force to promote self-esteem: this would give the movement official affirmation and allow legislators to fashion legislation around it. Best of all, they could recruit “the worlds” finest researchers to prove, scientifically, that it worked.

In the mid-8 0s, the notion that feeling good about yourself was the answer to all your problems seemed to many like a silly Californian cult. But it was also a age when Thatcher and Reagan were busily redesigning western culture around their projection of neoliberalism. By interrupting the unions, flogging shields for workers and trade deregulating bank and business, they wanted to turn as much of human life as possible into a competition of self versus soul. To get along and get ahead in this new competitive age, you had to be ambitious, ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself. What Vasco was offering was a simple hack that would draw you a more winning contestant.

Vascos first try at having his task force mandated into principle has now come to a halt in 1984, when he suffered material heart attack. His belief in positive think was such that, by seeking to remedy himself, he wrote to his ingredients requesting them to envision themselves with minuscule cleans swimming through his arteries, rubbing at the cholesterol, while singing, to the sing of Row, Row, Row Your Barge: Now tells swim ourselves/ up and down my flows/ Touch and rub and heated and thaw/ the plaque that stymie my streams. It didnt piece. As the senate “vote yes ” its own proposal, Vasco was retrieving from seven-way coronary bypass surgery.

After a second attempt was vetoed by the state minister, Vasco decided to enhance the name of his job, modernizing it to the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He reduced the proposed budget from $750,000 a year to $735,000 over three, to be spent on academic the investigations and the roundup of sign in the form of public testament. On 23 September 1986, Assembly Bill 3659 was signed into law.

The response from the California media was immediate and barbarian. One editorial, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Vascos task force naive and outrageous. Nothing established Vasco more enraged than his ideas not being taken seriously, but he was about to become the prank of America.

***

Until Monday 9 February 1987, Vascos task force had was widely regime report. But on that morning, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who had been tickled by the legislators crusade, inaugurated an extraordinary two-week lope of his favourite Doonesbury strip to be given to it. By the end of that day, reporters were mobbing Vasco on the floor of the assembly enclosure. Rival politicians devoted dismissive briefings You could buy the Bible for $2.50 and work better while the Wall Street Journals story endured the headline Maybe Folks Would Feel Better If They Get To Split The $735,000.

Vasco was pallid. The media, he grumbled, were ghastly, cynical, sceptical and inexpensive. Their problem? Low self-esteem.

Meanwhile, something impressive seemed to be happening. The response from the people of California had been great. Between its notice and the task forces firstly public gather in March 1987, the role received more than 2,000 calls and letters, and almost 400 applications to volunteer. More than 300 parties came forward to speak in support of self-esteem at public hearings in the various regions of the nation. And even if the medias tone wasnt always respectful, Vasco himself was now their own nationals anatomy. He seemed everywhere from Newsweek to the CBS Morning Show to the BBC. This, he felt, could be a major opportunity.

But firstly he needed to find a way to wrench the national media gossip upwards. And situations, on that front, were going from unfortunate to foolish. It began with the announcement of the task forces 25 members. On the upside, it was a diverse group, including women, gentlemen, people of colour, lesbian beings, straight beings, Republican, Democrat, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran whod been awarded two Purple Middle. On the downside, it also included a white man in a turban who predicted the work of the working group would be so powerful, it would cause the sunlight to increase in the west. A delighted Los Angeles Herald told how, in front of the press, one member of the task force had asked others to close their eyes and thoughts a self-esteem maintenance gear of sorcery hats, twigs and amulets.

Vascos team embarked sounding information from people up and down California. They sounded from an LA deputy sheriff who toured academies, attempting to reduce drug use by telling students, You are special. You are a wonderful individual. They sounded from masked members of the Crips, who accused their murderous criminality on low-pitched self-esteem. One school principal recommended having elementary pupils increase their self-importance by doing evaluations on their teachers. A wife called Helice Bridges explained how shed dedicated her life to assigning hundreds of thousands of blue ribbon that read Who I Am Makes A Difference.

With the national media held so much to snigger over, it was beginning to look as if Vascos mission was a bust. But there had been some good word: the University of California had agreed to recruit seven profs to research the connection between low-grade self-esteem and societal maladies. They would report back in two years hour. For Vasco, their findings would be personal. If the professors decided he was wrong, it was all over.

***

Me, myself and I: a selfie-snapping millennial. Picture: Francois Lenoir/ Reuters

At 7.30 pm on 8 September 1988, Vasco fulfilled the scientists at El Rancho Inn in Millbrae, just outside San Francisco, to hear research results. Everything hinged on Dr Neil Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology who had coordinated the design, resulting a crew who reviewed all the existing experiment on self-esteem. And the bulletin was good: four months later, in January, the task force questioned a newsletter: In the words of Smelser, The correlational discovers are very positive and compelling.

The headlines rapidly piled up: Self-Esteem Panel Finally Being Taken Seriously; Commission On Self-Esteem Finally Getting Some Respect. The nation minister mailed the professors experiment to his fellow ministers, suggesting, Im convinced that these studies build the foundations for a new period in American problem solving.

Vascos task force was almost done: all they had to supposed to do now was build upon this positive tint with the publication of their final report, Toward A State Of Esteem, in January 1990. That report turned out to be a win beyond the reasonable hopes of anyone who had witnessed its humiliating descents. The minister of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, whod privately taunted Vasco and his projection , now publicly endorsed it, as did illustrations including Barbara Bush and Colin Powell. Time magazine ran with the headline, The gibes are turning to cheers.

The man they were calling the Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem is available on the Today Show and Nightline, on the BBC and Australias ABC. The report went into reprinting in its debut week and went on to sell an extraordinary 60,000 copies. Vascos publicists approached Oprah Winfrey, who extended a prime-time special probing why she speculated self-esteem was going to be one of the catch-all words for the 1990 s. Interviewed were Maya Angelou, Drew Barrymore and John Vasconcellos.

Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were reporting that self-esteem was broom through Californias public academies, with 86% of the states elementary school territories and 83% of high school regions enforcing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began matching twice a few weeks to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi Valley, children were taught, It doesnt matter what you do, but who you are. Political chairmen from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi embarked considering their own task forces.

As the months became times, the self-love action spread. Accuseds in narcotic visitations were reinforced with special key chains for be contained in court, while those who completed medication were given applause and doughnuts. Children were gifted plays accolades just for swerving up; a Massachusetts school district prescribed children in gym classes to skip without actual ropes lest they abide the self-esteem calamity of tripping. Meanwhile, police in Michigan trying a serial rapist taught the public to look out for a thirtysomething male with medium build and low-grade self-esteem.

The credibility of Vascos task force turned predominantly on a single knowledge: that, in 1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analysed the data and approved his impression. The only question was, they hadnt. When I tracked down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as a fucking lie. And Vasco was behind it.

***

In an attempt to discover how America, and then “the worlds”, went conned so spectacularly, I travelled to Del Mar, California, to assemble the task force member whod prophesied their work would cause the sunlight to increase in the west. David Shannahoff-Khalsa greeted me into his bungalow, examining little changed from the old-time image Id learnt: appearance constrict, attentions sharp-witted, turban blue. A kundalini yoga practitioner who guessed meditation to be an ancient engineering of the head, Shannahoff-Khalsa had been so disillusioned by the final report, hed refused to sign it.

Portrait: Franck Allais for the Guardian

As we sat and nibbled cheese, he picked up a dense notebook with a glossy red-faced handle: The Social Importance Of Self-Esteem. This was the obtained work of the University of California professors. He flicked through its sheets, ending eventually on Smelsers summary of the findings. The information most consistently reported, he read out loud, is that the association between self-esteem and its expected importances are mixed, insignificant or absent.

This was a radically different conclusion from that fed to the public. Shannahoff-Khalsa told me he was present when Vasco first met preliminary enlists of the professors make. I remember him going through them and he ogles up and enunciates, You know, if members of the legislative council finds out whats in these reports, we are able to cut the funding to the task force. And then all of that nonsense started to get brushed for the purposes of the table.

How did they do that?

They tried to hide it. They wrote a[ positive] report before this one, he alleged, tapping the ruby-red notebook, which deliberately dismissed and considered up the science.

It was hard to believe that Vascos task force had been so rash as simply to develop the mention, the one that territory the findings and conclusions were positive and compelling. What had really happened at that see in September 1988? I knew the answer on an old-time audio cassette in the California state archives.

The sound was hissy and swooning. What I sounded, though, was clear enough. It was a recording of Smelsers presentation to Vascos task force at that meet in El Rancho Inn, and it was nowhere near as upbeat as the task force had claimed. I listened as he announced the professors work to be complete but worryingly mixed. He talked through a few domains, such as academic achievement, and remarked: These correlational findings are really pretty positive, reasonably compelling. This, then, was the mention the task force employed. Theyd sexed it up a bit for the public. But they had wholly omitted what he enunciated next: In other areas, the connects dont seem to be so great, and were not quite sure why. And were not sure, once we have connects, what the causes might be.

Smelser then leaved the task force a tell. The data was not going to give them something we are able to hand on a dish to the legislature and do, This is what youve got to do and youre going to expect the following kind of results. That is another sin, he said. Its the sin of overselling. And no one can wishes to do that.

I wondered whether Smelser was angry about the mention that got used. So I announced him. He told me the university got involved in the first place only because Vasco was in charge of its budget. The influence[ from Vasco] was indirect. He didnt speak, Im going to cut your budget if you dont do it. But, Wouldnt it be a good idea if the university could dedicate some of its resources to this question? It turned out that Smelser wasnt at all stunned about their dubious medicine of the data. The task force would welcome different forms of good word and either reject or disclaim bad news, he replied. I knew this was a quasi-religious crusade, and thats the kind of happen that happens in those dynamics.

Vasco passed away, aged 82, in 2014, but I find his right-hand guy, task force chairman and veteran legislator Andrew Mecca. When we finally communicated, he confirmed that it was the prestige of the University of California that had passed occasions around for Vasco. That gave us some credibility stripes, he replied. Like Smelser, he felt that the university became involved simply out of anxiety of Vasco. John chaired their lifeblood. Their plan! he chuckled.

How did he frequency the professors investigate? As you read the book, he mentioned, its a cluster of scholarly gobbledegook.

What was Meccas response when the data didnt say what he craved?

I didnt care, he did. I thought it was beyond discipline. It was a leap of faith. And I reckon simply a blind stupid wouldnt believe that self-esteem isnt center to ones persona and health and vitality.

Was Vasconcellos furious where reference is read the professors reports?

The thing is, John was an incredible politician. He was pragmatic enough that he felt he had what he necessary, and that was a scholarly report that pretty much supposed, Self-esteems important. At least, thats the spin we got in the media.

Mecca told me that, prior to the final reports publication, he and Vasco visited editors and television services and facilities producers up and down the two countries, in a deliberate attempt to construct the fib before it was possible to subverted. An extraordinary $30,000 was spent on their PR campaign: at its meridian, five publicists were working full time. We decided to make sure we got out there to tell our fib and not let them interpret it from the stuff that was being written by Smelser. We cultivated the letter. And that positiveness prevailed.

So nobody listened to what Smelser and Shannahoff-Khalsa were saying?

Im not sure anybody attended, Mecca added. Who recollects Neil Smelser or Shannahoff-Khalsa? Nothing! They were minuscule ripples in a big tsunami of positive change.

***

More than 20 years on, the effects of Vascos mission linger. Whether the tsunami of change he brought about was utterly positive continues dubious. I spoke to educational psychologist Dr Laura Warren, who taught in British academies in the 90 s, and remembers her schools edict that staff utilize mauve writes to differentiate wrongdoings, in place of the negative red. It was a policy of wage everything that they do, she told me. That turned out to be a atrociously bad idea.

The Ofsted inspectors detected as much when they saw Barrowford primary school in 2015. But after their critical report became public, the headteacher, Rachel Tomlinson, defended herself in her local newspaper. When we introduced the policy, it was after an horrid heap of research and deliberation, she read. And I think it has been a success.

Accommodated from Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What Its Doing To Us by Will Storr, published by Picador on 15 June at 18.99. To tell a emulate for 16.14, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

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inbonobo · 7 years ago

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Vasco’s first attempt at having his task force mandated into law came to a halt in 1984, when he suffered a heart attack. His belief in positive thinking was such that, in an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his constituents asking them to picture themselves with tiny brushes swimming through his arteries, scrubbing at the cholesterol, while singing, to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat: “Now let’s swim ourselves/ up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm and melt/the plaque that blocks my streams.” It didn’t work. As the senate voted on his proposal, Vasco was recovering from seven-way coronary bypass surgery.

In 2014, a heartwarming letter sent to year 6 pupils at Barrowford primary school in Lancashire went viral. Handed out with their Key Stage 2 exam results, it reassured them: “These tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique… They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister.”

At Barrowford, people learned, teachers were discouraged from issuing punishments, defining a child as “naughty” and raising their voices. The school’s guiding philosophy, said headteacher Rachel Tomlinson, was that kids were to be treated with “unconditional positive regard”.

A little more than a year later, Barrowford found itself in the news again. Ofsted had given the school one of its lowest possible ratings, finding the quality of teaching and exam results inadequate. The school, their report said, “emphasised developing pupils’ emotional and social wellbeing more than the attainment of high standards”. Somehow, it seemed, the nurturing of self-esteem had not translated into higher achievement.

The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences.

One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the chief executive of British exams regulator Ofqual admitted the value of GCSEs and A-levels had been eroded by years of “persistent grade inflation”. In the US, between the late 60s and 2004, the proportion of first year university students claiming an A average in high school rose from 18% to 48%, despite the fact that SAT scores had actually fallen. None of this, says Keith Campbell, professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and expert on narcissism, serves our youngsters well. “Burning yourself on a stove is really useful in telling you where you stand,” he says, “but we live in a world of trophies for everyone. Fourteenth place ribbon. I am not making this stuff up. My daughter got one.”

Campbell, with his colleague Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, has argued that this kind of parenting and teaching has contributed to a measurable rise in narcissism: witness the selfie-snapping millennials. Although their findings are disputed, Twenge points to other research done in the US and beyond – “twenty-two studies or samples [that] show a generational increase in positive self-views, including narcissism, and only two [that] do not”.

To get ahead in the 1980s, you had to be ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself

How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John “Vasco” Vasconcellos. That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced that raising the population’s self-esteem would act as a “social vaccine”, saving the state billions.

But Vasco’s plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day. I spent a year trying to find out why – and discovered that there was, at the heart of his project, a lie.

***

John Vasconcellos grew up an obedient Catholic, an altar boy, the smartest kid in his class, whose mother swore that he never misbehaved. But, being such a devout Catholic, he knew that no matter how good he was, he could only ever be a sinner. At primary school, he ran for class president. “I lost by one vote. Mine,” he later said. He didn’t vote for himself because “I’d been drilled never to use the word ‘I’, never to think or speak well of myself.”

After a spell as a lawyer, Vasco entered politics. In 1966, aged 33, he was elected to the California state assembly. But there was a problem: his professional success was at odds with how he thought of himself; he felt he didn’t deserve it. At 6ft 3in and over 200lb, he would stalk the Capitol building in Sacramento, glowering and anxious in his smart black suit, perfect white shirt and arrow-straight tie, his hair cropped with military precision. “I found my identity and my life coming utterly apart,” he later said. “I had to go and seek help.”

That help came from an unusual Catholic priest: Father Leo Rock was a psychologist who had trained under the pioneer of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, a man who believed that the Catholics had it absolutely wrong. At their core, he thought, humans weren’t bad; they were good. And in order to thrive, people needed to be treated with “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers coined the phrase). Vasco began studying under Rogers himself, a man he later described as “almost my second father”. Through intense group therapy workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Vasco became a devotee of the human potential movement, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do to live well is discover your authentic inner self.

Around the state capitol, Vasco’s colleagues began to notice the buttoned-up Catholic was unbuttoning. He grew his hair and wore half-open Hawaiian shirts on the floor of the senate, a gold chain nestled in his chest hair. One reporter described him as looking like “a cross between a rock star and a drug smuggler”. He became a human potential evangelist, preaching the innate goodness of humans and handing long book lists to colleagues. His self-hating Catholic self had washed away, and in its place was a great, glowing letter “I”.

Vasco knew he was in a unique position. As a politician, he could take everything he’d learned about human potential and turn it into policy that would have a real effect on thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. He decided to campaign for a state-financed task force to promote self-esteem: this would give the movement official affirmation and allow politicians to fashion legislation around it. Best of all, they could recruit the world’s finest researchers to prove, scientifically, that it worked.

In the mid-80s, the notion that feeling good about yourself was the answer to all your problems sounded to many like a silly Californian fad. But it was also a period when Thatcher and Reagan were busily redesigning western society around their project of neoliberalism. By breaking the unions, slashing protections for workers and deregulating banking and business, they wanted to turn as much of human life as possible into a competition of self versus self. To get along and get ahead in this new competitive age, you had to be ambitious, ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself. What Vasco was offering was a simple hack that would make you a more winning contestant.

After a second attempt was vetoed by the state governor, Vasco decided to enhance the name of his project, upgrading it to the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He reduced the proposed budget from $750,000 a year to $735,000 over three, to be spent on academic research and the gathering of evidence in the form of public testimony. On 23 September 1986, Assembly Bill 3659 was signed into law.

The response from the California media was immediate and savage. One editorial, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Vasco’s task force “naive and absurd”. Nothing made Vasco more angry than his ideas not being taken seriously, but he was about to become the joke of America.

***

Until Monday 9 February 1987, Vasco’s task force had been largely state news. But on that morning, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who had been tickled by the politician’s crusade, began an extraordinary two-week run of his popular Doonesbury strip devoted to it. By the end of that day, reporters were crowding Vasco on the floor of the assembly chamber. Rival politicians gave dismissive briefings – “You could buy the Bible for $2.50 and do better” – while the Wall Street Journal’s story bore the headline Maybe Folks Would Feel Better If They Got To Split The $735,000.

Vasco was livid. The media, he complained, were “terrible, cynical, sceptical and cheap”. Their problem? “Low self-esteem.”

Meanwhile, something remarkable seemed to be happening. The response from the people of California had been great. Between its announcement and the task force’s first public meeting in March 1987, the office received more than 2,000 calls and letters, and almost 400 applications to volunteer. More than 300 people came forward to speak in support of self-esteem at public hearings across the state. And even if the media’s tone wasn’t always respectful, Vasco himself was now a national figure. He appeared everywhere from Newsweek to the CBS Morning Show to the BBC. This, he sensed, could be a major opportunity.

But first he needed to find a way to wrench the media conversation upwards. And things, on that front, were going from unfortunate to ridiculous. It began with the announcement of the task force’s 25 members. On the upside, it was a diverse group, including women, men, people of colour, gay people, straight people, Republicans, Democrats, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran who’d been awarded two Purple Hearts. On the downside, it also included a white man in a turban who predicted the work of the task force would be so powerful, it would cause the sun to rise in the west. A delighted Los Angeles Herald told how, in front of the press, one member of the task force had asked others to close their eyes and imagine a “self-esteem maintenance kit” of magic hats, wands and amulets.

Vasco’s team began hearing testimony from people up and down California. They heard from an LA deputy sheriff who toured schools, attempting to reduce drug use by telling pupils, “You are special. You are a wonderful individual.” They heard from masked members of the Crips, who blamed their violent criminality on low self-esteem. One school principal recommended having elementary pupils increase their self-importance by doing evaluations on their teachers. A woman called Helice Bridges explained how she’d dedicated her life to distributing hundreds of thousands of blue ribbons that read Who I Am Makes A Difference.

With the national media given so much to snigger over, it was beginning to look as if Vasco’s mission was a bust. But there had been some good news: the University of California had agreed to recruit seven professors to research the links between low self-esteem and societal ills. They would report back in two years’ time. For Vasco, their findings would be personal. If the professors decided he was wrong, it was all over.

***

At 7.30pm on 8 September 1988, Vasco met the scientists at El Rancho Inn in Millbrae, just outside San Francisco, to hear the results. Everything hinged on Dr Neil Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology who had coordinated the work, leading a team who reviewed all the existing research on self-esteem. And the news was good: four months later, in January, the task force issued a newsletter: “In the words of Smelser, ‘The correlational findings are very positive and compelling.’”

The headlines quickly piled up: Self-Esteem Panel Finally Being Taken Seriously; Commission On Self-Esteem Finally Getting Some Respect. The state governor sent the professors’ research to his fellow governors, saying, “I’m convinced that these studies lay the foundation for a new day in American problem solving.”

Vasco’s task force was almost done: all they had to do now was build upon this positive tone with the publication of their final report, Toward A State Of Esteem, in January 1990. That report turned out to be a victory beyond the reasonable hopes of anyone who had witnessed its humiliating origins. The governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who’d privately mocked Vasco and his project, now publicly endorsed it, as did figures including Barbara Bush and Colin Powell. Time magazine ran with the headline, “The sneers are turning to cheers.”

The man they were calling the Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem appeared on the Today Show and Nightline, on the BBC and Australia’s ABC. The report went into reprint in its debut week and went on to sell an extraordinary 60,000 copies. Vasco’s publicists approached Oprah Winfrey, who ran a prime-time special examining why she believed self-esteem was going to be one of the “catch-all phrases for the 1990s”. Interviewed were Maya Angelou, Drew Barrymore and John Vasconcellos.

Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were reporting that self-esteem was “sweeping through California’s public schools”, with 86% of the state’s elementary school districts and 83% of high school districts implementing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began meeting twice a week to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi Valley, kids were taught, “It doesn’t matter what you do, but who you are.” Political leaders from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi began considering their own task forces.

As the months became years, the self-love movement spread. Defendants in drug trials were rewarded with special key chains for appearing in court, while those who completed treatment were given applause and doughnuts. Children were awarded sports trophies just for turning up; a Massachusetts school district ordered children in gym classes to skip without actual ropes lest they suffer the self-esteem catastrophe of tripping. Meanwhile, police in Michigan seeking a serial rapist instructed the public to look out for a thirtysomething male with medium build and “low self-esteem”.

The credibility of Vasco’s task force turned largely on a single fact: that, in 1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analysed the data and confirmed his hunch. The only problem was, they hadn’t. When I tracked down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as “a fucking lie”. And Vasco was behind it.

***

In an attempt to discover how America, and then the world, got conned so spectacularly, I travelled to Del Mar, California, to meet the task force member who’d predicted their work would cause the sun to rise in the west. David Shannahoff-Khalsa welcomed me into his bungalow, looking little changed from the old photographs I’d seen: face narrow, eyes sharp, turban blue. A kundalini yoga practitioner who believed meditation to be an “ancient technology of the mind”, Shannahoff-Khalsa had been so disillusioned by the final report, he’d refused to sign it.

As we sat and nibbled cheese, he picked up a thick book with a shiny red cover: The Social Importance Of Self-Esteem. This was the collected work of the University of California professors. He flicked through its pages, settling eventually on Smelser’s summary of the findings. “The news most consistently reported,” he read out loud, “is that the association between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant or absent.”

This was a radically different conclusion from that fed to the public. Shannahoff-Khalsa told me he was present when Vasco first saw preliminary drafts of the professors’ work. “I remember him going through them – and he looks up and says, ‘You know, if the legislature finds out what’s in these reports, they could cut the funding to the task force.’ And then all of that stuff started to get brushed under the table.”

How did they do that?

“They tried to hide it. They published a [positive] report before this one,” he said, tapping the red book, which deliberately “ignored and covered up” the science.

It was hard to believe that Vasco’s task force had been so rash as simply to invent the quote, the one that stated the findings were “positive and compelling”. What had really happened at that meeting in September 1988? I found the answer on an old audio cassette in the California state archives.

The sound was hissy and faint. What I heard, though, was clear enough. It was a recording of Smelser’s presentation to Vasco’s task force at that meeting in El Rancho Inn, and it was nowhere near as upbeat as the task force had claimed. I listened as he announced the professors’ work to be complete but worryingly mixed. He talked through a few areas, such as academic achievement, and said: “These correlational findings are really pretty positive, pretty compelling.” This, then, was the quote the task force used. They’d sexed it up a little for the public. But they had completely omitted what he said next: “In other areas, the correlations don’t seem to be so great, and we’re not quite sure why. And we’re not sure, when we have correlations, what the causes might be.”

Smelser then gave the task force a warning. The data was not going to give them something they could “hand on a platter to the legislature and say, ‘This is what you’ve got to do and you’re going to expect the following kind of results.’ That is another sin,” he said. “It’s the sin of overselling. And nobody can want to do that.”

I wondered whether Smelser was angry about the quote that got used. So I called him. He told me the university got involved in the first place only because Vasco was in charge of its budget. “The pressure [from Vasco] was indirect. He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to cut your budget if you don’t do it.’ But, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the university could devote some of its resources to this problem?’” It turned out that Smelser wasn’t at all surprised about their dubious treatment of the data. “The task force would welcome all kinds of good news and either ignore or deny bad news,” he said. “I found this was a quasi-religious movement, and that’s the sort of thing that happens in those dynamics.”

Vasco passed away, aged 82, in 2014, but I traced his right-hand man, task force chairman and veteran politician Andrew Mecca. When we finally spoke, he confirmed that it was the prestige of the University of California that had turned things around for Vasco. “That earned us some credibility stripes,” he said. Like Smelser, he felt that the university became involved only out of fear of Vasco. “John chaired their lifeblood. Their budget!” he chuckled.

How did he rate the academics’ research? “As you read the book,” he said, “it’s a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.”

What was Mecca’s response when the data didn’t say what he wanted?

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I thought it was beyond science. It was a leap of faith. And I think only a blind idiot wouldn’t believe that self-esteem isn’t central to one’s character and health and vitality.”

Was Vasconcellos angry when he read the professors’ reports?

“The thing is, John was an incredible politician. He was pragmatic enough that he felt he had what he needed, and that was a scholarly report that pretty much said, ‘Self-esteem’s important.’ At least, that’s the spin we got in the media.”

Mecca told me that, prior to the final report’s publication, he and Vasco visited editors and television producers up and down the country, in a deliberate attempt to construct the story before it could be subverted. An extraordinary $30,000 was spent on their PR campaign: at its height, five publicists were working full time. “We decided to make sure we got out there to tell our story and not let them interpret it from the stuff that was being written by Smelser. We cultivated the message. And that positiveness prevailed.”

So nobody listened to what Smelser and Shannahoff-Khalsa were saying?

“I’m not sure anybody cared,” Mecca said. “Who remembers Neil Smelser or Shannahoff-Khalsa? Nobody! They were tiny ripples in a big tsunami of positive change.”

***

More than 20 years on, the effects of Vasco’s mission linger. Whether the tsunami of change he brought about was wholly positive remains doubtful. I spoke to educational psychologist Dr Laura Warren, who taught in British schools in the 90s, and remembers her school’s edict that staff use mauve pens to mark errors, in place of the negative red. “It was a policy of ‘reward everything that they do’,” she told me. “That turned out to be a terribly bad idea.”

The Ofsted inspectors discovered as much when they visited Barrowford primary school in 2015. But after their critical report became public, the headteacher, Rachel Tomlinson, defended herself in her local newspaper. “When we introduced the policy, it was after an awful lot of research and deliberation,” she said. “And I think it has been a success.”

Adapted from Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It’s Doing To Us by Will Storr

(via 'It was quasi-religious': the great self-esteem con | Life and style | The Guardian)

#self-esteem #vasco #catholic self-hatred #catholic guilt #positivity #positive thinking #self-reliance #leo rock #carl rogers #john vasconcellos #eduation #usa #california #flower power #nacissism #schooling #human potential

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