Medial dictatorship or societal approval – the spirit of the time as a devastating weapon, shit tastes well…

one of the participants in the Swedish version of Big Brother.

A female Swedish journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius wrote in a chronicle yesterday about humiliation and mobbing programmes on TV, programmes that are very popular today. These programmes (or their critics?) had been up in a debate programme on Swedish TV recently.

The basic idea and conclusion from the programme leader, Janne Josefsson, was that people criticizing those programmes also allege that people watching them are stupid. These programmes have many viewers and all people can't be wrong.

In a way Josefsson puts himself in a loyalty situation with the ones who watch those programmes and what he did was stirring people up against the snobbish critics she thinks.

Boëthius writes that she has seen those programmes at least once, but has had to tie herself up to her TV-sofa, and the watching was a prolonged torture. I agree with her, I have felt tormented when I have been forced to see them, when I for instance have been visitor in other peoples’ houses and they have watched them.

She quotes a Spanish author who said something in the style:

“Maybe you aren’t only guilty to what you are doing, but also to what you are listening to, what you see and read.”

But maybe one needs to see to be able to judge and condemn?

Exactly so, Boëthius writes, we live in a viewership’s dictatorship; each programme with a lot of watchers is per definition “good”, just because it gets a lot of viewers. In what way, one can’t help wondering? she writes. Yes, they are good because they get a lot of viewers.

But this logic doesn’t hold, she thinks, and comes to think of the device

“Hundred millions flies can’t be wrong. Shit tastes well!”

I am perfectly convinced that a lot of intelligent people are watching idiotic programmes and that it’s not possible drawing equal signs between “watching shit-programmes” and being “unintelligent” she writes.

The spirit of the time allows those programmes, so people are watching programmes where people in the purpose of entertainment are humiliating themselves and/or bullying each other.

Similar spirit of times have occurred during history, where millions of people watched and enjoyed things we regard as horrible and worth condemning: public executions, the Nazi mass meetings, lynching etc.

Were all those spectators, who let themselves be drawn with and entertained, stupid?

Are the Swedes watching those programmes some day going to regret that they “made themselves guilty of” watching humiliation-TV? Maybe they will realize that those programmes are a sort of propaganda for a loathsome outlook on man?

In those times civil courage is demanded, from for example people like Josefsson, she thinks. Either you can put yourself on the side of the viewers by exhibiting the critics of the misery as “snobs”, by this legitimizing even more programmes of this type, or by standing up and saying that this is humiliating and dangerous for us all; producers as well as viewers.

I am totally sure that if one decided to send an American execution with poison directly on TV one would get more viewers than any previous programme before she writes. Does this mean that this is a “good” programme?

According to the logic of Josefsson the answer is “yes”. Because a billion people or something like that would choose watching, the ones criticizing the programme are despisers of man, according to the Josefsson vocabulary.

The spirit of the time is a devastating weapon.

How big the numbers of watchers even are the programme can be totally objectionable she means. She can hear the objections: you can’t compare those!

Yes, I can, she asserts. Consenting to letting oneself be entertained with humiliation, bullying and expelling, is to humiliate oneself, and maybe that’s the meaning as a matter of fact?

“We are all assholes!”

the producers are chuckling.

But we aren’t she maintains. Thinking independently, walking against the spirit of the time is one of the greatest gifts we have gotten.

It’s a question of daring to take possession of this gift and ability she concludes.

See earlier posting on reality-TV.

Blaming the victim(s)…

Who has to pay (most) for the current gigantic economic crisis? The ones that caused it? And what (or who) caused it? How has it been through history, with people causing crisis and sometimes even catastrophes and the ones who have had to pay for them?

Thought on responsibility and guilt. On civil wars.

Are we directing the anger at the true or original sources? Or at other, (much more) innocent, who maybe had nothing to do with this crisis, people who have been working and taking responsibility for themselves maybe their whole lives?

Yes, each person has a responsibility for her/himself as single unit, citizen and human being, but, there’s a but…

In Owe Wikström’s last book “In defense of longing – or the melancholy in Finnish tango” he writes at pages 92-93 (referring to Albert Camus and what he has written about Sisyphus) that the human being has come into his world with the capacity (ability) to think and plan, to chose and take responsibility. Thrown into the existence and endowed with a freedom we hardly can carry – not to talk about the other side of this freedom: the responsibility and the guilt, we are standing there quite unable to act before the strange that nobody knows – and this is Camus’ point – nobody CAN know either about what this existence/life is about. Camus talks about trials running away from those ontological and moral questions – through leaning on scientific models, political ideologies or fixed belief systems.

The struggle not fleeing to the seemingly secure systems demands courage. This struggle remains the human being’s nobility mark. Why do we need those easy answers and quick fixes?

The last fifteen years (since we got a right government the first time on more than ten years), at least, we have spoken here in Sweden about “freedom under responsibility” (the power’s idea!?), for us employed for instance (and not least). And also about loyalty to the workplace and its ideas or programs. Hmmm, loyalty to what and what not??

When I was reading Wikström and thinking on other things at the same time my thoughts went this way:

Responsibility: for ourselves, but as a separate individual what’s reasonable doing? The ones taking on bigger tasks HAVE a greater responsibility and have more power (because they have more power through their position, have taken more power on them. And many people don’t want to have all those responsibilities following with a lot of power, because they can imagine how it would be, how this is. Maybe we don’t get the ones hat would be the best in leader and power roles, but this is another discussion?).

But the small human being can’t accordingly disclaim ALL responsibility! The small human being has still a responsibility, but one can’t put responsibility on her for conditions (structural for instance) she as a separate individual have no possibility (or maybe slightest power) to change. We “must” condemn the right thing or person.

We ought to direct the anger and fury at those who deserve it. As Miller says; if we direct the anger at scapegoats (and not the true sources for our anger) nothing will become dissolved (we won’t really recover).

The leader also needs to have the courage to condemn systems he/she can’t beat! Because even for the one with a lot of power there can be conditions he/she can’t master or cope with, because they are beyond his/her human capacities.

Unless we don’t live in a totalitarian regime we are never totally helpless (even if it can truly and genuinely feel like that) though. Saying like this can really become misused and become a source for moralizing… And yes, it can maybe be a little dangerous.

It’s important to put the blame right and where it belongs and the responsibility where it belongs actually. And it’s probably easier blaming certain people (people with less power and societal status)?

Once again: who have to pay for what other people have caused and done? If those who have to pay (and because of this suffer in different ways, economically for instance) at least were honored and confirmed!!!

Interview with the daughter of Camus.

Survival of the fittest, what persons deserve freedom, and what persons get it?

Is it true that it should be (are) the most adaptable (flexible) who survives best? And the less that have most problems surviving?

If we should examine people in higher positions, earning more money then the average, what would we find? That they are the most flexible or adaptable, more than most of those under them? Or can they be very inflexible, no especially adaptive, rigid, stiff? (Do many of them have more means hiding this too?)

But it’s not impossible that many of them want to believe that they are superior and deserve their position and wealth?

Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, is about blaming the one who is a failure, who don’t succeed! With your success or failure you have proved if you are as good as other people or less good! If you deserve a decent living or not!

Strikes me once again; empathy is said to be one of several risk factors for burnout according to science.

Thought about inconsequence (arrogance, cynicism) in rhetoric (in politics, on the net in debates there etc.), an inconsequence making you totally confused and thus unfortunately entirely mute. Who is the stupid here? It must be me (primary defense?).

Neoliberals have told me that if nobody wants my product: my piano-playing, piano teacher work, then those things has to die. If nobody is willing to pay me for those things, goodbye with it.

But if a neoliberal try to sell his products or services as an own manufacturer with little or no success, then the failing success has with something else to do then with the need for or quality of his product, something it had in my case though. It’s nothing wrong with their product or what they want to sell (compared with my “product”), but the fault lays somewhere else, on taxes, the society, the government.

How is it with the logical thinking?

When the power has succeeded to make us, the grassroots, fight they have succeeded! People won’t see the ruling class or what they are doing if the grassroots are fighting between themselves. Forces try to make us believe that we have the same chance as those wealthy. Playing on the false hope defense.

The “weak” can die or something? Who are loyal with them? Loyal with the losers?

The wealthiest, richest and with most power join in groups of lots a different kinds to support each other (and most of those are men too), they organize themselves in closed and (often) secret groups. Loyal to each other?

But who are loyal to us. How do we, the grassroots, deal with this? By trying to be awaken to things, not let the power divide and rule! Who are going to protect the weak groups in society? (who are the weak and where does he weakness comes from?).

From where comes limitless needs? Can those ever become filled?

In the blogposting “Political mathematics” you can read that demands on cars, TVs and cell phones have decreased in the global financial crisis paths. The need for school education, glaucoma and cataract surgery and changing diapers are on the other hand unchanged from losses of demands on the market. But the government doesn’t think it can afford looking so those needs are covered- we have a crisis for God’s sake! The message from the secretary in charge is that we have to prioritize.

But the truth is that the government has prioritized differently for how the money shall become spent. New and more an more gloomy prognoses are published almost weekly about how drastic the cuts that will become forced on the general welfare. The needed money is almost exactly the money the tax cuts are for work! This means that 30 000 people will lose their jobs. 30 000 persons whose jobs are needed everyday, everywhere in the country. They are at risk of losing their jobs because the government doesn’t think if can afford them!

The Left party, as the envious bores they are (as the blog owner calls herself and her friends), has initiated an investigation how the tax cuts for work are divided among people in different income groups. Just to check if it really is the low and middle wage earners who are the most benefited by those tax cuts.

If it is like that, something the government readily claims, there is some sort of demand stimulus in the reform that at least isn’t totally crazy in a recession.

But it isn’t like this.

As a matter of fact more than 52 percent of the tax cuts for work go to the highest paid third part. They don’t need to increase their consumption. They will in all likelihood not do this to any significant degree. People on these income levels save the money they get over and the money neither lead to jobs nor to tax revenues.

The lowest paid on the contrary are made do with 8 percent of the tax cuts total value.

The 15 billion Swedish Crowns it’s about here could have become used better. A billion could have one to the lowest paid. While 14 billions needed for keeping the staff in the health care, child care and school could have gone exactly to those things.

It should, in contrast to using them to even more increase the already highly paid peoples’ space for savings, have become used to keeping the unemployment down and the employment up – something that actually should have been highly prioritized given the general state on the labor market.

This would in turn have held 30 000 publicly employed peoples’ consumption up and kept the economy going. Instead they are at risk of becoming thrown out into the low income slough on a really lousy dole or being forced to change account from the municipality town’s wage office to the social welfare office.

And the needs for the tasks the employed in the municipality are doing won’t disappear as said before.

So it will probably become the fired assistant nurses, children’s nurses, the teachers and home helps that have to step in and take care of their old tasks unemployed when the local governments service can’t afford it or haven’t time for it.

Why is the government doing this bizarre prioritizing? Have they misjudged the situation? Have they failed?

Hardly. This IS the bourgeoisie policy. This thesis the blog owner has developed together with another woman in an article linked here.

This is what Naomi Klein calls the prerequisites for Shock therapy?? A real or an caused crisis, where people in shock have nothing to put against.

But information is shock resistant as Klein also writes.

From another article "Bourgeoisie strategy": The refusal to intervene from the right government’s side isn’t due to lack of wisdom, but a logical consequence of the bourgeoisie political agenda.

The support for a commonly financed welfare is strong in the Swedish people. Too strong for the bourgeoisie parties to win sympathies on open talk of cuts and privatizations. But the right’s political agenda, that more and more of social security, nursing and care shall become financed privately hasn’t changed, only its rhetoric.

The bourgeoisie government has already made deteriorations in unemployment, health care and parental benefits.

At the same time many of the authorities which are the citizens’ immediate meeting with the welfare systems, as the employment offices and the regional social insurance office have gotten powerfully reduced subsidies and become reorganized from the bottom. The new, harder rules to get those benefits are hard to understand both for the citizens and the employed, people have to wait unreasonably long for payments and the staff is pressed to their utmost.

It’s natural that such a development leads to an increase in dissatisfaction and distrust against the common welfare systems. The ones that have opportunities will seek themselves to supplementing, private insurances to compensate for the deficiencies in the common systems. This is encouraged by the right government. The strategy is to create support for a gradually liquidation of the loyal, tax financed welfare systems through sabotaging them.

Warning bells are working full steam about an approaching welfare crisis and economists as well as local politicians are appealing to the government to intervene. But the secretary in charge says the municipalities have to prioritize. En clair this means that the government encourage to cuts in the school, child care, health care and geriatric care. At the same time as the safety systems and the authorities administering them are undermined; the government intend to let the school and health care collapse.

That the right government uses the economical crisis with the aim of carrying through a fervently coveted system shift becomes more and more obvious.

Local politicians, no matter what party, have the ungrateful job to cut the already hardly harassed welfare sector.

The government wash their hands and instead concentrates on creating laws and decrees favoring private alternatives for all our welfare. Thus the ring is raked for private health care companies and insurance companies taking over where the public have “failed.”

Instead of trying to get support for its privatization politics, through arguing, the government is prepared to sacrifice not only citizens health care but also the possibility for the staff in the welfare sector to carry their work through.

The government’s passivity under the ongoing recession isn’t about ignorance about what to do. What sort of visions does a government have that cut the taxes with 100 billion Swedish Crowns and encourages the local politicians to prioritize among sick, old and children? In fact it’s high time that the right government tells the Swedish people what it wants to carry through and they should become forced to argue for this.

So true!

I dislike this government from deep, deep in my heart.

Solidarity – to oneself, to other people, to the world, nature…

I baked Lucy cats yesterday.

[Slightly edited in the evening and updated December 3]. One of my bosses said on a meeting recently that he had read (or heard about) an investigation about people born in the nineties showing that those people are much more individualistic than any other generation. He didn't describe it as this individualism was something positive in my ears and feelings. My interpretation was that they are selfish and don't really care about other people. But has grown people always thought like this about the younger generations (with a self-ironic smile and a deep sigh).

These young people have a greater propensity for immediate satisfaction of their needs he said I think. They put themselves in the first place/room… If I remember right. They are (only) loyal to themselves.

Sidetrack: I also reacted at colleagues I got in the beginning of the nineties (colleagues coming directly from their education), colleagues who were born in the sixties (as our minister of education, whose ideas I don't like at all), they were so strict and authoritarian towards our students, sounded so totalitarian in their judgments! Yes, they sounded like this at least, it's maybe possible that they weren't really like this in practical work, I don't know.

I reacted at what my boss said, as if we just have to accept that young people are like this... And I also raised my voice on this meeting. Have thought further on this a little, among a lot of other things I have in my mind.

Does the one have to exclude the other? Can’t you be loyal both to yourself and to the community (so long as the community is really worth this of course)? Does the individual exclude the collective or vice versa? Can’t, and shouldn’t, the collective treat or meet, each individual with real, genuine, deep respect? And can't an individual feel loyalty towards a group, a community? So long as it is worth it, yes!?

Are those two opposites? Do they have to be? And if they are, why are they?

I try to imagine; if we managed to meet the child with true, genuine respect from the first beginning, in the first place, respect for its feelings, needs, reactions, expressions etc. wouldn’t that individual be capable of showing true, genuine respect to what is worth her or his respect? And make that person more capable of constructively dealing with difficult people, conditions etc.

I also came to think of John Cleese and one of the books he wrote with his therapist Robin Skinner, about leaders, more and less healthy ones. For instance what they had to say about Hitler and Stalin. I searched the book in my book cases and read quickly that they mean that Hitler belonged to the right-extremists and Stalin to the left-extremists briefly said!?

But I think I have to reread what they wrote better before I write more about it…

And I also came to think about shame again of some reason, as a raising method, even used (by people in the power) to steer adult people into things they otherwise wouldn't have agreed to or would have strongly protested against... Would it be possible steering people with shame if they had become better treated (truly respectfully treated) earliest in life?

The young people growing up during the former decade (the nineties), grew up during a time when the grown up world had less time for them; parents more occupied than ever, and there were less grown up people in school, because of the steel bath in the economy then...

There’s a lot at work now too… This was really quickly written...

Some quick reflections December 3: we have been told (encouraged) the last more then ten years at work to say what we think. Told not to talk in the corridors. But do people really - and if not why? Have they started doing this more? Or maybe even less? And the ones that are speaking up - how are they seen and/or met? Are they maybe exploding over states of affairs? And sensitive to not outspoken things? Is it a little "you shall but you shall not"? Which is one of the Master Suppression Techniques?

Avariciousness…

[Slightly edited October 1]. Quickly written after a long day at work: The Swedish leader-writer and priest Helle Klein writes in her blog that she thinks the economism gets both material and existential consequences.

She wonders how what’s now going on in the current financial crisis will end.

“The greediness digs its own grave – unfortunately many small-savers [??] are drawn with in this crisis.”

In a leader chronicle yesterday she writes about that “The Capitalism Destroys the Love.”

The Swedish debater and journalist Dan Josefsson said at the book-fair in Gothenburg recently that:

“Loneliness is a malignant tumour on our society.”

He and a psychotherapist have written a book together called something like “The Secrecy –from glance to lasting relation” (if we just "take ourselves in the collar" as we say here and become the clever girls and boys we will manage it!!! My interpretation from what I read about the book. Of course; all who haven't been so badly hurt will manage this, but those who were more badly treated... What about them?). Addition October 9: the home site for this book, see here.

In the book flood from this year’s fair (mass?) the need of help with relations appears. The human beings of today seem to have difficulties with the love –not with sex, kicks of happiness or enjoyment, but with lasting and deep relations.

Of 9 million people in Sweden 2, 5 million are living in one-person households. Over 1, 5 million of these have hardly any contact with their families. 200,000 say they don’t have any friends.

A lot of people call help-phones. All sorts of people are calling: young, old, people born in Sweden and abroad, men and women. Many carry a huge agony. The dismounting of the psychiatry is shown clearly. Other people are struggling with their addiction(s). Strikingly many women are drinking too much. But obviously many are merely alone. They have nobody to talk with. They are longing for connection beyond themselves.

Loneliness is the Western world’s big problem child. We have everything, but not. The affluence of things has to compensate for broken relations (but more and more people don’t have material things either, we are returning more and more to the class-society again).

However, all those offers of therapy, lifestyle coaching and self-realization say that we have to change ourselves, not the society * (the tendency to blame ourselves is strengthened! Very practical for the ones in power on all levels).

If one topic of conversation in our time is the loneliness, the other is the financial crisis. The bank system in USA is breaking down and the confidence for the societal economies is crashing.

The greediness, avariciousness has dug its own grave.

Maybe these two societal phenomena – the loneliness and the greediness - belong together?

“The capitalism is a condition in the world and in the soul”

Franz Kafka once claimed.

His provoking metaphor hold things together we use to hold apart – the economic and the existential aspects/things.

One of Klein’s teachers at the university, Per Frostin, once wrote an essay with the heading “The Capitalism Chokes the Love.”

He searched for the talk in society and church about the economism’s and consumism’s influence not only on the societal solidarity but also on our ability to maintain loving relations, enter into marriages and devote ourselves to family life.

This essay, published more than twenty years ago, feels more burning today than ever Klein thinks.

Our quarter-of-a-year-capitalism is not only a neoliberal economical system but also an ideology with a view on man which says: go in for, invest in yourself, and seek for the largest profit for your own sake.

Those ideals are the opposite of solidarity and love. The calculated egoism is breaking both the societal economies and human-between-relations down.

What has Alice Miller said about these things?? Is material things a substitute for other things? For instance love?

* In many circumstances quite moralistic - and not least unemphatic.

"I can - why can't you???"

Addition October 1: read this article too (in Swedish). And earlier posts on self-justification (the right to abuse?). And under the label moderators. See the blog Freakonomics on "In the Battle of the Sexes, Partians Outearn Peacemakers."

The American psychotherapist Jean Jenson writes that

"And the best is that the better our mental health becomes, the more we dissociate from power exercise and violence [in whatever form]."

And it was that with perverted needs and substitutes... Denial of needs "I don't need..." And as I don't have any needs I can't get hurt. And see the phenomenon divide and rule. Something we probably learned as children: siblings were played out against each other, more or less deliberately and/or consciously. A power-tool.

Read George Montbiot in "Congress Confronts its Contradictions."

How would we have reacted and resonated and how would the society and world have looked like if a sound development had occurred, i.e., if we had been truly and genuinely respectfully treated as very small kids and up? If more people had been? Because this kind of truly respectful (non-authoritarian) treatment is very rare?

A Swedish journalist said something about conservatism...

Arthur Silber wrote something interesting:

"When people say adults behave and think like children, what they more properly mean is that they behave and think like children who are profoundly damaged -- children who are already made emotionally numb by the typical kind of emotional abuse to which most children are subjected many times a day, children who have been forced to deny their own pain simply to survive, and who are therefore unable to grasp the pain of others. Most adults were once such children; one of the ways the damage reveals itself when they become adults is the denial described above... /.../

Many children believe that 'wishing will make it so,' just as they believe that there are no consequences for their actions that cannot be undone. But again, children who believe this are those children who are already damaged. Healthy children do not think in this manner. But most of us were greatly damaged as children, and most of us deny what ought to be unavoidable truths because we learned to do this in our earliest years of life./…/

…most Americans -- and our entire governing class and almost all commentators and bloggers -- refuse to grasp them. It is as if these ideas are written in a dead language. Certainly, the language is dead to them, for they have made themselves incapable of understanding it. To recognize a truth of this kind threatens the mechanism of denial that lies at the very center of their sense of themselves, at the very center of their identity. So the truth cannot be acknowledged.”