The cold glance of the bureaucrat…

Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German political economist and sociologist who was considered one of the founders of the modern study of sociology and public administration.

[Updated May 25 in the end]. The Swedish leader-writer Göran Greider wrote a leader today with the title ”Byråkratens kyliga blick” or “The cold glance of the bureaucrat.”

During the week it seems as there has been a row of programmes on radio about disabled people and their lives and life-experiences. Radio commentators have followed disabled people in the society, young disabled women have told about sexual abuse and mobbing and subtle actions of violence from the environment.

To Greider this comes as no surprise. During the former decade he worked with different disability organizations. Then, fifteen years ago, the old charity thoughts started to come back: instead of social rights – once again it was more and more about relying on idealistic forces and relatives. The last forty years many disability organizations have managed to cast off a lot of the yoke of charity. Now those achievements were about to get lost. And the problem went deeper than that: even the public welfare was – and is – in depth coined by inherited charity-thoughts he thinks, i.e., the view that the one receiving support shall feel grateful and preferably not be noisy when the gifts are falling over them. The core of the philanthropic thought was there and it is a very hard thought: those who need help have to do their full share and show their gratitude, if not they aren’t worth of help. Now the view on poor, unemployed and all sorts of exposed people is hardening. “The National Board of Health and Welfare” and “Social Insurance in Sweden” walk hand in hand with neoconservative social-politicians and those actors are more and more building an elite that is floating above the problems and seem to know best what sort of needs people have.

Greider thinks one can’t regulate what sort of help a disabled person needs on a bureaucratic level. The most banal things in everyday life can appear different dependent on if ones arms, eyes or ears doesn’t function.

He thinks that “Social Insurances in Sweden” doesn’t have to interpret the law as they are doing now – but the authorities choose to do that. Why? He wonders. However, he hardly thinks it’s out of evilness. It’s rather so that the obvious glance from above is what makes it difficult to see people as individuals. He thinks the directors of “Social Insurances in Sweden” have shown that they have become a part of the power-establishment who don’t understand the problems lower in the society then where they themselves are. They have lost contact with the grassroots. A sort of authoritarianism and totalitarianism? Beating their breasts?

The bureaucrat’s cold glance is directed towards the society. And Greider thinks we have to dare to meet it and not give way for it.

There was a letter to the editor in a local newspaper today where it stood:

“Sounds nasty.

The right alliance’s Reinfeldt [our current prime-minister] has difficulties winning peoples’ hearts.

Maybe the Swedish people need to do as Maud Olofsson [leader of one of the parties, centerpartiet, in the alliance leading Sweden now] said. Separate heart from brain. Ugh, that sounds nasty.”

Both the heart and brain is saying that what they are doing now is wrong – and VERY WRONG??

The Swedish physician Christina Doctare said in her book "Brain-stress" that the future's leaders need both IQ and EQ and jolly good broadband between those two, and spiritual dimension on top I think she added.

All sort of helpers (employees everywhere, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, physicians, teachers too etc. etc. etc.) are walking in the leading-strings of the power? Run the power's errands!! See former posting on "John Read and Models of Madness..."

PS. Doctare actually writes (I looked in the book) something in the style:

“The future’s leadership, on all societal levels, will be about people with well integrated brain halves and jolly good broad-bands between them. Persons having IQ, EQ and a spiritual dimension. It says itself that a certain amount of maturity is required and a great amount of integrity and civil courage./…/

Leadership is about seeing both power and authorities as tools in obtaining goals formulated together, not as goals in themselves or as tools for ones own self-glorifying and nourishment for a stuck-up ego."

And also read the reader’s letter on Miller’s web “Interview with child advocate Andrew Vachss.”

See former posting with those videos. And former postings on backward psycho classes.

PPS. Miller summarizes it quite well when she says, apropos Oprah Winfrey in the talk with Andrew Vachss, where Vachss “confronts Oprah with her belief that anger resulting from an abusive childhood is a bad thing that one needs to overcome, and that the way to ‘healing’ is through forgiveness. And he thoroughly questions it" (as it stood in the reader’s letter). As we are learned so often in therapy; to feel but not to feel:

“Feeling and understanding the causes of our old pain does not mean that the pain and the anger will stay with us forever. Quite the opposite is true. The felt anger and pain disappear with time and enable us to love our children [therapists are afraid we shall get stuck in he old pain and anger. But if clients do - why? See below*]. It is the UNFELT, avoided and denied pain, stored up in our bodies, that drive us to repeat what have been done to [and which gives us all sorts of troubles, and it is help with feeling this pain we need?].

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”Att känna och förstå orsakerna till vår gamla smärta betyder inte att smärtan och vreden kommer att stanna hos oss för evigt. Snarare tvärtom. Den kända vreden [den vrede vi medvetet upplevt] försvinner med tiden och gör oss förmögna att älska våra barn [och oss själva och andra vuxna. Men många terapeuter är rädda att vi ska fastna i detta!? Något som är absolut förbjudet? Och jag har ju mina tankar om varför en klient 'fastnar'...*]. Det är den INTE KÄNDA smärtan, den smärta vi undvikit och förnekat, som lagrats i våra kroppar, som driver oss att upprepa det som gjordes mot oss [och som ger oss allehanda problem].”

Addition May 25: Struck me on my bike to the grocery store before lunch: And the more power we have the more important feeling and understanding the causes of our pain are. The more important it is that we don’t have unfelt, avoided and denied pain stored up in our bodies, driving us to repeat what was done to us.

I am thinking of the power parents, leaders (the greater and higher up the more), therapists and all sort of helpers have. In these circumstances awareness about ones own self is more important than ever for all around and under. The more serious the effects of the past from the childhood of the one in power can become; what he has experienced and endured and not been able to process – something we have certainly seen through history and still continue seeing.

And there can be pains we don’t even are in contact with? Pain we have never consciously felt. Pain that is so denied.

*“If one uncritically cling to old methods' alleged infallibility and blames the client for failures, you inevitably land in the same fairways (waters) as the sect-guru, who also promises entire liberation. Such promises only produce self-destructive dependence which stands in the way for the individual’s liberation.” (Alice Miller in “Paths of Life” in my amateur translation from the Swedish edition of this book)."