Susan's blog

The Infinite Potential of the Human Mind

by Susan Rosenthal

Want to know a secret? A healthy human mind is incompatible with capitalism. Let me explain.

Science tells us that the mind cannot be reduced to an activity of the brain. The mind is created and sustained in a complex dance between human beings. Cut off from social relationships, the mind loses its ability to function. Evidence for this comes from socially-deprived infants and from adults kept in isolation or subjected to sensory deprivation.

For more than 95 percent of human history, people lived in small, cooperative societies. Over the past few thousand years, our species underwent an amazing cultural evolution. Our brains did not change biologically, but how we used them did. As people pooled their experiences and accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next, their minds developed. And as their minds developed, they created new social arrangements to meet their changing needs.

Capitalism blocks this creative process. While knowledge continues to accumulate, it is not shared. And while some people are moved forward, many more are hurtled backward. The central problem for capitalism is how to create profit, not how to develop human potential. To maximize profit, capitalism must disrupt human relationships and stifle human potential.

The more we are divided and deprived, the more wealth can be generated for the people at the top. Any form of collectivism is a threat to the system, from union organizing to demands for government-funded services.

Instead of using our minds to solve our common problems, we get to decide only which section of the elite will dominate us. Instead of working together to raise our living standards, we labor to enrich the elite. Instead of protecting ourselves and each other, we fight their barbaric but profitable wars.

The human mind crumbles under such conditions. Epidemics of anger, anxiety, inter-personal conflict and deep discouragement create an ocean of human misery. Adding insult to injury, these signs of social sickness are mislabeled as "personal problems" and "mental illness."

To preserve itself, capitalism must block the infinite potential of the human mind. And I do mean infinite. There is no limit to the number of ways that we could organize our lives and society.

The average human brain contains approximately 100 billion nerve cells or neurons. Each neuron has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors. When you consider that each of these connections can be turned on or off, the number of possible firing patterns is greater than the number of known particles in the universe. When you add the different ways that each human mind could connect with the other six billion minds on the planet...well, I think you get the picture.

Capitalism has stuck humanity in a giant historical rut and bamboozled us into thinking that this is the best we can do, that we have reached the end of our history. Not So! We have barely begun to explore our potential. However, if capitalism has its way, we never will.

We can’t let this happen. We have created capitalism, and we can change our minds and replace it with something much better.

Read POWER and Powerlessness. Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Machismo at Work: False-Consciousness or Self-Defense?

by Susan Rosenthal

The man was nearly deaf. "He won’t wear hearing protection!" exclaimed his exasperated wife. I turned to the man and asked if this was true. He nodded and confessed that none of the guys at work wore hearing protection.

Feminists would describe this behavior as workplace machismo, or male toughness. Marxists would describe it as false consciousness, where workers fail to recognize their class interests, in this case, to protect their health on the job.

I suspected something else, so I replied, "I think I understand. If you value your hearing, then you are valuing yourself, and that would create conflict in a job where you are not valued." His eyes widened in recognition. Then he looked at the floor and nodded. His wife asked me what I was talking about. And so I explained.

The more employers devalue their employees, the less they have to pay them, and the more profit they will make. In contrast, employees seek greater recognition of their contribution in the form of higher wages. Workers command more respect when they pull together.

In 1937, General Motors was the biggest corporation in the world. Genora (Johnson) Dollinger describes the confidence of workers who forced GM to recognize their union:

"Every time something came up that couldn’t be settled or the workers got a tough foreman who told them, "Go to hell," they’d shut down the line. The men were so cocky, they’d say to the foremen, "You don’t like it?" They’d push the button and shut down the line."

In response, the capitalist class set out to strip the unions of their power. In Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, Sharon Smith explains how conservative union officials joined with government to drive socialists and other militants out of the unions. By the 1950s, American unions had been transformed from fighting organizations controlled by workers to bureaucratic organizations run by middle-class professionals. But the bosses wanted more. They wanted complete control of the shop floor.

Degrading workers

In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman describes how employers robbed workers of their power by applying an industrial system called "scientific management" or Taylorism.

Frederick Winslow Taylor developed three methods for transferring control over the labor process from workers to managers: separating mental and manual work; de-skilling the labor process; and micro-managing every step of the work. In combination, these methods reduce the skilled worker to a cog in a machine, interchangeable with any other cog. As a writer of the time observed,

"It is not, truly speaking the labor that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail."

Today, Taylor’s methods are the norm. Fast-food restaurants are structured like assembly lines. Hospitals function like factories where separate departments tend to different parts of the body, in assembly-line fashion. Classroom courses are scripted to the point of describing which hand gestures to make while teaching.

Devalued workers are treated as expendable. An estimated 55,000 Americans die every year from occupational injury and illness, far more than died on 9/11. Despite this shocking level of industrial slaughter, politicians do not denounce employers as "terrorists," and they do not order Homeland Security to patrol the workplace.

Ninety percent of all work sites in America, covering 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, are not inspected regularly for health and safety violations. When violations are found, the penalties are too small to force any real change.

The State virtually gives employers a license to kill workers. In 1970, Congress declared that causing the death of a worker by deliberately violating safety laws is a misdemeanor (not a felony) with a maximum sentence of six months in jail. This is half the maximum for harassing a wild donkey on federal land.

Workers stripped of skill, dignity and social worth suffer low morale, sickness and frequent absenteeism, all of which lower productivity. To boost productivity, experts in medicine, psychology and human relations serve as the maintenance crew for the human machinery. These professionals are not employed to remedy the assault on the worker. Their job is to manage the worker’s reactions to that assault. The worker becomes the problem, not the way work is organized. And that’s how a middle-aged worker with hearing loss ends up at the doctor’s office feeling embarrassed about not using hearing protection.

False consciousness?

Is this worker suffering from "false consciousness"? I would say no. He knows he has a conflict. He understands the danger of excessive noise and wants to protect himself. However, he also recognizes (even when he can’t put it into words) that if he and his co-workers valued themselves, it would be more difficult to tolerate a job where they are not valued.

Given the employer’s disregard for their hearing, these workers have two choices. They can unite and demand less noise and more effective health and safety provisions. Or they can "go along" by dissociating from their need to protect themselves. The first option would create conflict with the boss. The second option creates conflict with themselves and each other. The workplace is structured to promote the path of least resistance, which is to "go along to get along."

When challenging the social order seems impossible, machismo serves as a form of collective self-defense. Machismo helps male workers bear their degradation by making it seem that they choose to risk their health on the job, as a confirmation of their manly toughness.

To view the problem only as masculine strutting is to fail to recognize the worker’s real oppression. To view the problem only as false consciousness is to disregard the creative forms of self-defense that workers use when they see no class-based alternative.

Similarly, racist workers have a legitimate need to defend their jobs. However, workers who blame other workers for their problems trade apparent short-term gain for real long-term pain. The need for self-defense is real, but the method is self-defeating, because employers use racism to lower living standards for all workers.

Socialists strive to provide workers with the knowledge and experience that will help them to see the social source of their misery and their collective power to end it. The term "false consciousness" is used to explain why workers persist in supporting a system that oppresses them. (Feminists also use the term "false consciousness" to explain why women support a system that oppresses them.)

Marx never used the term "false consciousness," and Engels refers to it only once, in a letter. However, the concept bears an uncanny resemblance to Freud’s concept of psychological resistance. When Freud’s patients refused to accept his interpretation of their problems, he called this "resistance," a psychological defense against discussing, recalling or thinking about painful realities.

Freud’s concept of resistance assumes that the therapist is always right and the patient is always wrong. In reality, therapists frequently fail to appreciate the larger social context that compels people to behave in ways that seem self-defeating, but are actually self-preserving in the absence of other choices.

Consider the unconfident woman who stays with an abusive mate despite her therapist’s recommendation that she leave. Freud would view the deadlock between therapist and patient as resistance, where the patient is resisting the therapist. There is another possibility. The therapist may not appreciate the woman’s financial inability to support herself and her kids and the real possibility that her mate may kill her if she leaves.

Just as the concept of resistance creates conflict between therapist and patient, the concept of false consciousness creates conflict between socialists and non-socialist workers. Who decides whose consciousness is "true" and whose consciousness is "false"? Socialists may not appreciate the extent to which capitalism is structured to keep most people feeling powerless most of the time, regardless of what they know. Understanding these forces is the first step to overcoming them.

The body tells the truth

The self-defense methods that workers use to "get through" are not entirely successful. They preserve a semblance of dignity, but fail to protect against the ravages of exploitation. What the mind refuses to acknowledge, the body protests by generating pain and other disabling symptoms (like hearing loss). As Michael Schneider writes in Neurosis and Civilization,

"As long as the working class does not rebel against these new and intensified forms of exploitation, heart, stomach and circulatory diseases of individual workers will rebel for them. Even though the worker may still ‘go along,’ his circulation, in any event, will not. Even if he says, ‘actually I feel alright,’ his stomach ulcer will prove the contrary."

As the rich get richer, the rest of us get sicker. Capitalism produces obscene wealth at one end of society and epidemics of dis-ease everywhere else. The medical system hides the relationship between class and illness by treating sickness as an individual malfunction, instead of the inevitable price of a profit-driven system. Even universal health care cannot stop the sickness produced by capitalism. Only the working-class majority can transform an illness-generating society into a health-generating one.

Machismo, racism, dissociation, sickness and other forms of self-defense both mask and reveal the reality of worker oppression. By viewing worker compliance with capitalism as false consciousness, socialists pit themselves against workers.

Workers do not want to suffer. They want to be judged even less. Socialists can align with workers by appreciating the complexities of their lives and the ways they defend themselves. This alliance is essential for workers to learn to fight as a class.

As Braverman concludes, until workers fight back as a class they will "remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies," and they will "work every day to build for themselves more ‘modern,’ more ‘scientific,’ and more dehumanized prisons of labor."

For more, read POWER and Powerlessness. Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Alienation and Dissociation: The Two Sides of Powerlessness

by Susan Rosenthal

Alienation and dissociation reinforce each other to create a cycle of social powerlessness. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, a worker ponders this dilemma.

"The more a person is on the receiving end of orders, the more the person’s got to think he or she is really somewhere else in order to keep up self-respect. And yet it’s at work that you’re supposed to ‘make something’ of yourself, so if you’re not really there, how are you going to make something of yourself?"

Capitalism alienates the majority from control over the decision-making process, putting most people "on the receiving end of orders." Dissociation is a psychological defense against feeling powerless; the worker goes "somewhere else" to preserve self-respect. However, dissociation keeps the worker in his alienated condition, "so if you’re not really there, how are you going to make something of yourself?"

Alienation and dissociation re-enforce each other in countless ways. Workers who must function like cogs in the social machine have dissociated relationships with the other cogs. There is no direct and conscious sharing of the creative, productive process.

Instead of relating to each other as fellow producers, directly exchanging what they want and need, workers relate to each other as dissociated consumers, you pay my boss for what I made and I pay your boss for what you made.

Consequently, despite living, working, commuting and shopping together, most people feel estranged from one another. We talk about what we can’t control (sports, the weather) to avoid discussing what we aren’t allowed to control (our work, the world).

Capitalism alienates humanity from the environment by dissociating the past and the future from the present. Only the sale is important. Every year, tons of industrial chemicals, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals enter the market as commodities with no consideration for what happens after they are sold. Once used, these products are thrown away, washed away and excreted from human and animal bodies, entering rivers, streams and lakes, returning to us in the form of contaminated food and water.

Alienation and dissociation reach their pinnacle in war. When people feel helpless to stop the madness, they must dissociate from the brutality or go mad themselves.

People who feel powerless have been compared to laboratory animals who resign themselves to unavoidable electrical shocks. Even after their cage doors are opened, they do not escape. This phenomenon is called "learned helplessness," where the familiar, no matter how terrible, seems preferable to the unknown, no matter how promising.

People without hope do feel powerlessness. However, animals have limited ways to extract themselves from harmful situations, unlike human beings who are creative and resourceful problem-solvers. And while individuals have a limited ability to solve problems, there is virtually no limit to the problems that people can solve together.

To maintain their stranglehold over society, the people-in-power use divide-and-rule strategies that keep the majority feeling isolated, fearful, and powerless. Nevertheless, the criminal behavior of the ruling class compels ordinary people to organize in self-defense.

Cooperation counters the downward cycle of alienation and dissociation. Cooperation elicits feelings of strength and hope, so people work harder to find solutions, thereby increasing their chances of success. Cooperation and hope re-enforce each other to increase social power.

Whether we feel hopeless or hopeful, powerless or powerful depends on whether we work alone or together. Alone, we can’t protect ourselves from environmental pollution, ruthless bosses, corrupt corporations and war-mongering governments. As an organized force, we have the power to change the world.

For more on alienation and dissociation read Power and Powerlessness, Chapter 5. "Seize the Surplus." Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Mothers Betrayed

by Susan Rosenthal

An exhausted and depressed young woman tells me that she must be a bad mother. In her mind, good mothers feel joy, not despair. I assure her that she is not to blame; she has been betrayed. Capitalism celebrates mothers in theory and deprives them in practice.

Malnutrition and lack of medical care cause more than three million babies to be stillborn every year. Most of these deaths are preventable. Every year, more than half a million women die in pregnancy or childbirth, and millions more are crippled.

Poverty is the primary cause of infant and maternal deaths. In 2000, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 women was 2 in Sweden, 17 in the United States, 330 in Asia, and 920 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Providing all women with equal access to social resources would cause the maternal death rate everywhere to fall to the lowest achievable rate.

In the United States, parents get little or no support. The arrival of a child, even when happily anticipated, turns life upside down. Frequent night feedings exhaust parents who are expected to work the next day. Despite talk about "family values," Americans are not entitled to paid parental leave.

Financial uncertainty adds to physical and emotional stress. Family expenses rise at the same time that the mother’s pay check is reduced or discontinued. How long can the mother afford to stay off work? Will she lose her job? Will she find another one? Will there be affordable childcare? Americans are not entitled to childcare support.

In most cases, the full burden of childcare falls upon the mother. As a result, women are more likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric problems around the time of childbirth than at any other time in their lives.

About 85 percent of new mothers experience "baby blues," the fatigue, sadness, and irritability that commonly follow childbirth or adoption. From 10 to 17 percent of new moms suffer clinical depression due to changing hormones, sleep deprivation, social isolation, financial stress, a difficult or traumatic birth, difficulties breast feeding, low social support, financial problems, inadequate housing, and relationship problems.

Approximately one in 800 new mothers develops full-blown psychosis. In Texas, Andrea Yates suffered from hallucinations that compelled her to murder her five children. In Toronto, a family doctor jumped in front of a train, killing herself and her infant son.

Society demands that mothers manage without support. When they cannot cope, they are assumed to be inadequate. Postpartum depression and psychosis are under-recognized and under-treated because most women are too ashamed to seek help.

In fact, parents of both sexes suffer from depression more than non-parents. Lack of social support makes the child-raising years the most stressful for both men and women. This is unfair and unnecessary.

Before humanity divided into classes, everyone shared life’s problems and rewards, and everyone helped to raise the next generation. How sensible! Every child is a gift to humanity. In return, society must support parents, so that child-raising can once again become the joyful experience that it should be.

For more on this subject read POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 7, "Burden the Family." Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

The Virginia Tech Massacre: Cho Seung-Hui delivers his message

by Susan Rosenthal

Why did Cho Seung-Hui go berserk and kill 33 people including himself?

We know that Cho was a shy Asian immigrant who was severely bullied as a youngster and suffered racist discrimination. We know that he was a man, and men are not supposed to show their pain. We know that he was full of rage and that he did not get the help he needed. While media pundits dismiss him as an inhuman monster, Cho was very human and not unlike many of my patients.

Last week, one of my patients confessed, "I want to hurt him. I want him to know how badly I feel." She was referring to her husband, who refused to acknowledge the pain he was causing her. Most of us have felt like that at one time or another.

Human beings are social creatures; being alone with our pain is intolerable. We need others to know how we feel. That is why "the hurt hurt" — meaning that those who are hurting often lash out at others. In a desperate bid for connection, they force others to feel their pain.

Had Cho only killed himself, he would have joined the more than 30,000 people who suicide in the U.S. every year. Instead of going quietly, he transferred his pain to others as if to say, "Now you know how I feel." The survivors and relatives and friends of the victims will never fully recover from this trauma. Health-care workers like me will be patching shattered lives for decades, if not generations.

Cho felt hopeless to solve his problems. In the package that he mailed to NBC he cried, "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option." In fact, a number of students and faculty did reach out to him. Why did he reject their efforts? Sadly, it was too little, too late.

Cho’s self-imposed isolation indicates intense shame. Shame results when a person feels worthy or unacceptable — a loser. The greatest source of shame is the social hierarchy that divides people into a few winners and many more losers and blames the losers. Bullying is a form of public blaming and shaming, where children practice what they see in the adult world.

When a person feels shame, the need for connection conflicts with the fear of rejection. This conflict is expressed in the mixed messages of, "help me" and "stay away." In many people, shame and rage can reinforce each other to produce a downward spiral of despair.

What about his parents?

Some people wonder if Cho’s parents did anything to contribute to their son's behavior. I suspect they did what most parents do — they valued their child. Feeling valued would have left Cho emotionally unprepared for a world that would devalue him so severely. Black families have experienced racist discrimination for generations, and many help their children to preserve their self-esteem in a hostile world. Cho’s family immigrated to America and would have been unprepared for such a deeply racist society.

Young people like Cho experience shock when they encounter racism and other forms of social injustice. There is no connection between the world they expect and the world they see. A fortunate few find support and socially-useful channels for their anger. Those who find no validation feel lost and betrayed. Many blame themselves, thinking, "I must be crazy." Many blame others and shut them out, "You don’t understand." Some become aggressive. Others become depressed. Many drug themselves. Some kill themselves. On rare occasions, one becomes homicidal.

Individual violence should be no surprise in a world that promotes violence as the solution to every problem. When President George W. Bush wanted Iraq’s oil, he didn’t offer to buy it; he didn’t negotiate for it; he took it by brute force, using the flimsiest excuses. The mass slaughter he launched has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Given the savagery of those in power, it is amazing that more young people are not violent, that so many organize against injustice and for a better world.

This tragedy will be used to promote more police and tighter security measures. In fact, racism kills 50 times more Americans every year than die at the hands of individual murderers. To preserve this unjust but highly profitable system, the ruling class needs to crush those who rebel and intimidate everyone else. This is the opposite of what is needed.

We don’t need more ways to "manage" anger and punish angry people. We need to abolish the injustice that provokes anger. We need to create a world where everyone has equal worth, a caring society where the top priority is relieving human suffering. Profit-driven capitalism cannot do this. We need to build a socialist society that puts people first.

Most important, we need to support our youth, publicly and visibly. They need to know that they are not alone — that we also see the unfairness that they see, that we also know how intolerable that unfairness feels. They need to know that we share their outrage and the urgent need for change. Their future and ours depends on us pulling together.

Note: When Virginia Tech remembered the victims of the massacre, they rang the bell 32 times and released 32 white balloons. Even in death, Cho was excluded.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness. Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com 

Anger — The Emotion of Injustice

by Susan Rosenthal

Unfairness makes people angry, instinctively and automatically. If you feel angry, there is some injustice in your life that needs correcting.

All social animals have a built-in sense of fairness. Two dogs will fight when only one gets a bone. When treats are equally dispensed, everyone is happy. The sense of fairness is most developed in primates. Some monkeys refuse to perform when they see other monkeys getting better rewards than they get for the same effort.

Human beings have a keen sense of fairness. We don’t need to be taught this; we feel it in our guts. Even young children protest, "He got more than I did!" and "It’s not fair!"

Anger results when some are denied what others have. Anger results when some are overworked while others live in leisure. Inequality is a constant irritant. The have-nots may live with simmering resentment or rebel openly.

Anger is commonly seen as a threat to social connections. However, the function of anger is to protect social connections by protesting unfair treatment. Anger screams, "Something is wrong!" and provides the energy required to restore fairness and social harmony.

When fairness seems out of reach, anger can accumulate to produce physical symptoms like high blood pressure and digestive problems, emotional symptoms like anxiety and depression, and social problems like domestic and workplace violence.

Early egalitarian societies understood that social peace depends on every member having equal worth and equal rights. West Coast aboriginal tribes arranged parties where desired goods would be given away, exchanged, and even destroyed to prevent the resentment that arises when some have more than they need and others go without.

Since the beginning of class divisions (about 10,000 years ago), inequality has provoked angry protest. From the slave uprisings of the ancient world through the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages to the rebellions that rock the modern world, people have always struggled for the right to an equal say and an equal share.

Because inequality guarantees resistance, unequal societies need penal systems to crush those who rebel and to intimidate everyone else. In America, unprecedented inequality has gone hand-in-hand with an unprecedented expansion of the prison system.

We don’t need to "manage" our anger. We need to use our anger to correct what is wrong. By working together, we can put an end to inequality and create a world that is truly fair.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 4, "Nature’s Youngest Child." Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com 

Open Your Heart

by Susan Rosenthal

Open your heart to the possibility...

...that the hardships in your life are not your fault.

You’ve been robbed. Thirty years ago, the media declared that automation would provide more leisure time than people would know what to do with. Today, the average Joe and Jane work longer and harder because the benefits of automation were not shared.

Capitalism is a system of organized thievery, where a few enrich themselves by depriving everyone else. If the height of the Washington Monument (555 feet) represented the average income of the top 500 American CEOs, the average American worker’s income would be 16 inches tall in comparison.

...that others feel the same.

Most people feel alone and scared and think that they are the only ones who feel that way. How can so many people feel the same and feel so alone?

Powerful social pressures prevent people from sharing their true feelings. Some go berserk. The rest suffer in silence, distracting themselves with work, drugs, TV, shopping, etc. Some reveal their secret pain to doctors, therapists, and clergy who are sworn to confidentiality, reinforcing the belief that there is something wrong with those who suffer.

...that you deserve to have your needs met.

People in bad situations usually blame themselves. When you can’t make ends meet, when your job makes you sick, when you feel unappreciated and alone, you assume that there must be something wrong with you. Who else could it be? The elite who hoard the world’s wealth don’t want you blaming them. Instead of sharing, they insist that it is shameful to be needy.

Human beings depend on each other to survive — we evolved to need each other. There’s nothing wrong with being needy. The problem is not getting your needs met.

By serving the few, capitalism fails the many. What is produced by humanity properly belongs to humanity. What any deserves, all deserve. Virtually every personal and social problem could be solved by providing people with what they need.

...that we can build another world, together.

The people we are supposed to hate want to live and raise their families in peace, just like we do. The real threat to our security comes from those who divide us in order to rule us.

Another world is possible. Human beings have a built-in need to cooperate and to share. If we stop blaming ourselves and each other, if we join together, we can build a new world. Open your heart to the possibilities.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 2, "Compassion Isn’t Cost-Effective." Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Babel

by Susan Rosenthal

In the movie Babel, human connectedness collides with social separateness. A couple vacationing in Morocco cannot comfort each other after the death of their child. When the wife is accidentally shot, we see an expanding nightmare of failed communication in the face of urgent need. We can all relate. This is everyday reality.

All is not bleak. The film shows several scenes of social connection: a Mexican wedding, the hospitality of strangers, a shoulder to cry on, a hand in the dark. While ordinary people struggle to solve their problems, the authorities offer little or no help. Their priority is to identify the wrong-doers, which only compounds the tragedies and creates more victims.

“Babel” means a confusion of many voices or languages. Language is central to human communication. Other mammals maintain their social bonds through physical contact: licking, nuzzling, and other forms of social grooming. The size of the group is limited by the number of individuals that can physically interact. Language overcomes this limitation.

Language makes it possible to link every human being on the planet. Using communication aids (telephone, internet, television, satellite, etc.), any number of people could communicate with each other, regardless of their physical location. However, this potential for a globally integrated species is blocked by class and national divisions.

The tension in the film, and in life, flows from the conflict between the human struggle to connect and the social structures that block connection.

Most people view lack of communication as a personal failing. The film’s tagline is, “If You Want to be Understood...Listen.” Could our alienation from each other be overcome by better listening? I wish it were that easy!

Some people refuse to listen because they profit from the way things are. Politicians don’t care what ordinary people want; both political parties put corporate greed before human need. Washington turns a deaf ear to the majority of Americans who abhor torture, oppose secret prisons, and want an end to the Middle East wars.

Babel implies that human disconnection is the cause of social problems, not the result of a fragmenting social structure. However, ordinary people are not to blame. The people at the top of society pursue a divide-and-rule strategy, creating have-lots and have-nots, building walls around nations, and provoking wars. The trickle-down effect of this divisive system is to fragment individuals at the most personal level.

We live in a world of conflict, where the many are oppressed to enrich a few. If you listen, you will hear the global cry for justice.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 11, “Divide and Rule.” Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Dread and Hope for the New Year

by Susan Rosenthal

Most people feel some level of dread most of the time.

We fear for our personal survival. In a recent poll, 61 percent of Americans agreed that “most people today face increasing uncertainty about employment.” We fear that we will be unable to provide for our families and keep a roof over our heads.

We fear for the future — for growing environmental destruction and the spread of war. We see our rulers failing to solve these problems, and we fear that no one can.

Human safety depends on our ability to solve problems together. As a result, fear activates a biological need to connect with others. However, capitalism divides us by class, nation, race, religion, etc. These divisions are reenforced by lies: that there is not enough to go around, that foreigners are to blame, that if we don’t massacre people in other lands they will come and massacre us. By promoting such lies, the people in power enrich themselves at our expense.

Some forms of organizing are encouraged — churches, charities, and neighborhood associations. However, organizing that challenges the profit system is actively discouraged — unions, demonstrations, and groups seeking real social change.

What to do? We look for other ways to achieve a sense of security. Lottery tickets give us hope. Pets provide comfort. Drugs, especially narcotics, activate the same brain centers that are activated by secure human bonds. And it’s hard to resist the draw of TV and movies where all questions are answered and all problems resolved.

As we pursue the illusion of safety, the real dangers grow. Some say that there is no hope for humanity, that we are heading down the road to extinction. Others believe that civilization must collapse before we can create a sustainable society. I disagree.

Feeling disconnected is not the same as being disconnected. Humanity is more connected than ever. All over the world, youngsters watch the same movies, listen to the same music, eat the same (fast) food, and wear the same clothes. When the U.S. threatened to invade Iraq, people demonstrated in synchronous fashion around the globe.

Feeling powerless is not the same as being powerless. When auto-parts workers struck in Michigan, the entire industry ground to a halt. Today’s computers are manufactured by Chinese workers, assembled by Mexican workers, sold by American workers, and serviced by Indian workers. Any one group of workers could disrupt the entire chain. By pulling together, they could take control of it. The same is true for most other industries and for society as a whole.

I prefer to believe in humanity and make a mistake, than to give up on humanity and make an even bigger mistake. My New Year’s Resolution is to strengthen my belief that you and I can work together to change the world.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 3, “Who Needs a Heart When a Heart Can Be Broken.” Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com

Of Human Bonding

by Susan Rosenthal

The holiday season highlights warm relations between family and friends. But for too many people, this time of year sharpens the contrast between the love they seek and the loneliness they get. Like naughty children who receive no presents from Santa, they wonder what they have done to merit the lump of coal in their throats.

There are holiday nightmares of family fights, of ridicule, humiliation, and shame. Mothers are stressed by expectations of elaborate meals. Father are stressed by mounting bills. Children take out their frustrations on one another. And everyone keeps the secret that their family is less than perfect.

Science tells us that there is no such thing as a single human being, that a human being is a social being. We need to please one another, and we need to feel valued. We suffer when we think that we don’t measure up and that we don’t matter. The importance of human bonds was reinforced by John and Jane, who gave me permission to tell their story.

John had suffered from depression for the past ten years, despite taking medications. Drinking with his friends helped him feel better, but Jane was threatening to leave him if he didn’t stop drinking. He was 65 years old and looked 75. Jane was angry with John and very discouraged. It was clear that they were causing each other unbearable pain. Yet neither wanted to end their marriage of 40-years.

As I listened to their stories, I tried to put myself in each of their shoes. John thought Jane was angry because he had failed to meet her expectations. Unable to please her, he felt hurt and hopeless (thus the depression) and drank for relief. Jane thought John was spending so much time drinking with his buddies because they mattered more to him than she did.

John and Jane were suffering from a ruptured bond that they could not repair on their own. Everything we learn in society teaches us not to be vulnerable or needy, not to be honest, and not to recognize that we are in the same boat.

By bonding with John and with Jane, I served as the bridge by which they could repair their bond with each other. Through me, they could see how much they mattered to each other. Until then, each had assumed that they cared more for the other than the other cared for them. This sense of inequality lies at the heart of most relationship problems.

After several months of therapy, they felt much better. John stopped drinking, no longer felt depressed, and looked 10 years younger. Jane was no longer angry because they were talking more and spending more time together. Both agreed that the main change was feeling more secure in their relationship. They were working as a team, instead of against each other, which made their problems seem more manageable.

Strong relationships are the key to health and happiness. We need a society that honors human bonds, by treating each and every person as equally worthy of what life has to offer.

For more on this subject see POWER and Powerlessness, Chapter 5, "Seize the Surplus." Available at www.powerandpowerlessness.com