The 'objectification' of others has, like conflict, been with us from Day One.

It became articulate, formalised, intellectualised, by the Reformation, and Cartesian "Dualism".

We humans are separate from nature, I am separate from you, the mind is separate from the body.

We can subjugate nature, I can subjugate you.

Relationships are degraded from Martin Buber's "Ich - du" ["I - Thou"] to "Ich - es" ["I - it"].

You become "it": you are stripped of your personality, your humanity.

You are 'over there' - to be exploited, used, and discarded.

The planet also becomes "it": a 'thing' to be exploited, used, and - oops - we can't discard it can we?!

Sounds familiar?

It's the modus operandi of Anglo-US_Corporate_Capital.

It's the modus operandi of the 'celebrity' culture. Who's dating who, who's splitting from who, who's cheating on who? (Dystopic role models to envy, emulate and despise.)

It's the modus operandi of the TV reality show in which contestants are set up like gladiators in some digital coliseum, and expected to tear each other to shreds.

It's the paradigm of our relationship with "Gaia" - the only home we've got.

"I - it" relationships are easy to trash; it's what we do best:

One day in January 2005, an elderly couple was driving down a road in Mosul, Iraq, when without realizing it they passed through a makeshift US military checkpoint.

The checkpoint, recalled a sergeant who came upon the scene, was "very poorly marked." Yet, he said, the soldiers "got spooked" and opened fire.

The bodies of the couple sat in the car for three days, the sergeant said, "while we drove by them day after day."

That incident was no Haditha or Abu Ghraib. It was a fairly typical day for Iraqis under US occupation ...

The Nation 11 July 2007

Out of the abyss of individualism

If you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost, or the pain of others.

The result may be a world where people are articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about those of others. An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, fed by a distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified box room for paranoiacs ...

Davai
21 Feb 2010, 10:44AM

Materialism is a cult which demands that firstly we don't co-operate with our neighbours - we compete with them.

Secondly, it demands that we never be happy with our lot - we always have to be 'aspiring'.

Thirdly, it demands that we constantly spend beyond our means and live our lives permanently dealing with the stress of self-induced debt slavery.

Our real human needs have been subordinated to the needs of 'the markets'.

How do we rectify that? I'm afraid we don't.

The forces that coerce our children and form them into 'consumers' before they have the facility for rational thought are all-pervading.

Lack of impulse control and absence of restraint is something we see in a lot of our young, and those traits I'm convinced are a result of the marketing man's influence. 'Don't think - just consume' easily morphs into 'don't think - just lash out'.

I'd like to think we could wake up from our consumerist torpor and collectively say "I've got enough stuff, thanks" but I'm afraid the future is just more of the same - leading to future booms and busts, greater polarisation of wealth and greater social fracture.

FalseConsciousness
21 Feb 2010, 10:51AM

Individualism is the ideal of the ruling class. We all have much more in common that many would like to admit. We all have all the same basic needs and these basic human needs outweigh any differences in nationality, or race which is simply a social construct.

While most religions share core values, religion ultimately serves the State and the ruling classes, not the faithful. We should move beyond the poison of individualism and realize that the vast majority of us are working people with common interests whether we live in Britain or Saudi Arabia.

The fate of working people in Europe and the US is intimately bound up with the fate of working people in China and Pakistan, Egypt and Israel, and every other country.The international working class should not let the ruling elites of the world keep us divided through their perpetuation of bigotry,fear, and communal violence.

Guardian  21 Feb 2010    Autonomous Individualism    Mechanistic Modelling

Archbishop Vincent Nichols attacks NHS over compassion

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is to use a homily to criticise what he sees as a lack of compassion in some parts of the NHS.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols will say that some hospitals see patients as no more than a set of medical problems ...

He will say the constitution of the NHS promises to respond with humanity to a patient's distress and anxiety as well as their pain.

But the archbishop will claim some hospitals fail to meet that commitment because of a prevailing culture which sees patients as no more than medical cases to be resolved.

He will say systems of care have been created which by treating patients in this way inflicts what amounts to hidden violence on them ...

BBC NEWS  13 Feb 2010     'Dignity & Compassion' in the NHS

Sentenced to death on the NHS

The economics of turning people into things

Economics emerges from the rubble in fragile state

This ... was a crisis that economists said couldn't happen. Not wouldn't, couldn't. This was an era when all the big macro-economic problems were supposed to have been solved.

This was a decade that saw the ultimate triumph of mathematical, model-based economics not just in the classrooms of Cambridge and Chicago but in the dealing rooms of the City and Wall Street.

Those who argued that global finance was heading for a big fall were slapped down. How could that be when markets were efficient? Those who said the boom in US house prices would be followed by a bust were told in no uncertain terms that the market never lied: prices reflected every piece of available information about the past, present and future.

And it was all bunk. The mathematical models blew up when faced with problems familiar in every bubble since Tulipmania in the Holland of the 1630s – herd behaviour, irrational exuberance, greed and panic. Human nature intervened, in other words: something not possible to capture by algebra, no matter how sophisticated ...

Guardian  29 Dec 2009    

For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso. Yet money stirs up more passion, stress and envy than any axe or hammer ever could. We just can't seem to deal with it rationally... but why? ...

As we come to understand more about money's effect on us, it is emerging that some people's brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend. Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status - so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide ...

In reality we are not that rational. Instead of treating cash simply as a tool to be wielded with objective precision, we allow money to reach inside our heads and tap into the ancient emotional parts of our brain, often with unpredictable results. To understand how this affects our behaviour, some economists are starting to think more like evolutionary anthropologists.

Daniel Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... suggests that modern society presents us with two distinct sets of behavioural rules. There are the social norms, which are "warm and fuzzy" and designed to foster long-term relationships, trust and cooperation. Then there is a set of market norms, which revolve around money and competition, and encourage individuals to put their own interests first ...

We are still a long (way) from knowing why some people appear to go crazy over money, while others seem to pay it so little attention. Those chasing after it to the exclusion of almost everything else aren't necessarily "addictive". Some may be greedy, and others just needy - thirsty for status or using money to compensate for social shortcomings. What is clear is that money - supposedly a dispassionate tool of exchange - stirs up big emotions and mental strife.

It's time economists' models took this into account.

News Scientist 18 March 2009

And not only economists. The role of government in creating a society in which mental illnesses are less likely to arise is also one which understands that policy needs to reflect the superiority of social norms, and thus the need for greater control of market norms.    'Blatcherism'    David Selbourne

The centralisation of the public services - as they used to be known - is now managed by Stalinist-style targets.

John Seddon sums it up:

... vast pyramid, hundreds of thousands strong, of people engaged in regulating, specifying, inspecting, instructing and coercing others doing the work to comply with their edicts.

[John Seddon 2008, page 193]

Two recent reports have focussed on the consequences of such a regime as applied to social services and schools:

1. Social services failing to implement Climbie refoms

Councils will be accused of failing to make the changes demanded after the death of Victoria Climbie and covering up their shortcomings.

Lord Laming called for total overhaul of child protection systems following the eight-year-old's death in 2000 ...

Lord Laming is expected to criticise the culture of targets and performance indicators which has led social workers to be bogged down by bureaucracy and red tape which prevents them acting quickly enough to remove children from abusive homes ...

Telegraph 08 March 2009

2. Focus on fact is stifling schools, warns top head

Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education ...

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.

One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes.

Observer 08 March 2009

The broad thrust of Anthony Seldon's argument is supported by others, for example:

• The importance of knowing how     A C Grayling

• This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think     Jenni Russell

• What is education for?     Susan Bassnett

"Self-interested utility maximisers"

The system springs from the same theoretical source as the management of the economy: Rational Choice Theory.

It starts with the utilitarian assumption that all individuals ... are essentially self-interested utility maximisers ...

"The Romantic Economist" Richard Bronk | 2009 | page 6

Hence, a world driven by "self-interested utility maximisers" will needs to reflect such goals in its schools.

The last thing such a system requires is AC Grayling's 'critical thinkers' pondering the nature of government, society and economy - and worse - imagining some other society where consumerist goals are subordinate to ethical - and ecological - imperatives.

BMW came under furious criticism yesterday after it said it was laying off 850 agency workers at its plant in Cowley, near Oxford, where it makes the Mini.

Union leaders attacked the decision to end the weekend shift, which the company blamed on falling demand. Opposition politicians seized on the announcement to argue the cutbacks showed the government's measures to support the automotive industry were not working.

Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of the union Unite, described BMW's decision as "scandalous" and his union demanded immediate government action to protect agency workers, who have fewer employment rights than full-time colleagues ...

Agency workers are a feature of employment in the motor industry, allowing manufacturers to adjust more easily to changes in demand, both up and down. But the BMW decision has reignited last year's row over the European agency workers directive, which is designed to give agency staff greater employment rights.

Unite said the government could act to bring in legislation to protect agency workers. The joint general secretary, Derek Simpson, said: "There are currently one million agency workers in the UK who can be sacked without any notice ... The current inequalities between agency workers and full-time employees must end." ...

Guardian 17 February 2009

Q&A: Rights for agency workers

Plea to protect ‘vulnerable’ agency workers

Warnings over changes to law on agency workers

Car firm cuts 850 agency workers

The Benefits Of Employing Agency Workers and Contractors

Peadar Kirby looks at the treatment of the “mentally ill” in Western countries, and argues that notions of ‘individuation’ - springing from Cartesian ‘dualism’ - are seen as the key to treating mental health problems:

The mind is separate from the body, the disease from the person who has it ... people become the 'objects' rather than the 'subjects' of their own activity ...

This dominant Western psychology of the self ... has led to the emergence of a psychotherapeutic model that is largely based on individualistic assumptions.

In such a schema, 'individuation' and a strong separate ego are seen as the key to mental health. This constricted sense of self highlights our division from one another, and allows for the objectification of others and ourselves.

... The ideological framework informing much of the psychological treatment given to those who are labelled 'mentally ill', identifies their behaviour as 'abnormal' ... the moral and political dimensions of the deviant behaviour are not addressed.

Illness in such a world view is an individual matter.

There is no language of social suffering that can speak to the moral and political experience of both sufferer and the suffering community ... Denial of the desire to live in harmony with the natural world leads to alienation, numbness, anxiety and depression.

[VaV page 156, pbk edition 2006]

... One reason we are in this mess is that we assumed far greater foresight than actually existed. All the fancy models purporting to show only a minuscule risk of financial blow-out were flawed. They assumed the complexity could be captured by mathematics and pseudo-science. One silver lining to the storm cloud over the global economy is that there will now be an overdue revolution in how we do economics. Already, the cutting edge of the profession is looking to other disciplines - biology and psychology in particular - to explain why models that work in theory come a cropper in practice ...

Larry Elliot 16 February 2009

Larry Elliott writes a good column in today's paper, suggesting excessive rationality – those silly mathematical models which assured bank chiefs that all was well and they could take the bonuses – may have to give way to a more romantic view of human experience and behaviour.

The article is memorably illustrated (when did this last happen?) with a painting by Caspar David Friedrich – Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog – though Brown's Kirkcaldy hero, Adam Smith, was not over-reliant on excessive rationality either.

London under Labour was second only to New York and Washington in promoting the failed model. As a result of its collapse the balance of world power is now tilted back towards Asia for the first time in at least 400 years.

So the current size, rules and composition of bodies like the G7, World Bank and IMF – created at America's bidding in 1944-45 – are going to change when reform comes. One symbol of such change is that the top man in the Bank or IMF will not automatically be an American or a European any longer, I suspect.

So why give it to a pasty-faced champion of the Anglo-Saxon financial God that failed? I don't think so. Gordon wandering inside the sea of fog is going to be with us for a while yet. I think.

Michael White 16 February 2009

At What Price Individualism?

Autonomous Individualism

Autonomous Individuality v. Rugged Individualism

Ayn Rand

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

David J. Rothkopf

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Governmentality

History of Global Individualism

John Forbes Nash, Jr

Methodological individualism

Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

Objectivist ethics

Political Neoliberals

The Idea of Society

"The Lonely Robot"