The Disabling
Dynamic
If we know our way of living is
so unsustainable, why do we
keep on repeating the same
Errors?
Lecture by
MICHAEL R. EDELSTEIN
Earth Day Poster 1970
Walt Kelly “POGO”
Disabling Dynamic
• How do we loose our awareness of and
our control and choice over our actions
and their consequences?
• #1: We are not even aware---ours is an
illusionary world
• #2: We live in our own cognitive world
• #3: We have lost community and public
• #4: We rely on Experts
• #5: Information is controlled
#1: MUCH OF THE WAY WE SEE
THE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION
What is Our Perspective on This?
WEAREWHEREAREWE
We May Not See What is Right in
Front of Our Eyes
What Part of The World is This
Cow From?
Is This an Orange Frog?
Information: the Irrelevance of Our
Senses
Our immediate senses are not useful in our
world and we learn to ignore them
Deadened senses contribute to our not
seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, moving
in or smelling the roses
And the result is De-Placement and
Displacement:
Nancy Wolf
#2: We live in Our Own Worlds
---Paradigm Revisited
How many of you have already learned things in this
class that contradict the way you previously saw the
world?
How can that be?
Cognitions’ Inherent Vulnerabilities
• AL Gore: “The Real Danger is When we
Think We Know Something and It Just
Ain’t So.”
• Conceptual Worlds Distinguish Humans
• Heuristics—Cognitive Shortcuts
• Festinger---Cognitive Dissonance vs
Compartmentalization --- we tolerate
inconsistency quite well
We Are Susceptible to Suggestion?
Dominant Social Paradigm
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Man is above nature
Nature is a resource at man’s disposal
Growth and Progress are perpetual
Technology solves all problems
Individual Interests over Community
Rich and Poor get what they deserve
Na Na Na Na Na Na Live for today
Lifescape =
Our Underlying Assumptions
Importance of:
• Body/Health
• Self/Control
• Home/Security
– Debt, ownership, Subprime,
lose value, variable mortgage,
foreclosure, forced migration
• Environment/Safety
• Social World/Trust
Social Addiction and Recidivism
We all have addictive personalities when it comes to our
dependence upon society for food, transport, housing,
medicine, care, relationships, entertainment, work, etc.
The institutions that enable our addictions are just doing
the business of the social paradigm we live in.
Despite the downsides (that we are aware of), the status
quo for most of us feels right and good.
We are recidivistic, replicating the same life we grew up
with unless we can do “better.” George Romero’s
zombies returning to what they knew best—shopping.
Lifestyle
Psychology---what we do
(behavior) not = what we think
we do
• Same person in different
situations acts differently
• Different people in the same
situation act similarly
There is a similar not unique
structure to our activities
• Cognitive maps
• What assumptions underlie our
activities?
• Illusion of freedom: Beyond
Freedom and Dignity—Skinner
• Mike’s free choice argument
with Resources for the Future
• Involuntary structures as
constraints to choice.
The Way our World is Structured?
How Much Transit Choice
Do we Have?
• Where we go
(structure of our life)
• When we go
• Where transit goes
and when
• Sprawl
• Cost
Or do we just love our cars?
Picture your car/child here:
It is yours
You chose it
It reflects on who you are
It reveals your consumer self —
what you wanted not what you
need!!!!!!
You decorated it
It has your stuff in it
You can go where you want
You are known by your rpm not
mpg
It separates you from nature
Emotions and Health:
Stress Driven, Reactive (coping)
and Palliative (Huxley’s “soma”)
#3:
We have lost community and public
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Escape to the private
Fear of society
Atrophied relationships
Lost reciprocity
Lost community and social capital
Commodification of relationships
Private > Public
Private Sphere:
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Individual
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Family
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Relational Web
Public Sphere:
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Neighborhood
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Community
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Polity
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Organizational
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Institutional
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Commons
Ulrich Beck—The Risk Society
Risk Society --- Pogo: “we have met the
enemy and he is us”
• Shift from scarcity-focus to risk-focus
• Collatoral Damage of Environmental risks
and Social Risks
• Render people as victims of their own
society---human risk not natural risk
• Modern vs. Post-Modern Perspective
Atrophy of Relationships
• We no longer rely on interpersonal relationships
for our main life transactions
• We deal with corporations, not local businesses,
for our mortgages, hardware, food, doctors and
health insurance, banks and jobs
• Civility and reciprocity is replaced by
bureaucracy and corporate interest
• We are no longer defined by who we are and
who we know but by our passwords, if we can
remember them. And beware identity theft.
The Loss of Reciprocity
Livelihood
Reciprocity
Economics of Place
Local Self-Sufficiency allowing Subsistence
Loss of Human Scale
Loss of Relationship
Loss of Happiness and Quality
The Loss of Community:
Repositories of Wisdom
• The Senior Community vs “It Takes a Village to Raise a
Child”
• The gated Community vs crime, gangs, drugs, prison
• The Old Folks Home vs. Family
• Sides of the Tracks
• McKnight writes that “Communities become social
deserts grown over with a scrub brush of clients and
consumers.” p11
• E.F. Schumacker— The Issue of Scale
– “The guidance we need cannot be found in science or
technology... but traditional wisdom of mankind.”
– Ibo story: Biafran War Council of Next Generation.
The Commodification of
Relationships
Loss of Social Capital
• Define old as a problem
• But as boomers age, cost of problem excessive
• Define young as problem—childhood invented 150 years ago
– Hospices to hospital based, mid wives
– Bereavement counselors vs Family/Friends
– McKnight–Hidden Curriculum of service technologies
• Shift in Authentic social forms
– Uncommodified: care vs service
– Unmanaged: consent vs control
– Uncurricularized: monopoly replace diversity
CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD
Have you Applied for a New Credit Card Today?
Robber Barons---the real Johnstown Flood
Corporations
The Corporation as an Individual (1886 Supreme Court)
The Corporate – Government Relationship
--- Revolving doors, tax breaks, campaign contributions,
interest mixing, capture, liability removal, hidden
agendae, etc.
The Corporate – Individual Relationship
--- Livelihood becomes job, outsourcing, downsizing,
debt, marketing and distruth, branding, intellectual
property, information privacy, capture, ethical lapses,
etc.
Clienthood: Commodifing Citizenship
– 90/10 to 10/90 manufacturing/service
– Clienthood replaces citizenship
– Expertise and Specialization—rationalize
technological systems—Trained ignorance
– Professional coding—cannot decode
– Loss of knowledge, tools and skills,
antidemocratic
– Shift attention from political problems to
technical problems
– Professional decides if you are a success, not
you
(McKnight)
Clienthood: Commodifing Citizenship 2
– Labeling Problems --- ill, mentally ill, fat, old,
hyperactive/ADD, dying, birthing, aging, menopause,
teenager, etc
– Proliferation of services—unmet needs, remedy
defines need
– The economic need for need creates a demand to
redefine conditions as deficiencies
– Marketing---manufacture need, translate need into
deficiency, define new deficiencies new problems,
these deficiencies are in the client. Professional and
their tools are the answers.
#4:Expertise, Experts and
Disabling
• Technocrats and Role of Engineer
• General knowledge of education replaced by
specialized knowledge
• Language of expertise---Jargon
• Role of the expert in making decisions
• “How to” replaces “should”
• Economist sets “Values”
• What is safe? What is appropriate? What is
acceptable?
• Caution vs. Precaution
We Trust Experts to guide us
Disabling --- Ivan Illich
Loss of Control to Experts
Loss of Control to factors in the social and
physical environment
---human caused vs. natural difference
Much disabling is bellow the threshhold of
our awareness
Or it is disguised as “reality,” “normal” and
“Everyday life”
Disabling Defeats Conviviality
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Illich---Tools for Conviviality
Disabling > Conviviality ex Prius problem
Disempowerment > Empowerment
Loss of Control
Empire> Democracy (ex. Eisenhauer on
“beware the military industrial complex”
Mumford---Authoritarian vs Democratic
Technics
Iatrogenesis and Expertise
Medical Nemises (Illich)
• Belief in experts override family, community,
Self
• Doctor created disease--Do we get sicker from
medicine?
• What is the least safe to be when you are
sick?
• More injustice from lawyers and police?
• More ignorance from teachers and schools?
• More family collapse from social workers?
The Commodification of Nature
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Core Relationships:
Importance of Place vs. Loss of Place
Commodification of Nature (Karl Polanyi)
Disconnection from Nature
Loss of Nature—Integrity of place, sacred
Alien Built Environment
Lack of Public and Semi-Public Spaces—
disconnection from each other
Mobility
Virtual Realities
Loss of Community of Place
Loss of Subsistence
#5 Control of Information
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Information Overload:
Where is the Remote?
• We have built in limits to our ability to attend to
stimuli
• Recent evidence suggests some other cultures
have greater attend-ability
• We surround ourselves with noise
• We surround ourselves with multiple channels,
all playing loud at the same time
• We have no easy way to sort out what is vital
• We have no easy way to concentrate on what is
important
Information---What Can You Trust?
• Information with a vested interest
• Advertising is about misleading
• We are information rich about trivia and
information poor about what counts
• We are deliberately fed wrong information
• Our trusted media are biased---Fox Syndrome
• How do we protect ourselves from distorted
info?
• The danger of Systematic Distortion
Distortion of Information
Statistics Can Mislead Us
The Climate Brief
The Environment is Invisible But
Not Irrelevant
• Everything is connected to everything else
• But we don’t pay attention or can’t see
these connections
• We think we control our own private
sphere
• We trust by default others to protect and
respect our air, water, food, etc.
• Invisibility is associated with
irresponsibility
#6: What We Don’t Know Won’t Hurt
Us:
Our Stolen Future
AP probe finds drugs in drinking water
By JEFF DONN, MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD,
Associated Press WritersSun Mar 9, 12:33 PM ET
A vast array of pharmaceuticals —including antibiotics,
anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones —
have been found in the drinking
water supplies of at least 41 million Americans”
“A five-month-long inquiry by
the AP National Investigative Team found that
many communities do not test for the presence
• of drugs in drinking water, and those that do
often fail to tell customers that they have found
trace amounts of medications, including
antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers
and sex hormones. The stories also detailed the
growing concerns among scientists that such
pollution is adversely affecting
wildlife and may be threatening human health.”
More Testing for Drugs in Water Sought
By MARTHA MENDOZA – AP.ORG 3/16/2008.
“Troubled by drugs discovered in European
waters, poisons expert and biologist
Francesco Pomati set up an experiment: He
exposed developing human kidney cells to a
mixture of 13 drugs at levels mimicking those
found in Italian rivers.
There were drugs to fight high cholesterol and
blood pressure, seizures and depression, pain
and infection, and cancer, all in tiny amounts.
The result: The pharmaceutical blend slowed
cell growth by up to a third _ suggesting that
scant amounts may exert powerful effects”
Drugs in Water Could Affect Human Cells
By JEFF DONN AP
Monday, March 10, 2008 3:45 AM EDT
http://www.auburnpub.com/articles/2008/03/09/ap/regional/us/d8va1b700.txt
“Pharmaceuticals in the water are being blamed for
severe reproductive problems in many types of fish:
The endangered razorback sucker and male fathead
minnow have been found with lower sperm counts
and damaged sperm; some walleyes and male carp
have become what are called feminized fish,
producing egg yolk proteins typically made only by
females.
Meanwhile, female fish have developed male genital
organs. Also, there are skewed sex ratios in some
aquatic populations, and sexually abnormal bass
that produce cells for both sperm and eggs.”
Mutated fish swimming in tainted water
Pharmaceuticals in drinking water supplies
hurting surrounding wildlife
By Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard
The Associated Press March. 10, 2008
“Reports from Sweden and Norway show high levels of
sucralose (Splenda) in wastewater effluent and surface
waters….100 times sweeter than sugar…The presence
of a sugarlike substance in the environment could
change organisms' feeding behaviors, interfere with
plant photosynthesis that could cause problems for
algae, shutting down CO2 uptake. Sucralose also has
been shown to interfere with the transport of sucrose in
sugarcane… No one has systematically examined the
environmental effects of sucralose.”
Artificial sweetener persists in the environment
• Science News –March 12, 2008
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthagw/2008/mar/science/nl_sucralose.html
The Economic Meltdown
• Housing bubbles: overvaluing, mortgages that can’t be
paid back, the new homeless, etc.
• Bank Failure: Investing in mortgages and other devices
that have to fail but worth the risk? To whom? Who does
the bail out?
• Currency Failure: Global interdependency and its
downside?
• Retirement Investments: Did Madoff Simply Model the
Whole Economic Charade?
• GM et al: Bailing out the SUV. Hummer lawn ornaments
for sale. Get them while they are not hot.
• Core Dependencies: On unsustainable oil and other
resource exploitation.
• Will new coal (a fiction) save us (fool us)?
REQUIM FOR THE HUMMER
•
NYT Aug 31, 2003 Cries of Activism and
Terror in S.U.V. Torchin By NICK
MADIGANWEST COVINA,
Calif., …A week ago, in the
middle of the night, 20 new
Hummer H2's worth about
$50,000 apiece were set
aflame and destroyed at a
car dealership here, part of a
wave of vandalism in which
50 other vehicles had been
damaged at the same
dealership and others in the
suburbs east of Los Angeles.
GM Gives In To Good
Taste, Closes Hummer
Division
•
By Chris Morran on February 24, 2010 4:21 PM