I offer you this tweet to must upon:
I agree with James Davies.
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Please forgive the personal nature of this post, as I feel it may relate to Dr Davies’ tweet. Feel free to not publish it if it’s not relevant.
Just like living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).
It’s a test of ‘resilience’; an endurance test, if you will.
The ‘reward’ for passing?
More of the same, minute by minute, day after day, month on month, every relentless year and decade.
There is no cure for ME.
Is there one for the continued ignorant, casual cruelty of neoliberalism?
BTW, thank you, Richard, and all the well-informed and obviously kind, rational contributors here. You help get me through the unforgiving grind on a daily basis.
Thank you for sharing this
My wish is that you go as well as you can
Thank you
I tried to touch upon this the other day about resilience. It is one of our greatest assets but also a major source of weakness that can be exploited.
Resilience is another often abused term by Neo-liberal thinkers.
Human beings are very resilient – that’s why we are a very successful species.
Yet time and time again we are told by Neo-liberals that we not resilient. We are not working hard enough. We expect too much from health and other services. We need to be more independent!!!
This is because Neo-liberals have a tendency to rewrite thousands of years of human history don’t they?
Out goes kindness and self-sacrifice (altruism) but more importantly out goes social solidarity – a huge component of our success as a species. Sticking together.
The Neo-liberals with their over heightened hyper-individualism can’t stand it when people stand together and support each other because of course, it makes us more difficult to deal with and this threatens their authoritarian and fascist nature.
The promise of individualism is the basis of all most everything the markets sell to us so individualism is good when it makes money.
And emphasising individualism over solidarity, atomises dissent and makes us all into scared lonely individuals who are easy to control.
It’s up to us therefore to stick together as much as we can and fight back.
I entirely agree. “Resilience” is a way of decontextualising someone’s distress/coping and locating the problem within them. We ask what’s wrong with the person, rather than what’s wrong with the world. The psychological sciences (particularly psychiatry) are problematic for similar reasons, they turn distress into an inner disorder or problem rather than a socially embedded one. It disconnects feeling from it’s situational basis, turns it into an illness, and renders it meaningless (your misery becomes a fiction based in faulty biology). What’s said of “resilience” here can equally apply to ideas of mental health/illness – ideas that have been effectively debunked by e.g. Darian Leader, Richard Bentall, Mary Boyle, Joanna Moncrieff, Mark Fisher, etc. If someone is miserable they have a mood disorder, if they’re anxious it’s an anxiety disorder and so on. Feelings become medicalised letting the context off the hook. We end up with banalities such as “anyone can have depression”, which presupposes an unverifiable illness and is as meaningful as saying anyone can get a blister. The fact is that misery afflicts disempowered people in poverty far more frequently than other groups. We need to understand misery for what it is – a reaction to a miserable situation – instead of imagining feelings as illness/disorder. Similarly when people aren’t coping – we need to look at how their world is overwhelming, rather than at trying to find ways in which they’re failing as people.
Very true
There is nothing new in misery being medicalised. Drapetomania, was, according to Samuel A. Cartwright, a mental illness that caused enslaved Africans to attempt to escape.
The paper in which he defined the “disease”, together with early symptoms of it and recommended “medical” treatments is here:
Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race”, The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 1851:691–715 (May).
It is reprinted in:
Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, Dominic A. Sisti, eds, Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004) ISBN 1-58901-014-0
It is a deliberate and cynical abuse of the term resilience.
It should be about building spare capacity in many senses of the word, to allow for peaks and troughs and unanticipated needs and demands. Most obviously it is about spare capacity in the health system, the lack of which has had fatal consequences. It is about buildings and infrastructure. Banks that do not have to be bailed out by the public when crises hit. And it is about societies where large numbers are not living on the edge, pushed over the edge all too easily.
The neoliberal version of capitalism we have is solely focused on extracting the maximum that it can – and distributing the results to ever fewer. Building and investing in resilience is just seen as an unnecessary diversion of wealth and resources.
The comments we have heard from ministers and the BofE that it is just down to the public to bear the pain is utterly cynical and confirms how detached they are from most citizens’ real lives. It also confirms that they will never do what is required to build a successful – and resilient – country.
I recommend this interesting book about the impact of neoliberalism on our psychology and culture:
“Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness”, by Neil Vallelly
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/futilitarianism-9781912685905
He’s interviewed by Laurie Taylor here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cq47
I always understood resilience as the ability not only to withstand hardship but also to bounce back. This situation with interest rates is not about resilience but endurance. The people who had to borrow to their fiscal limit will have to endure hardship and do not have the ability to bounce back because they have no spare capacity as described above by Robin. This rewriting of meaning may be language “growth “ (eg vile once meant cheap but now means nasty ) but it needs to be resisted.
Per “What are the economic myths that need shattering?” and Robin Stafford’s post above, ‘efficiency’ is another economic myth that needs shattering. Spare capacity is actual resilience. Not to mention sharing and collaborating. But there’s no such thing as society ….
Added to my list
I do not agree, save that any word can be used in the rich English language in different, often manipulative, seductive or misleading ways.
The Covid Enquiry is constantly debating the ‘resilience’ of Public Health or the NHS through the pandemic; largely this is to underscore the point that the ‘resilience’ of both to withstand the shocks from the pandemic required a high level of systematic planning and resources to maintain the system; and clearly neither was provided (I have jumped to a conclusion, but the evidence against the Government already provided has reached tsunami proportions, with little contrary evidence).
Resilience is closely related to redundancy (both terms widely used in a variety of different contexts in business). In the context of resilience, redundancy refers to the necessity of possessing unused capacity so that the system has sufficient capacity to withstand big shocks; ie., is resilient. The power of ‘Just-in-time’ in industry is to reduce working capital requirements drastically (and vastly increase capital efficiency) is based on the removal of redundancy by using technology and streamlined distribution to dispense with redundancy (large stocks). The pandemic and Ukraine war demonstrated the problem of stripping out the redundancy. It only works in a system immune to large, unexpected shock.
For many people redundancy is a word solely possessing bleak overtones, associated with job loss and rejection. It isn’t so.