We need only look at the cultures of the Aka, Bayaka, and Mbuti tribes, who all split off from the same tribe 150k years ago & still share many of the same cultural norms oriented around counterdominance, matrifocal care, and singing as a means of protection & decision-making.
Their cultures can show us what it took to survive and thrive in a jungle with numerous large predators. These tribes carry wisdom we can apply in our daily lives.
Not taking care of a wise injured person who might recover & help guide others, teach children, care for children, help heal, reveal spiritual teachings, and otherwise be human would be profoundly stupid. Judging who to care for based solely on productivity or ability to direct others would also be profoundly stupid....this strategy sounds like middle-management.
Surely emotions and morale are worth considering as well. Even if someone is unproductive and stupid, but friendly and well-liked, then their death would impact everyone's productivity for some time.
Exactly. Every being has intrinsic value. A pure productivity perspective is rooted in dehumanization and a reductive take on what it means to live/survive/thrive.
If your hatred for this doesn't lead you to commit your skills to building systems of liberation, you're likely part of the tech soldier caste and not yet the liberatory praxis movement.
The idea that you can draw a line between stress and trauma is an attempt to generalize something experienced on a personal level.
That's not how to handle any complex system with accuracy and effectiveness.
Therapy doesn't address systemic oppression, which does lead to more incidents resulting in PTSD & is a generator of CPTSD (which isn't just for edge cases, but for recurrent stressor that don't allow the body time to recover from past events).
Western therapy is failing. The therapists attending to what's going on are speaking out and some are abandoning their practices because they realize they've been co-opted in systemic harm.
So you know of any personal blogs or articles or other writings from therapists who feel this way and left the profession? It sounds fascinating, but I wouldn't know where to start.
Other writings: For example the books by Vivian Broughton, a UK therapist: https://www.vivianbroughton.com/my-books/ Her latest book ("You were just a child...") contains critical essays, which you might enjoy.
Essential reading: The books by Judith Herman, who coined the term "Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" and lobbied to get it added to the DSM. Her latest book is all about justice for victims (and how the system is failing them).
The most famous critical essays about modern society from a therapist are by Sigmund Freud. You may want to start with "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1929). Quote:
"The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods."
My experience matches very much with this thread. After years of therapy I hit a limit to what conventional psychology could explain or understand or “treat”, and the only thing that worked after that was going deeper into my own psyche with meditation.
The whole psyche is available for exploration when you stop believing that you are made of thoughts. It becomes extremely clear where all the anxiety and depression and addiction comes from, and that almost all conventional approaches merely treat the symptoms.
I also took some intro psych at university and remember that in general Freud’s was sort of accepted by mainstream psych as the de facto most “correct” and logical view of psychotherapy while Jung was considered a bit of a weirdo, and I accepted this at the time. However through my own experiences now I think Jung was much closer to the truth, particularly around what he calls the “shadow”.
Your friends in psychiartry...are they acknowledging the impact of living under oppression as a direct cause of issues & advocating for an end to oppression?
Because that's what many healers outside of western medicine are touting.
People are amplifying because the western medicine approach isn't addressing underlying issues & so people are trying to explain the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine. The dismissiveness in these comments is a direct driver of this culture.
I'll be honest, I don't think I would've interpreted "demanding an AuDHD diagnosis" as "explaining the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine". Especially if their issues are just oppression. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding.
Western medicine is well aware of the fact that they can't treat the underlying cause of things like autism and ADHD. If you're a real patient with one of these diagnoses (or even depression), they will tell you that upfront. They're not pretending to fix anything with pills.
Kindly stop supporting a nation built on genocide and enslavement. The ethical path to engineering a system that's not intended to kill people is to stop it when it does and dismantle it, evolving the foundational principles used to design it in the first place. And to do all that without sacrificing more lives. Electoral reform is impossible because there's no way to say no to the entire system.
I live in the USA. You can put all your skills to work on designing systems of collective liberation to replace the existing systems of oppression this country was founded on & requires to persist. A collapse is coming, so now is the time to prepare so we have something liberatory to fill the predictable power vacuum with. The wealthy are already doing this.
The right managed to succeed with their electoral reforms. Gerrymandering is legal, and the president is now above the law.
The left should use the same tactics: Focus on state and local elections then use those positions to fix elections so that the national majority of voters decide who runs the federal government (instead of the current 25-30% of voters).
Doing this is completely legal now that the Supreme Court has gutted the rule of law.
For starters, all states should aggressively gerrymand. That’ll basically guarantee the house goes democrat in 2026:
If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
As a democratic voter I don't like this either. I vote because I want rule of law. It's not as clear cut to me that discarding rule of law to beat the GOP is the best option. There is a chance they can be defeated without undermining having a functional electoral system
This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.
You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.
Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.
They can be "defeated" that way in the sense of a classic Pyrrhic victory, exactly like in 2020, sure. That's the absolute worst out of all options available. "Losing" in 2020 would have been much better. You need to start thinking about the game, realpolitik, and the patterns that have been happening. And the long-term. You think you're thinking long-term by prioritizing the things you do, but it's the exact opposite.
The first thing you need to come to terms with is that losing in 2020 would've been better for the long-term. Once you've gained that freedom, realizing that simply winning an election can be the worse option, you can start thinking about what would instead be better.
One possible solution is to get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans and run liberal/progressive candidates as Republicans. Built on the Eisenhower platform of 1956 and his record as a military commander. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...
Granted, it's not ideal, but coming in the back door may be necessary.
> get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans
Sorry, didn’t quite follow that! You can vote for anyone regardless of who you Registered for? Or, was that suppose to give a misleading signal to Republicans that they have way too many voters? :-)
It depends on the state (in some you can register as a democrat and ask for a republican primary ballot), but I did this so I could vote against George W three times. (If only we could have him again instead of Trump…). You can register for whatever party you want, but some states have early deadlines.
One problem with creating real change with this approach is that the party elites get to decide who are on their ballots.
A while back, Colbert (?) tried to run as a republican and documented all the roadblocks he hit.
To get an idea of how it went, imagine a popular candidate going to a southern plantation to kiss the rings of the great-grandchildren of slave owners.
After deciding there is no personal upside to them, they decide to keep the candidate off the ballot and ask a servant to freshen their mint julep.
> If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
This has been clear for very long. Hence why they're still not doing it, and have for the last 9 years been and still[1] continue to push for Clinton-like candidates rather than whatever candidate has the biggest chance of winning elections. It isn't incompetence, and it hasn't been for ages. They're nearly just as captured. It's true that they're slightly less captured than R overall, but not to an extent that is actually meaningful.
Stating it as an "if" is copium. They have failed to, are failing to, and will continue to fail to do this, and it's intentional. What you're saying is so blindingly obvious that there is no other explanation - no Hanlon's razor for this one, the incompetence angle is not realistic.
To liberals a “socialist” like Mamdani is way worse than conservatives like Trump. They are more than happy to support a sexual predator over a socialist. Trump and the DNC largely have the same donors to keep happy. Capitalism and how to make a select few fabulously wealthy isn’t a power either the democrats or republicans want to give up. Unfortunately due to the first past the post voting system we have to align to one of the two fucked up corporatist political parties. One which pretends to care about things like equality and fairness and one who has removed their mask and fully embraces all the worst aspects of humanity. I’d still much rather have a Target that pretended to care about things than a Target who fully embraces late stage capitalism.
The most frustrating thing about leftists is their focus on tearing down and self-flagellation over actually doing anything meaningful to make the world a better place.
There is a whole archetype of person that would rather verbally jerk off to thoughts of defeatism and disgust and criticizing everyone else than do anything useful themselves.
Maybe it's not as dualistic as you portray things. I'm literally designing and building a system for collective liberation and meeting needs to replace systems of oppression.
This is a great argument for a dietary regimen of feasting before a sprint, intermittent fasting during the middle of it, and fasting fully for crunch weeks! I bet it could be so successful, I could start an AI company copying what others do, not changing a thing, and I'll just be so much more productive I'll wind up on top!
And arguing over whether or not businesses need to care for employees (while pretending that an argument for a corporate culture of collectivist genuine effective care was somehow an argument for businesses to operate how they already do).
People also quibble on here over what exactly is genocide and should we really be against it.
Their cultures can show us what it took to survive and thrive in a jungle with numerous large predators. These tribes carry wisdom we can apply in our daily lives.