and reach thousands of daily visitors
Listen to this
I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple because Life/life is about giving, not getting. - Hubert Selby Jr.
I have been reading Gabor Maté’s profound reflections on working with addiction in his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. It is a powerful book with innumerable insights that I have to say I found quite compelling both personally and professionally. At one level it is a nightmarish text that reflects the horrors of addiction as it exists within our current society. At another level it is a text that argues powerfully for the importance of seeing people as fully human, no matter what their circumstance or situation. Maté’s ability to use self-reflection and compassion to make sense of his experience as a physician working in a harm reduction program in Vancouver is inspiring, not because his work produced sobriety in his patients, but because sobriety was never the goal. It’s not that sobriety wasn’t considered worthwhile. It’s that caring for others whatever their level of addiction was paramount.
I have written before in this column about how we demonize addicts so I won’t belabor the point except to state that in Maté’s account, the way that we wage the war on drugs cannot be separated from the fact that we are really waging war on addicts. And of course, what we know about warfare is that the first step in being willing to inflict harm on the enemy is to dehumanize them. If we are to wage a war in drugs, then like a war between nations, it is not the nation that is harmed. The nation is an abstract idea that cannot be physically attacked. No, we attack the citizens of the nation, the human beings and the infrastructure that supports them. Similarly, in the war on drugs, we don’t mean an attack on all drugs. We mean an attack on the illicit use of certain drugs and more importantly reducing the number of human beings using and distributing those drugs. The drugs themselves are not really our target. The goal of the war is to reduce or eliminate the population of addicts and drug dealers.
To dehumanize our brothers and sisters who are suffering the ravages of addiction is both a brutal and complex action. Brutal in the dismissal of the addict as less fully human than the rest of us. This dismissal is an act of radical exclusion that leads us to believe that only the addict dedicated to recovery and sobriety is truly worthy of care. It often seems as though we believe that those who are actively using without any real intention or capacity to become sober should suffer the consequences of their refusal of our “help.” If they suffer and die from the overdoses, infections, diseases associated with use, then that is the natural consequence of refusing sobriety.
This is a harsh calculus that effectively gives most of us a kind of escape hatch from any sort of accountability to our fellow human beings who won’t follow our admonitions of sobriety. The question is why we would seek to step aside acts of caring for those living with addiction. The answer to that is complicated. At the broadest level there are many instances in which we abdicate our responsibility for caring for each other. We don’t have to look far to see the ways in which we imagine our interests to be separate and superior to the needs of others. At the most extreme edge are the acts of violence we perpetrate against others in hopes of assuring ourselves a range of personal investments, from safety to sheer acquisition of those things we believe we need or want. And there are subtler forms of violence against others based in actions that range from dehumanizing discourses to sheer neglect and erasure.
When I spend time reflecting on our capacity for harm, I find myself wondering what in the world would be the impetus for such actions. Of course, this is a question that has been asked and answered by much greater thinkers than me. That said, as I read Maté’s book, a couple of thoughts occurred to me that might be pertinent to the work we do in CYC.
For some time, I have written here and elsewhere about the fact that it seems to me we spend quite a lot of time on the question of relationship, but not nearly as much time on the question of care. And, that when we do engage the question of care, it is bounded and delineated into a rather narrow framework of institutional practice. The deteriorating circumstances of young people who we never see in our programs or institutions very seldom captures our attention as CYC theorists or practitioners. As a result, when we think about harm or violence, our framework tends towards the dyad of worker/child or worker/family or perhaps most broadly worker/community (although this latter is not very fully articulated). We have begun to stretch that a bit with emerging thinking about decolonization, issues of racism, gender, sexuality, but even then, our analysis leans towards programmatic implications.
The broader questions surrounding the social and cultural logics of care, violence, and neglect, that cannot help but deeply influence our work, don’t seem to make it into our thinking about our field of practice. And yet, I would argue that without an analysis of the depth of social and cultural pathology that perpetuates a seemingly never-ending stream of children and youth experiencing multiple points of trauma, our field will at best be a triage point for that minority of young people who encounter our services. Of course, this is not a bad thing in and of itself. For those young people we do see, our services can alleviate some suffering and ameliorate some trauma. In some instances, enough that they can join the rest of us living on the edge of a world on fire.
I guess at some level, it is a question of whether we believe that the stakes matter. Put another way, are the stakes high enough yet to rethink the way we practice care? Is the fact that our world is facing existential threats that will undoubtedly radically increase the likelihood of suffering for millions of young people enough to force us to seriously reflect on whether what we are doing is enough? Or are we simply rearranging the deck on the Titanic? Is the system of care we have been developing based on the logics of the 20th century anywhere near adequate to the needs of the 21st century? Do we have a model of care that is premised on the living material realities of the young people we engage in our work?
I would argue that to understand the kind of crisis that results in the endless flow of suffering young people who arrive at the doors of our programs, we need to understand what we are seeing as a symptom of a broader social malaise that has reached pandemic proportions and is escalating without any serious attempt to stop it. Of course, symptoms are the manifestation of a body attempting to respond to an imbalance that threatens the integrity of the organism. When I refer to the symptoms of a social malaise, I would propose that we need to diagnose the underlying imbalance in our body politic.
In the case of societal imbalance, we could look to the ways in which our resource allocation is profoundly skewed so that a minority of human beings have access to a vastly disproportionate share of wealth both in terms of abstract systems of value such as money, as well as material elements such as land, institutions, machinery and so on. Or we could point to the increasingly toxic imbalances in the bio-chemical composition of the planet that is leading to massive species extinctions and dangerous shifts in the chemical compositions of the air and water that sustain us. Here we could point to climate change as a radical global manifestation of a dysfunctional system. But we could also reference the fact that the air we breathe and the water we drink is increasingly compromised by the infusions of chemical waste we are continually dumping into our environment. This toxic infusion of the detritus of the way we live is also emptying the aquifers of water that we rely on. The extraction of minerals and petroleum are destabilizing the geological infrastructure of the very ground so that we have increases in earthquakes and landslides. The list could go on, but the point is that these are all symptoms of a body in severe existential crisis. But we still haven’t diagnosed the cause.
The trouble with these kinds of symptoms is that although they are right in front of us, they seem in a peculiar way somewhat distant from the way we live our lives. Although, we have been told that the way we are living is literally killing more and more living beings including our fellow humans, we seem to be having a hard time seeing this as something we can do anything about.
A significant aspect of this disjunction has to do with the fact that while the symptoms are material, the disease is not. The imbalance we are diagnosing can be clearly related to what we are doing daily, so we should just stop doing it. And yet, it doesn’t seem that we are able to do that. I would argue that the reason for this is that the foundation of our behavior is always rooted in a system of logic or the way we make sense of the world. This logic operates at both a conscious and unconscious level and while its effects may vary slightly from person to person, it is the product of our collective unconscious desires. And those desires arise from our collective generational memory of all that has threatened or harmed us and the solutions we have devised to protect ourselves from harm. While this may sound as though it should function well to create worlds in which we are increasingly secure and well cared for, there is an element of self -investment that can blind us to the unintended consequences of our actions to secure the world to our benefit.
Over time, we can come to create societies that are overinvested in what they perceive to be safety and security. Such societies can become blind to their interconnections to the world around them and can come to believe that the world of living things only exists for their use and benefit. This kind of social organization is premised on a logic of exclusion that builds systems that define who belong and who does not.
Initially, the circle of exclusion can be pretty broad and inclusive, but over time such systems become increasingly self-referential and narrow, so that the circle of those designated as having the right to safety and security shrinks, and those designated as a threat grows. What is lost here is any understanding that the social body is composed of literally everything and that any narrowing of that understanding constitutes a threat in and of itself to the body politic.
This is the system under which we are functioning. It is in many respects its own form of addiction and our repudiation of those we term addicts may well be a form of denial of our own addiction to an all-encompassing need for control and domination. Like all addictions this way of life is self-defeating, but at the same time offers its own form of comfort. It does have relational components that are complex and productive. What is missing is the element of care. In such a system, care is reduced to caring for the addiction itself. All other forms of care become eclipsed. Like the American Dream referenced at the opening to this article, all the elements that support life such as “integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul” are sacrificed to the addiction of self-referential comfort, domination, and control. But this can’t work, and it is ultimately suicidal to the body, both individual and collective.
But I don’t want to end there. I want to offer a daydream that I have for our field and for our society. I sometimes imagine a world in which we understand that caring for life is not about the acquisition of things that we use to hedge our bets against pain and death, but a world in which we understand that pain and death are inevitable parts of life. Both pain and death will come to us. That isn’t the question. The question is whether we understand that mutuality of caring will get us through the pain we will experience as living beings and cushion the fear of death. Connection to life can heal the ties that have been torn asunder by the system of greed and fear that are breaking us apart and repair the value systems that secure us through belonging in a universe full of living spirit. I daydream that we can begin to bring such a world into being in a myriad of small ways through the ways we provide care for each other both youth and adult. It is a daydream … but if there is a day for such a daydream, perhaps it is today.
