WHEN HELPING YOU HELPS ME --Behind The Left's Selfish Mask Of Caring....

The Iconoclast ^ | December 24, 2002 | Murray Soupcoff (The Iconoclast)

[clintonbaiter]

ICONOCLAST DAILY NOTEBOOK....

WHEN HELPING YOU HELPS ME
--Behind The Left's Selfish Mask Of Caring....



December 24, 2002: When will the "caring" activists of the left ever learn? Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much misery for so many people they wanted to help. As the social-engineering debacles of the last half century in the United States have demonstrated , carelessness in "caring" for the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society only leads to a glaringly uncaring result.

After all, it was pioneering liberal-left social engineers in the 1940's and 50's who came up with the not-so-creative idea of fighting poverty in American slums by ripping down existing for-profit rental housing and replacing the existing rental stock with the cold, massive, impersonal concrete human stockyards we now know as public housing projects -- the equivalent of urban hell for several generations of the poor in North America. Not only was poverty not checked by this urban "reform," but the absence of cheap rooming houses and other lodgings for society's marginalized citizens ultimately created the phenomenon of urban homelessness. And of course, we all know the many wonderful benefits that come with living in today's comfy, government-subsidized "projects" -- rampant violence, drug addiction, vandalism, family breakup, gang war, murder and social anarchy.

Oh, and did we mention an even more ingrained "cycle of poverty"?

Yet, the obvious bitter fruits of their all-knowing beneficence in providing "better housing" for the underclass did nothing to stop the clumsy social-engineering efforts of liberal-left do-gooders. For example, in the 1960's, confronted with the demoralizing "evidence" -- all emanating from their overactive imaginations -- that poor self-esteem and a cycle of "failure" was hindering the educational achievement of poor black students, liberal-left educational reformers set about dumbing-down the schools in disadvantaged black urban slums. Unfortunately, the only noticeable result of this attempt to treat the educational system as a social laboratory was that standard test scores plummeted in these enlightened educational enclaves, literacy became the equivalent of an endangered species, student conduct deteriorated dangerously and precipitously, and a unique new "let's stay stupid" ethic (otherwise known as not "going white") evolved among poor black students -- harassing any fellow students who showed any desire to get an education to improve their lot and break the chains of poverty.

Oh, and did we mention that schools in poor black urban slums quickly became a mirror image of government-subsidized housing projects -- run-down urban fortresses afflicted by the scourge of vandalism, gangs, hard drugs, random violence and social anarchy.

However, not surprisingly, that hasn't stopped the liberal-left cognoscenti from coming up with ever-more innovative ways to waste taxpayer dollars on ever-more destructive "cures" for various real and imagined social injustices.

The $64,000 question is why? Enter a most educational book, The Careless Society: Community & Its Counterfeits by community activist John McKnight (Basic Books, 1995), a crusading tome whose insightful pages I recently revisited. Even more specifically, I would single out Chapter One ("Professionalism") and McKnight's groundbreaking essay entitled "Professionalized Help and Disabling Service"

Granted, watching an old When Harry Met Sally video is probably a more stimulating diversion. However, if you're one of those people who feels guilty after being accused by liberals of not being a caring enough person in your politics, then you'll probably find this book most enlightning. It's a golden-oldie that still packs a punch, even though it received minimum attention when it was first published.

So what new insight does Mr. McKnight bring to an understanding of the educated "caring" classes and the ever-expanding "helping" industry they helm. Well, if I might serve as your interpreter, let me first posit that I think he would suggest that we all should recognize that no matter how intrinsically idealistic and caring today's social "dogooders" might be, they are still human. Therefore, self-interest is bound to intrude at times into even the most idealistic of initiatives to help the less advantaged.

In other words, today's social reformers and activists may be well intentioned, but they're fooling themselves about the nature of their mission. According to McKnight, the language of the helping professions may be one of caring (just like Bill Clinton, they feel the needy's pain). But behind what McKnight calls the mask of caring lies simply one more expanding service industry -- a unique business (distinguished by its emphasis on doing good) in need of markets, staffed by an ever-growing cadre of caring professionals in need of income.

In other words, today's caring elite of policy wonks and service professionals need "need". They derive their sense of superior goodness, not to mention their livelihoods, from servicing the "needs" of those whom they define as "the needy".

So from McKnight's point of view, professional caring in modern society has become just another business, but one whose true mission is masked by its aura of caring and love for those whom it helps. Or to put it in his own words:

It is clear, therefore, that the word 'care' is a potent political symbol. What is not so clear is that its use masks the political interests of servicers. This fact is further obscured by the symbolic link between care and love. The result is that the political-economic issues of service are hidden behind the mask of love.

Behind the mask is simply the servicer, his systems, techniques, and technologies -- a business in need of markets, an economy seeking new growth potential, professionals in need of an income....

The masks of love and care obscure this reality so that the public cannot recognize the professionalized interests that manufacture needs in order to rationalize a service economy. Medicare, Educare, Judicare, Socialcare, and Psychocare are portrayed as systems to meet needs rather than programs to meet the needs of servicers and the economies they support.

Most important, from McKight's point of view, this is not a shell game where "helpers" consciously set about to exploit the needy for their own selfish ends. Instead, servicers are well-intentioned individuals who so strongly identify with the caring "face" of doing good that they cannot let themselves recognize its negative consequences. The "mask" of goodness is so important to their sense of self, they can't let themselves see its true face -- the exploitation of society's deprived classes, by a credentialed elite, to enhance the economic well being and moral superiority of that elite.

Hmmm. So maybe that was what Hillary was up to with her plans for a giant bureaucratized national health system.

Regardless, in McKnight's words, "removing the mask of love shows us the face of servicers who need income, and an economic system that needs growth." And within this framework, "the client is less a person in need than a person who is needed." Or in pure economic terms, the client is less the consumer than "the raw material for the servicing system." In other words, today's dogooders need the needy, and must continually identify new "need" (social problems) to grow their business (government-funded social initiatives to "help" those in need and to create lucrative employment for the enlightened classes who help them).

Therefore, even though it might not be the original intention of social dogooders, it doesn't take long for those whom they set out to help to ultimately become commodities in the business of caring -- and for the helpers, by implication, to become the new industrialists of caring. And those helpers, I might add, include a whole new educated class of professional social workers, psychologists, child-care workers, government bureaucrats, administrators, legislators, social-policy wonks, community activists, and even self-appointed ethnic spokespersons like Jesse Jackson.

Not surprisingly, one particular power dynamic most usually emerges from such "helping" efforts: the helper is the expert who holds all control and power, and the one who is helped is chronically consigned to the role of the dependent, needy victim. For example, within this power paradigm, social-policy wonks and social workers possess the professional training and expert knowledge to know what's required to rescue the needy; and the needy "need" that professional intervention since they are seen as being incapable of helping themselves.

Of course, when self-interested career "activists" like Jesse Jackson are involved, another dynamic inevitably kicks in. The rich (come on down, Jesse) get richer (from government and corporate "donations"), and the poor get nothing (from Jesse and his associates).

Ironically, as John McKnight also suggests, many of today's much-advocated social-problem-solving efforts are actually iatrogenic -- the equivalent of doctor-created disease. For example, doctors like to gather the sick in infection-ridden hospitals, where ill patients often contact infectious diseases which make them even more sick than they were when they first entered hospital. Consequently, for many the doctor-prescribed cure is worse than the disease.

In the same way, most liberal-left social "cures," via government-mandated social engineering, are iatrogenic-- social "remedies" bedeviled by a bevy of harmful unintended social consequences created by government agencies recklessly intervening in the private sphere.

The problem is that public intellectuals of the left suffer from the hubris of thinking they know more than they do. And over and over again, we are confronted with more grim evidence that mere humans -- even the most schooled and brilliant -- cannot control complex social processes sufficiently to achieve the societal outcomes they desire. For example, the fabled War on Poverty in America may have been based on the accumulated sociological wisdom of the academic intelligentsia of the 1960's, but it quickly turned into a rout -- as a host of unintended social consequences (created by the experts' ill-chosen social-engineering remedies) ambushed all the good intentions and left the equivalent of a social killing field among the hapless victims of left-wing largesse. Aside from the countless billions of dollars wasted on needlessly enriching the educated helping classes in their battle against the "social ills" afflicting the disadvantaged, the celebrated campaign to eradicate poverty and its ills only reinforced the cycle of poverty in black disadvantaged neighborhoods, created a frightening social contagion of ever-escalating welfare dependency, family breakdown and neighborhood violence -- and ushering in a shining new era of urban social anarchy and hopelessness. Doctor-created social disease at its worst!................

[clintonbaiter]

Amen!

[headsonpikes]

Thank you for posting this. If folks could only grasp his main point, that the underclass is the creation of self-interested government employees, we could begin to deconstruct this ruthless beast of a welfare state.

Remember, the mission of socialism is to destroy the old Man and create a new 'Soviet Man', or his like.

These welfare service delivery professionals actually predate on their fellows while claiming to be helping them and demanding special respect and regard for doing so. Disgusting.

Down with their Cannibal Kingdom! Heads On Pikes!!!

Merry Christmas. ;^)

[headsonpikes]

Bump and ping.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

In San Francisco they tore down blocks and blocks of beautiful rentable Victorians (in the 60's) to make way for horrid looking brown boxy "low income housing" which is filled with drug dealers and danger. I hate going through the area on the bus. These people are just deranged (both the libs who did this and the people who live in them).

[wildbill]

I'd like to give a personal experience with these "poverty pimps." Back in the Sixties,as an alumnus for an Ivy League school, I was a recruiter for my college. I came into contact with a group of Mexican-American poverty warriors who had an organization that purported to help young Mexican-Americans get into colleges, especially Ivy League schools.

The real purpose was to get grants that paid these guys very well to pretend to help the downtrodden. When I tried to enlist their help in actually talking to the parents and trying to get their children into a special outreach program, I was told: "We don't do that. We get funded by the number of applications for admission that are filed. It doesn't matter how many kids actually go to school."

Pitiful.

[boris]

Liberals are insecure about their own morality and compassion. In fact, deep down at their core they disbelieve that they possess these virtues.

This insecurity causes them to commit ever-more-outrageous acts of "conspicuous compassion", in order to demonstrate to others -- and secretly to themselves-- their moral superiority.

But the black hole within the souls of liberals can never be sated. It will eat the world--consume the universe--if not thwarted.

All of this would be sadly amusing were it not for the fact that the left discovered they could force others to pay for their displays of "compassion". Thus was born Forced Compassion (tm). Forced compassion is NOT compassion. It is easy to be "compassionate" when someone else is paying the tab.

Let Teddy Kennedy and Jane Fonda bankrupt themselves, take up the lifestyle of Mother Teresa, and give all they have to the poor. Then they will have the moral stature to lecture the rest of us on the inadequacy of our compassion and charity. Otherwise, every word that drips from their smarmy mouths will be met with the whisper, "Hypocrite" in every ear.

--Boris

[Freee-dame]

Years of social promotion in public schools has led to 2 generations of kids who think their lack of success in school is the fault of teachers, parents, poverty, curriculum, anything but their lack of effort. Until kids get the message DO YOUR WORK both in school and on the job, nothing will improve.

[CyberAnt]

bump!!

[listenhillary]

Several years back "social services" were running radio ads for WIC and other government handouts. While WIC is one of the lesser evils of government, I imagine maybe the administrators may have been suffering slight pangs of guilt about sitting around twiddling their thumbs with no clients.
Thus the need to drum up more "business".

[nomad]

Its not just black students that are harassed about "going white" in these schools. All students in these urban schools are vulnerable, hell I`ve seen whites attacked in this regard, its a central part of the liberal inspired ghetto/barrio attitude. For this alone liberals should be drawn and quartered, how much personal suffering has this engendered, what loses to our nation, if not humanity, has this caused? But, just a look at some of the other threads on welfare issues reveals that its not just "liberals" who are guilty of supporting this form of bureacratic inertia.

[nomad]

Try visiting this thread, "Welfare is a priviledge and not a right" by Clive. It should provide illumination on the present neo-con perspective. With "conservatives" like some of these guys, who needs liberals?