Probably one of your most important essays ever. Good that you bring in an historical perspective.
This harks back to what I was saying in an earlier post, about the absurd assumption that all children are highly skilled and capable of looking for a job as soon as they finish school, as if magically that selfish drive for one-up-manship (which is what a CV is) just appears out of nowhere.
I always resented that, but had no outlet for expressing it, and indeed, no coaching in how to express it.
I've never been normal, and am quite proud of that now, but back at the end of the school days it was a cause of depression. There was no explanation of why things - societal norms & expectations - were as they were (and are), and certainly no training, and more importantly, no alternatives offered.
I'm not particularly ambitious, which I quickly found goes against most societal norms, especially the further up the food chain you go. Now it's almost a criminal offence.
I never wanted to work at some bullshit job (a la David Graeber), I suspect most people are the same. They say they want a job because that is the only narrative they have been taught. What they actually mean, they (and I) want to flourish, to thrive.
Can you imagine going into the DWP job centre and actually saying I don't want a job, they'd probably get security to throw you out!
Ugh!
I tried being normal for 20 years, which was a disaster mentally. Have now been successfully self-employed for 19 years, writing, painting and gardening, but it should not have taken a mental health crisis at 45 to get there. And that is the brutal outcomes of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, an epidemic of mental health crises.
Of course, those NEETS can clearly see that "working for a living" has stopped even pretending to be a mode of thriving or flourishing, the rentier extraction of neo-liberalism has destroyed working as a concept for many people. That doesn't mean they want to sit around watching TV, smoking dope and tearing up the place on illegal scambler bikes, they want to do. Whatever doing is. Unfortunately they haven't been given the mental models to describe that, the language, the societal narrative, nor any plausible alternatives other than some bogus tick-tok influencers telling them to man up and side hustle.
In that sense, nowt has changed, looking back on my own experience, other than the scale of the problem.
How then, to do a cultural change from a resource-extraction economy to a flourishing/well-being economy?
Goodhart's law, scaled up to a whole country. The average person was a description until politics made it a target, and the moment it became the target it stopped describing anyone and started prescribing everyone.
The single transferable party falls out of that for free. Whoever wins inherits the same statistics and targets, and instruments bend behaviour harder than intentions do, so opposite values converge on identical conduct. The norm sits downstream of the metric, not the manifesto.
I am reminded of a statement made (possibly apocryphal) by a politician during the Thatcher era when I was a young teacher that the aim of education was to make sure all pupils were above average!
In this article, you have put into words what I have been thinking for a long time but far more eloquently than I ever could. I saw a headline last week, in the Independent newspaper, that said NEETs would cost “us all £125m”. So I had to ask: “but what about the human cost?” The feelings of failure when it is the system failing them. The pressure to conform. That people like me, who are neurodivergent (ADHD), left handed, disabled, female, and unable to work, are problems to be fixed. We are asking all the wrong questions. What we need to ask is: How can we help you to achieve your goals? Especially if that goal doesn’t involve conventional work. The “normal” person is likely male, able-bodied, educated to a certain standard and working in a conventional job.
We need to remember we are human beings, not human doings.
I highly recommend @robinince “Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal” for an explanation of how people who are neurodivergent live and what happens when we don’t act according to social norms.
I’d like to live in a country that counts success, not in GDP, but in the morale of the citizens.
You have shown us the wood where we have become lost in the trees. The idea that we should organise society around the idea of recognising everyone's difference is both obvious and revolutionary. The politics of care is essentially (if I understand it correctly) about relationship, the need to meet people where they are rather than where we want them to be.
The other thing about relationship is that it is not just my relations with you and yours with me - it is the vast web of relationships we have which connect us sometimes directly but more often indirectly. That connection matters because what we do individually ripples out from our location in the web and has unforeseen consequences. This is sometimes referred to as Ubuntu which describes the unique quality that is us, personally, as the necessary contribution to us as a whole society.
The Age of Enlightenment ushered forth much knowledge but rather less wisdom. The mechanical approach to the miracle of life has resulted in the world of measurement and the devaluing of that which has no objective scale. Trust has been a casualty of this along with the necessary withdrawal of compassion in order to maintain the 'scientific' approach.
So much has to change to usher in a politics of care and to me it seems unlikely that the current political structures can manage this as not only have they been captured by those who benefit from the myth of 'the norm' but their very structure precludes the loosening of the reins that would be necessary to permit the flourishing so badly needed.
While I have much sympathy towards the Anarchistic view what we really need is a nationwide debate about how to move to a more caring society.
A little while back a thought randomly occurred to me that maybe there is no such thing as "neuro-diverse" - everyone is "diverse" in their own particular way, and trying to identify those who are diverse from those who are not is ultimately a waste of time, as well as unhelpful. I didn't try to progress the notion.
It seems to me that Richard is thinking on the same lines, but with his customary thoroughness has explored the idea in great detail and written it up in a detailed but very readable form. This is a fascinating essay and deserves to be read widely.
I think we are all diverse and there is no “normal”. But I also think autism, ADHD, AuDHD, etc are real and defining. We are not all normal but some clearly do think differently, and neoliberalism has even less idea how to handle them than it does so called normal people.
That's very true, there are certainly conditions that make it very hard for individuals to cope with the basic process of living, resulting in the need for specialist care. It also seems that neo-liberalism has created its own definition of normal, as in, for example, the perfectly rational, always optimising, and ultimately mythical individual of orthodox economics. And then there's Thatcher's horrible aphorism "there is no such thing as society". What kind of normal people was she imagining?
Thank you for this very valuable essay. You manage to describe the history, derivations and the results in an incredibly detailed manner, which found very enlightening.
What you mention about flourishing is very noticeable now that the owners of the digitised sites seem to be grabbing all the wealth possible. (How much of their wealth should really be attributed to withheld wages?)
So many workers are actually forced out of employment (women of, or nearly, 50 years old). The younger NEETs may well be discouraged by the dearth of opportunities offered to them.
Flourishing as the aim for the person in any economy seems to be ignored as a workplace opportunity. Yet this is precisely the condition to enable the economy to grow and prosper.
There can be no normal when we are a mass of uniqueness. Each of us being unique is a remarkable thing. Yet everything is about getting rid of one's uniqueness in the name of organising and ease. Now i will read Richard's piece.
There has to be a realisation that there is no such thing as 'normal', perfection doesn't exist as everything contains flaws depending on who is looking/at what level/against what criteria/what time period.
Categorisation and classification is useful for specific tasks for specific aims and purposes. These systems all differ with inclusion criteria, standards used, calibration of those doing the observation/measuring, and have to adapt/change with time/circumstances/situation.
An analogy I like to use is that as a person, I am floating in a wobbly bell-shaped jelly, that is rotating on a cake stand, lit by multicoloured lights. Where people looking from the outside record my position within that jelly is all dependent on where they are observing from, what they are perceiving, what recording criteria they have been given.
When I was facing my disciplinary procedures with my employers because of having a chronic illness; I still have ability despite having an illness that is classified as being disabling. Over the past 10 years, I am getting increasingly frustrated with feeling that "society" is becoming focussed more on the middle 80% cylinder that are 'fit the mould', whereas the 20% of non-conforming variants around the periphery have to struggle on, facing hurdles, barriers and tired of listening to the soundbites of things will improve, but nothing seems to be done - instead becoming the targets or seen as the problem / scapegoats.
Again, when I was working in the NHS, and we started developing Integrated Care Pathways to ensure that all aspects of a patient's journey could be tracked, assessed, followed up, and variants to that pathway highlighting what changes needed to be made; it now just seems that it is just a pathway with data points with the care part being secondary to 'business models' that actually do not really understand what clinical effectiveness means - combining audit, research, cost-effectiveness, candour in the best interest for the health and wellbeing of the patients and those delivering the care.
Please don't post poorly disguised neoliberal twaddle, because that is what you are doing, and I presume you think you are very clever. You aren't. You are the problem, not the solution.
THANK YOU!
Probably one of your most important essays ever. Good that you bring in an historical perspective.
This harks back to what I was saying in an earlier post, about the absurd assumption that all children are highly skilled and capable of looking for a job as soon as they finish school, as if magically that selfish drive for one-up-manship (which is what a CV is) just appears out of nowhere.
I always resented that, but had no outlet for expressing it, and indeed, no coaching in how to express it.
I've never been normal, and am quite proud of that now, but back at the end of the school days it was a cause of depression. There was no explanation of why things - societal norms & expectations - were as they were (and are), and certainly no training, and more importantly, no alternatives offered.
I'm not particularly ambitious, which I quickly found goes against most societal norms, especially the further up the food chain you go. Now it's almost a criminal offence.
I never wanted to work at some bullshit job (a la David Graeber), I suspect most people are the same. They say they want a job because that is the only narrative they have been taught. What they actually mean, they (and I) want to flourish, to thrive.
Can you imagine going into the DWP job centre and actually saying I don't want a job, they'd probably get security to throw you out!
Ugh!
I tried being normal for 20 years, which was a disaster mentally. Have now been successfully self-employed for 19 years, writing, painting and gardening, but it should not have taken a mental health crisis at 45 to get there. And that is the brutal outcomes of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, an epidemic of mental health crises.
Of course, those NEETS can clearly see that "working for a living" has stopped even pretending to be a mode of thriving or flourishing, the rentier extraction of neo-liberalism has destroyed working as a concept for many people. That doesn't mean they want to sit around watching TV, smoking dope and tearing up the place on illegal scambler bikes, they want to do. Whatever doing is. Unfortunately they haven't been given the mental models to describe that, the language, the societal narrative, nor any plausible alternatives other than some bogus tick-tok influencers telling them to man up and side hustle.
In that sense, nowt has changed, looking back on my own experience, other than the scale of the problem.
How then, to do a cultural change from a resource-extraction economy to a flourishing/well-being economy?
I am working on that. Thank you for your comment
Goodhart's law, scaled up to a whole country. The average person was a description until politics made it a target, and the moment it became the target it stopped describing anyone and started prescribing everyone.
The single transferable party falls out of that for free. Whoever wins inherits the same statistics and targets, and instruments bend behaviour harder than intentions do, so opposite values converge on identical conduct. The norm sits downstream of the metric, not the manifesto.
Thank you for this excellent and inspiring post. It made me rethink so many of my own observations and opinions.
Very profound - agree with Mark Bevis
A very profound and powerful message.
Now that it is laid out in front of me it all seems as if I have known those things all along.
The question now is how on earth can we implement the changes we so clearly need?
That's the hard bit. I am working on it...and some bits are easy
I found this immensely satisfying. Thank you.
It seems to me that “the new” is not so much “struggling to be born” as to be made.
Thank you
I am reminded of a statement made (possibly apocryphal) by a politician during the Thatcher era when I was a young teacher that the aim of education was to make sure all pupils were above average!
That was MIchael Gove
Ahhh! I thought I had erased that person from my memory! 8-)
Gove; is that worthless washed-up useless cogger still around???
Yes, but now he's Lord Washed-up Useless Cogger.
I agree—just look at the photo on his Wikipedia page! He looks totally gormless.
This essay is worth posting on as manty sites and/or blogs you can post it on as it really needs to shared with and read by all.
Thank you
Dear Richard,
In this article, you have put into words what I have been thinking for a long time but far more eloquently than I ever could. I saw a headline last week, in the Independent newspaper, that said NEETs would cost “us all £125m”. So I had to ask: “but what about the human cost?” The feelings of failure when it is the system failing them. The pressure to conform. That people like me, who are neurodivergent (ADHD), left handed, disabled, female, and unable to work, are problems to be fixed. We are asking all the wrong questions. What we need to ask is: How can we help you to achieve your goals? Especially if that goal doesn’t involve conventional work. The “normal” person is likely male, able-bodied, educated to a certain standard and working in a conventional job.
We need to remember we are human beings, not human doings.
I highly recommend @robinince “Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal” for an explanation of how people who are neurodivergent live and what happens when we don’t act according to social norms.
I’d like to live in a country that counts success, not in GDP, but in the morale of the citizens.
Thank you.
Thank you and much to agree with.
You have shown us the wood where we have become lost in the trees. The idea that we should organise society around the idea of recognising everyone's difference is both obvious and revolutionary. The politics of care is essentially (if I understand it correctly) about relationship, the need to meet people where they are rather than where we want them to be.
The other thing about relationship is that it is not just my relations with you and yours with me - it is the vast web of relationships we have which connect us sometimes directly but more often indirectly. That connection matters because what we do individually ripples out from our location in the web and has unforeseen consequences. This is sometimes referred to as Ubuntu which describes the unique quality that is us, personally, as the necessary contribution to us as a whole society.
The Age of Enlightenment ushered forth much knowledge but rather less wisdom. The mechanical approach to the miracle of life has resulted in the world of measurement and the devaluing of that which has no objective scale. Trust has been a casualty of this along with the necessary withdrawal of compassion in order to maintain the 'scientific' approach.
So much has to change to usher in a politics of care and to me it seems unlikely that the current political structures can manage this as not only have they been captured by those who benefit from the myth of 'the norm' but their very structure precludes the loosening of the reins that would be necessary to permit the flourishing so badly needed.
While I have much sympathy towards the Anarchistic view what we really need is a nationwide debate about how to move to a more caring society.
A little while back a thought randomly occurred to me that maybe there is no such thing as "neuro-diverse" - everyone is "diverse" in their own particular way, and trying to identify those who are diverse from those who are not is ultimately a waste of time, as well as unhelpful. I didn't try to progress the notion.
It seems to me that Richard is thinking on the same lines, but with his customary thoroughness has explored the idea in great detail and written it up in a detailed but very readable form. This is a fascinating essay and deserves to be read widely.
I think we are all diverse and there is no “normal”. But I also think autism, ADHD, AuDHD, etc are real and defining. We are not all normal but some clearly do think differently, and neoliberalism has even less idea how to handle them than it does so called normal people.
That's very true, there are certainly conditions that make it very hard for individuals to cope with the basic process of living, resulting in the need for specialist care. It also seems that neo-liberalism has created its own definition of normal, as in, for example, the perfectly rational, always optimising, and ultimately mythical individual of orthodox economics. And then there's Thatcher's horrible aphorism "there is no such thing as society". What kind of normal people was she imagining?
Thank you for this very valuable essay. You manage to describe the history, derivations and the results in an incredibly detailed manner, which found very enlightening.
What you mention about flourishing is very noticeable now that the owners of the digitised sites seem to be grabbing all the wealth possible. (How much of their wealth should really be attributed to withheld wages?)
So many workers are actually forced out of employment (women of, or nearly, 50 years old). The younger NEETs may well be discouraged by the dearth of opportunities offered to them.
Flourishing as the aim for the person in any economy seems to be ignored as a workplace opportunity. Yet this is precisely the condition to enable the economy to grow and prosper.
Thank you
There can be no normal when we are a mass of uniqueness. Each of us being unique is a remarkable thing. Yet everything is about getting rid of one's uniqueness in the name of organising and ease. Now i will read Richard's piece.
There has to be a realisation that there is no such thing as 'normal', perfection doesn't exist as everything contains flaws depending on who is looking/at what level/against what criteria/what time period.
Categorisation and classification is useful for specific tasks for specific aims and purposes. These systems all differ with inclusion criteria, standards used, calibration of those doing the observation/measuring, and have to adapt/change with time/circumstances/situation.
An analogy I like to use is that as a person, I am floating in a wobbly bell-shaped jelly, that is rotating on a cake stand, lit by multicoloured lights. Where people looking from the outside record my position within that jelly is all dependent on where they are observing from, what they are perceiving, what recording criteria they have been given.
When I was facing my disciplinary procedures with my employers because of having a chronic illness; I still have ability despite having an illness that is classified as being disabling. Over the past 10 years, I am getting increasingly frustrated with feeling that "society" is becoming focussed more on the middle 80% cylinder that are 'fit the mould', whereas the 20% of non-conforming variants around the periphery have to struggle on, facing hurdles, barriers and tired of listening to the soundbites of things will improve, but nothing seems to be done - instead becoming the targets or seen as the problem / scapegoats.
Again, when I was working in the NHS, and we started developing Integrated Care Pathways to ensure that all aspects of a patient's journey could be tracked, assessed, followed up, and variants to that pathway highlighting what changes needed to be made; it now just seems that it is just a pathway with data points with the care part being secondary to 'business models' that actually do not really understand what clinical effectiveness means - combining audit, research, cost-effectiveness, candour in the best interest for the health and wellbeing of the patients and those delivering the care.
Please don't post poorly disguised neoliberal twaddle, because that is what you are doing, and I presume you think you are very clever. You aren't. You are the problem, not the solution.
A beautifully worded and very appropriate response Richard 👏👏👏👏