The Shock Doctrine of the Left by Graham Jones

Author:Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509528547
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Unhealthy Relations

It was late at the UCL campus, and the meeting was tense. We found ourselves a quiet room in a dark, labyrinthine old building, empty apart from us and the occasional cleaner. On entering, the group had spontaneously polarized, moving towards opposite ends of the table. The dispute we had come together to try to resolve had been growing for months, and it was harming our daily organizing and mental health. Yet, despite how unlikely it had felt at the beginning of the meeting, by its end we had made good progress. What had become a mutually hurtful situation of escalating intensity, much of it conducted online, was rapidly diffused with that oldest and most obvious technology: talking and listening face-to-face.

The connection we feel to animated, human faces responding to our words proves vital in organizing. The face aids in providing care, in healing from hurt, for apologizing and making amends, for enthusing and empowering others. It provides immediate feedback on our actions, enabling our bodies to adapt together in the moment. Communications technology has many advantages, but the loss of the human face – animated and responsive rather than a frozen avatar – is a threat to resilient organizing.

For one thing it amplifies an existing tendency of conflict. In these situations we often see the other side in simplified terms, an enemy, without considering the parts, the past experiences, the imagined futures, the environments and interactions, empowerments and disempowerments which brought each side to that point. This obscures the reasons why conflict occurred, and makes it difficult to adapt to ensure that it is not repeated. To be transformative, conflict resolution has to proceed, as difficult as it may be, through an understanding of all the bodies involved.

Internal conflict can also act as an accelerator of positive growth, rather than just of collapse. By creating space in which people can express their position without judgement, you can help to uncover aspects of a body that are harmful or oppressive. You allow individuals to see the effects they may not have realized they were creating, and allow them to change. And we will often come to the realization that the triggering event has beneath it much longer histories of trauma and oppression.

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