Social Work: The Noble Profession

Aug 18, 2024 //
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I am a social worker in Canada, and with some frequency I am told that I work in a noble profession. And it’s always that word, too: noble. Social workers are paragons of virtue simply by dint of how we make a paycheck. We don’t toil monotonous labour; we don’t exploit those same labourers for surplus value – we transcend the capitalist dichotomy. Doctors, firefighters, and the like may be heroes, but social workers are noble. We’re not glamourously saving lives; we’re in the trenches helping the less fortunate. We sit among both the lepers and the crooks. It’s unclear what we actually do, as I find when talking to even those who work intimately with social workers, but our virtue is assumed – whatever it is we’re doing with those lepers and crooks is irrelevant. Our proximity to pain is enough.

So what do social workers do? Are we really so noble? Am I secretly a monster??

Pictured: a social worker

The Sixties Scoop refers to direct policies of colonial Canada to remove indigenous children from their homes and place them into white foster families or fully adopt them into other, equally white families. It ran from about the 1950s until the 1990s. It represented a shift in approach from the residential school policy which was established to follow the maxim, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This approach aimed to “save” the indigenous person by “killing” everything that was indigenous about them, and the residential school program aimed to do exactly that by removing children from their families and culture, abusing them if they spoke their native tongue, and presenting them as superficially white with shorn hair and new clothes.

As abducting children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive facilities became more and more gauche, the Canadian government needed a new methodology to “save” them. In comes the social worker to investigate indigenous homes, and when the indigenous parents are found lacking by white colonial standards, abducting the children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive white families. This practice continues to this day in what’s called the Millennium Scoop, as the majority of youth in care across the country remain indigenous despite being a small fraction of the Canadian population. Social workers as a profession are responsible for this.

Pictured: another social worker

But surely social workers must do more than whisk babies away in the dead of the night to feed the endlessly hungry maw of settler colonialism! And we do! Socials workers are in schools, healthcare, all over the place. We even do more than just report new moms to child welfare when they’ve given birth while poor! We also connect those without an income to regular, adult person welfare which in British Columbia adds up to… $560 a month.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that seems like less than table scraps. But there’s more! Social workers can also support low-income people in getting housing that is arguably worse than homelessness: insufficient temperature controls that have residents freezing during the winter and cooking in the summer; illegal practices by landlords including unlawful evictions; restrictions on guests preventing loved ones from ever visiting; health issues arising from mold, bed bugs, vermin, and general lack of upkeep; the list goes on. Those helped by social workers can enjoy their fraction of a scrap living in deplorable squalor.

The resources that social workers can actually provide to the people they’re “helping” are so insufficient it seems somewhat surreal to refer to it as helping at all. This is the parsimonious bounty the system provides, and social workers are the smiling face of the miser doling it out. People don’t typically know what social workers do because even in the best case scenario, the real answer is so close to “nothing” that we would all collectively die of embarrassment if anyone actually looked into it.

Pictured: still another social worker

If our jobs are so trivial, how did we become noble? In this instance, it’s useful to look at the etymology of the term. Noble comes from the Latin nobilis, referring to the high-born families of the time: the nobility, duh! It is a moral framework steeped in hierarchy. Noble people are those who embody the ethic of the aristocracy, and social workers do exactly that.

The idea of the welfare state is to help the less fortunate, but capitalism can’t actually address any of the root causes of poverty and inequality because that would upend capitalism itself. Welfare is the compassion of capitalism whose sole purpose is to never solve anything. Monetary policy requires a percentage of the population to be unemployed; when there is inflation, the central bank raises interest rates in order to produce more poor people. Our system requires poverty, and if any of the methods utilized by that system ever did anything to address it, society would collapse into itself in a Dadaist paradox. Social workers are the systemic representation of that compassionate farce. We are noble because we are the morality of the capitalist elite. When approaching indigenous population, we are the ethic of the white settlers, taking up the white man’s burden to serve our captives’ need. We ease the worries of an otherwise apathetic middle-class, comforted knowing that social workers are there as a bulwark against the cognitive dissonance from class and racial guilt.

Pictured: a final disparaging caricature of social workers

We are not, however, a moral profession. As compassionate and as genuine as social workers tend to be, our “help” is often harm. Indigenous families do not look upon social workers as saviours but as destroyers, tearing up their families in the name of an oppressive fantasy of “doing good.” The impoverished do not see social workers as angels coming down from on high, but merely as a means of drowning less quickly. We try to be good, but good on whose terms? We try to help, but we’re in denial, cogs maintaining the facade of a benevolent state. True solutions would not involve social workers at all, but a restructuring of the world so that the horrifying outcomes of colonial capitalism would not be produced in the first place.

If the ethic of nobility is the delusion social workers use to sleep at night, it is useful to look at the Latin once more to try to break free from that corrupted reverie. We traditionally think of the vulgar as the offensive, the crass, the unclean. In its origin, however, it referred to the low-born, everyone else outside of the nobility. These are the people social workers are supposed to support, yet we remain detached and aloof. How can we bridge that gap? What would an ethic of the vulgar look like? What would social work practice look like if it embraced the vulgar instead of the noble?

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Categories Social Criticism

Superheroes: The Delusion of Power

Jun 30, 2024 //
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Power is typically seen as the capacity to act – with obviously varying degrees. A prisoner can pace their cell, do push-ups, and so on, but can’t act outside the limits of their cage. The President of the United States might not have the power to verbalize a complete thought, but he can do all the things the prisoner can, and more besides. They both have power, but one of them has far more power than the other.

I think this is a narrow view of power that is lacking one of its key components: need. The variations in power aren’t so much across the capacity to act per se, but the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The prisoner must accommodate the needs of the warden, the guard, the parole board, and so on. His needs are ranked quite low when contemplating which actions to take. The President of the United States, on the other hand, can skate by without acknowledging the needs of most of the planet. He might have to consider the needs of Benjamin Netanyahu, to a degree, as the Israeli Prime Minister has considerable power in this regard as well, but he certainly does not need to consider the needs of the Palestinians who are, for all intents and purposes, power-less.

How power is depicted goes a long way

Taking this needs-focused perspective of power opens up further understandings of how power works, and how impotent our approach to it actually is. If we consider our human needs (using Maslow’s hierarchy for the sake of simplicity), what we consider powerful can really only help us meet our most basic needs: food, water, safety, shelter. This can also help us define what might be considered ‘power’ as anything that can help us obtain these things without considering the needs of others – money, celebrity, access to opportunity (think Harvey Weinstein), and so on.

In case you need a refresher

There are way more needs than the basic ones, and power is useless in obtaining them. Love is elusive to those whose identity is based solely in their power, and this is highlighted in the common trope of the rich person worrying over whether they are loved as themselves or if those close to them are only after their money. Similarly with esteem: we think we respect power, but we really only respect what one does with it. Elon Musk isn’t respected because of his money, but because of his advocacy for free speech and his pursuit of a better world for humanity through clean energy and space exploration; or, he’s not, because of his advocacy for racism and his massive ego whose projects offset any climate good his cars might produce. His power is irrelevant; he is judged by his actions based on the capacity that he has to act – as anyone would be. Self-actualization goes without saying.

Someone with only their very most basic needs being met – such a thing to strive for…

So why is there this fixation on power? Why do so many people strive for it, often at the cost of their other needs? Why do we delude ourselves that power is somehow going to fulfill our lives when it literally cannot? The answer is obviously capitalism, you goons; it’s always capitalism.

Capitalism as an ideology requires an underclass to use their labour to produce the things needed by the more powerful. This required scarcity forces people into a situation of never having enough power, so our most basic needs can never be met. A housing market that makes shelter out of reach; low wages to make food and security luxuries; a “flexible labour market” (i.e. gig work) to make the underclass even more precarious in their ability to meet their basic needs.

We are then told that in order to get our needs met, we must compete laterally with others in our class. We must gain power by any means necessary, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to afford rent. Do not consider the needs of your neighbour; they are in competition with you! The only way for society to function is if there are winners and losers, and winners don’t need to accommodate anyone. This is the way.

Baby Yoda’s famous catchphrase, “Fuck you. I got mine!”

This isn’t to say that power didn’t exist prior to capitalism. Feudalism obviously had lords going head to head to obtain more power – it’s just that the regular people didn’t give a shit because they had their basic needs met. More people had access to a more diffuse power: land. If you had access to land, you had food, security, family, and so on, and didn’t see the point in striving for anything else. If you didn’t have land, there was still the commons which allowed a degree of needs to be met. There wasn’t as much wealth as we understand it today, but there didn’t really need to be; people had enough. Industrialization created urbanization which increased inequality and poverty which reduced the average person’s power, and the shrinking of the commons increased commodification which reduced normal people’s ability to get their needs met as basic needs became more and more unaffordable. As the West went through this transition, we peasants and proletarians gained political power through the institution of democracy, but lost it economically as the means of production shifted more and more to the ownership class.

This blog is technically more anarchistic than communistic, but Party Marx will always be welcome for discussions around the ownership of the means of production

This manufactured scarcity and proselytized ideology has deluded us into thinking that with power, we’ll finally be able to live the lives we want to have. To a degree this is true: we cannot achieve anything without our basic needs being met, and power is required to obtain them. The delusion arises when we forget that our goal is to get our needs met, and not power in-and-of itself. We want money in seeming ignorance that the entire purpose of money is to buy stuff – do we want the money or do we want the stuff? Do we want the power or do we want to have our needs met?

Also, wasn’t this article supposed to be about superheroes?

It has been this whole; you just had no idea!

Superheroes have superpowers which would include them in this analysis. It’s a little campy, but being more powerful than a locomotive is technically a power. As David Hume said, “Strength is a kind of power; and therefore the desire to excel in strength is to be considered as an inferior species of ambition.” Could Superman achieve his basic needs without taking into consideration the needs of others? Absolutely! That’s how we get Injustice and Homelander. This shit counts, however nerdy an ambition it might be.

Superman, of course, would never do such a thing in the traditional canon. That’s what makes him heroic. He doesn’t use his power for himself, and I’m going to argue that he doesn’t do it for the people of Metropolis either. The people of Metropolis don’t exist – they’re fictional. Superman doesn’t technically exist either, but the story of Superman does. The writers are producing this power, and the power of Superman is used to meet the needs of person reading his story. We feel secure against the threat of Zod. We feel safe from the machinations of Lex Luthor. This is how empathy works.

If our needs don’t supersede the needs of the hero, they become the villain. This is why the villain Homelander is still seen as a hero in an ever-increasing fascistic America – the people who watch The Boys don’t see any issue with what he’s doing, and their needs remain met by his actions. But traditional villains rob banks and try to take over the world, using their superpowers to meet their own needs. Disney’s new “sympathetic” Marvel villains have high ideals, but don’t consider the needs of others in their quest for it – this is how their villainy is displayed despite the validity of their ideology.

The face of accommodating the needs of others

The thing is, this glomming on to the powerful with the assumption that they’ll meet our needs exists outside the world of the superhero as well. In the traditional model, women (who are limited in their power) will seek out powerful men as a means of linking themselves with his power to help them get their own needs met in a world that wouldn’t allow them to be met otherwise. If there is abuse or violence, it is often endured out of a fear that her needs won’t be met without him – his power is all she has to keep herself from becoming powerless.

Under capitalism, there are more powerless people than just trad wives. Many of us live our lives with the bare minimum of power, scraping by as best we can. Wouldn’t it be nice to attach ourselves to some hero who would use their power to uplift our own? This is the allure of the tyrant. Surely I’ll be taken care of if we give more power to this person with whom I identify! Surely my station will be reduced if they are overthrown! We connect to the tyrant as we would to Superman, as some of us bizarrely do with Homelander – they will use their power to keep us safe. Our needs will be considered; the needs of the outsider be damned. But is the solution to our abusive boyfriend to make sure we land a nice one, or to adjust society so that women and men are equitable in their power, limiting the potential for abuse to happen in the first place? Such a world appears to be possible!

People are alive today who have witnessed significant changes in systems of power

The thing is, power is the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The powerful don’t need to consider us, so why would they? That’s how power maintains itself, so why abandon the working model? We, however, as a collective have more power than any individual. This is why platitudes are made about how the powerful will take care of us, as a manipulation. We are given speeches and scraps to delude us into thinking that we are better off with them having all the power, with us remaining powerless and allowing them to go unchallenged. Superman is a propagandic myth: the boyfriend who tells his girlfriend to never leave him, he’s going to take care of her, trust him.

Power cannot escape what it is; we have to escape power. We have to recognize the value of our neighbour and accommodate them accordingly. We have to recognize the life beyond our basic needs. Both of these perspective require giving up our pursuit of power. Power will never go away, our basic needs will always need to be met, but we can diffuse it. Just as democracy diffused political power, we must identify other aspects of power and diffuse them as well. Power where it exists today must be counterbalanced – this is often the project of the Left as we try to convince governments to allow the otherwise powerless access to their basic needs. It’s a faulty system as power remains relatively undisturbed, and this liberal redistribution does not address the root causes of the concentration of that power, but it’s what the system currently allows. We still have room to dream for more.

To quote a super-villain (notably, one later purchased by Disney), “When everyone is super, no one will be.” And we’d be better off for it.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism

Vancouver Is Dying, Part IV: Why This Matters

May 20, 2024 //
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Part I — Part II — Part III

I have outlined in broad terms why Aaron Gunn’s propagandistic pseudo-documentary fails to even begin to address the drug crisis in Vancouver. It ignores the actual causes of drug use, it cherry-picks data from already irrelevant sources, and it does not even attempt to rebut the massive amount of evidence supporting harm reduction, and, to a lesser extent, safe supply (mostly because it is a new, statistically small project with little data currently available). Instead, it demonizes drugs and through them the drug user, painting them as violent and unpredictable. He films tent cities, likely without consent, and never actually asks any of the residents how or why they’re in that situation. Drug users are a pornographic threat, dirty and alluring, and the only solution he offers is to utilize state violence to enforce abstinence by any means necessary.

The pornographic content that I know you’re here for!

Gunn suggests that he and those ideologically akin to him are the only ones who actually care about drug users. He claims the Woke Left want to keep drug users in the slums, stuck in addiction, stuck in poverty, and it is only by making drug users “better” that they can be saved. Much in the same way that infamous LGBT antagonist Anita Bryant claimed that she didn’t hate homosexuals, Gunn seeks salvation for the morally fallen. This is why there is so much emphasis in the real world of right-wing politics to force people who use drugs into treatment – they need to be saved! Of course, there aren’t enough beds out there for those who want to go into treatment voluntarily, but despite this miniscule logistical anomaly, we must force these sinners into repentance for their own good. You’ll hear talk of treatment beds as a panacea to the drug crisis without anyone actually pointing to solid evidence that bed-based/residential treatment actually works any better than anything else people are doing, with some evidence showing that the risk of overdose increases after treatment because the person’s opiate tolerance has evaporated. This is because treatment isn’t treatment in this context; it’s conversion therapy. “Beds” are only a measure of our capacity to eliminate sin. The goal is erasure, and erasure on a massive scale does not consider pesky irritants like research, studies, or the voices of the people being erased.

When the threat of hellfire isn’t enough!

This is why analyzing this kind of propaganda is important. Gunn released this trash leading up to the Vancouver municipal election, and the right-leaning ABC Party under Ken Sim won a solid majority on a platform nearly identical in ideology to that of Vancouver Is Dying – we need law and order to combat drug use and random violence! Interestingly, in trying to find years old news coverage about Sim’s platform, I stumbled on a fun little update to all those stranger attacks so prominent in the film – apparently there was a massive decrease in stranger attacks when the pandemic was winding down in 2022, and the police just didn’t release those statistics during the election campaign of the right-wing candidate they had endorsed. Remember how Gunn neglects the pandemic when talking about crime? Perhaps the fear of crime was sensationalized by opportunists hoping to push emotionally-driven policy with no regard for what the truth actually is. ANYWAY, I DIGRESS!

Who could have guessed??

So what does erasure look like in real world scenarios? Perhaps the event that received the most news coverage was the police sweep that cleared the encampment from Hastings Street which Gunn so callously captured in his more voyeuristic shots. This was completed without any thought as to where these human beings might go, and as expected, the problem didn’t go away – people just didn’t have their tents and meager belongings anymore. But there’s more: Vancouver’s ABC party shut down a street market that many homeless people utilized to acquire cheap secondhand goods, moving it to a less accessible indoor location with fewer stalls for vendors. These goods could be the result of theft and organized crime, dontcha know, which is scary! Getting rid of the observable and centralized market is obviously not going to reduce theft, but there is only one outcome that matters: erasure. The city of Vancouver also chose not to renew the lease for the Thomus Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site which has a centralized location close to an abundance of drug users. With overdose deaths through the roof, it sure would make sense to have a space where it could be done safely with some medical oversight! But alas, erasure demands the elimination of anything that might support the scary and bad thing. There’s more: Vancouver downsized CRAB Park – the only sanctioned tent city – for safety reasons. Tent cities are the never-ending symbol of erasure as they pop up and are cleared off with metronomic consistency, from Oppenheimer to Strathcona Park to one that popped up and was shut down near to where I live – all eventually cordoned off by the blue metal fence.

Seriously though, check out the Crackdown podcast linked above about Oppenheimer Park being shut down

It’s not just Vancouver, and that’s my point. An encampment in Prince George was evicted as well, leading the federal housing advocate to call it a “human rights violation” based solely on the fact that it was evicting people from somewhere with nowhere else for them to go. Federally, the Conservatives have been railing against the science of harm reduction, going so far as to blame every last drug overdose death in BC on decriminalization – a pilot project meant to reduce police interactions with drug users (not actually reduce drug deaths) which was a thrilling success, with a 77% decrease in possession charges and a 96% decrease in drug possession seizures! The problem was that people started to see more drug use – the exact opposite of erasure – and that made them uncomfortable. This discomfort unfortunately is the perfect gateway drug to emotionally-driven tripe like that being peddled by Gunn! (Of note, Gunn claims that police don’t actually harass drug users, which is clearly not borne out by the statistic that 96% of police seizures were under the 2.5 grams for personal use before that amount was decriminalized – perhaps this was part of when he mentions that police will “stop and talk to people on the street.” Even if someone isn’t being locked up, that doesn’t eliminate the harassment!)

I’m sure Gunn would comply without complaint to enduring this repeatedly and without reason

What if we could reduce the harms of hard drugs to such an extent that they were no more harmful than alcohol (which in social costs is technically higher than heroin, but haha who cares, right!?). Anyway, let’s say that the drug supply was sufficiently harmonized that it was no longer causing overdoses, that the tools to use it safely were widely available to eliminate the threat of diseases, that the crimes associated with its sale were eliminated, and so on. It is possible – remember we literally used to give legal opiates to children! This is what Gunn fears – he’s actually quite explicit in this when he cites the dangers of “normalization.” What if opiates became so banal that their use was equivalent to enjoying a beer at a hockey game? Or equivalent to cigarettes, where they were discouraged but still mostly tolerated? Perish the God damned thought!

To bring things back to Anita Bryant, it’s important to remember that talking about doing anything about the AIDS epidemic was fearfully seen to be “normalizing” homosexuality. If the homosexuals are dying, well, that’s only because they’re sinners. We’re the only ones trying to save them by praying the gay away, and anyone trying to increase their life expectancy is actually endorsing homosexuality – they’re basically sinners themselves. The parallels to Vancouver Is Dying are endless, and the previous allusion to conversion therapy is depressingly apt. If drug use becomes normal, then people might start being accepting toward drug users!!

Eagerly awaiting the parody that sings about how everyone has unmanaged childhood trauma to a catchy tune!

In my professional life as a health care social worker, I came across multiple people who saw this film and were swayed by it – people who ought to have known better – but I get it! Emotions run deep, and playing to them is a likely way to win in politics, particularly on the right. Crime is scary! The stereotypical drug user, an unkempt man covered in filth and drool with a needle sticking out of his arm, is gross! These are valid emotions! But manipulating those emotions to erase a vulnerable population because you think their lifestyle is a sin has been done before with similarly deadly consequences. Between 1981 and 1988 in the United States, there were 46,134 deaths related to AIDS. In Canada, with a fraction of the American population, there have been 42,494 deaths between 2016 and 2023 related to opiates. I know that it’s not a contest, but my point is that the fear, the moralizing, and the disinformation being put out is just as disgusting now as it was then and that this shit matters. These deaths matter. Anyone who seeks to erase a population is contributing to those deaths because the outcome is essentially the same – the drug user exists no longer by one means or another, and the likes of Gunn don’t seem to mind which route they follow. They don’t see a disease, just a people they define as a disease.

To conclude this excruciatingly long series of posts, Aaron Gunn, your film is toxic and manipulative, degrades human beings, and encourages their deaths. Now you are hoping to become a federal Conservative, with looming control over these people’s lives. A pie to your face is the least you deserve.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism
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