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Social pain, political weapon of digital capitalism
x Marcos Roitman Rosenmann: It seeks to create pain, enhance its effects on people. Make it part of a flexible and submissive behavior, where pain paralyzes
We live in a sick society. The demonstrations are many. The use of antidepressants, anxiolytics, and opium derivatives show unusual behavior. The oxycodone crisis in the United States has turned pain into business for pharmaceutical companies. Likewise, it has become an epidemic to which autolytic behaviors are added.
Self-harm is an escape route for millions of people in the world. Fear of failure is one of its most common causes. Young people and adolescents are among the most vulnerable population. Damaging oneself becomes a way of feeling free, of breaking ties.
It is not the pains of the body that provoke the desire to self-harm. On the contrary, they are the social pains, those dependent on the structures of exploitation, domination and inequality.
The loss of confidence and loneliness act as catalysts for a pain whose way to combat it is to violate the body itself.
Depression, neurosis or borderline personality disorder, characterized by the way in which the person thinks and feels in relation to himself and others, are symptoms of a reality typical of the 21st century and digital capitalism.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their essay Equality, how more egalitarian societies improve collective well-being, warn: In Britain 22 per cent of 15-year-olds have hurt themselves at least once, and 43 per cent. One hundred of that group claimed to hurt themselves once a month. In Australia, a study with adolescents indicates that 2 million young people injure themselves sometime in their lives. In the United States and Canada, data indicates that between 13 and 24 percent of schoolchildren are injured voluntarily and children as young as seven years old cut themselves, scratch themselves, burn themselves, pull their hair, cause injuries and break bones deliberately.
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These behaviors are rooted in a change in the way pain is perceived. “It is hard to imagine that mental anguish can turn life into such a painful experience that physical pain is liberating and provides a sense of control (…), but many children, young people and adults say they injure themselves by feeling shame, demanding themselves or believe that they are not up to the task ”.
Pain builds and articulates. Thus, we enter another dimension in which behaviors towards pain can be induced and recreated. According to US Colonel Richard Szafranski “it is a question of influencing the consciousness, perceptions and will of the individual, entering the neocortical system (…) of paralyzing the cycle of observation, orientation, decision and action . In short, to nullify the ability to understand ”.
Fear and pain, a perfect combination. The fear is oriented towards political goals. Their claims can be unemployment, insecurity, hunger, exclusion or poverty. In this context, pain strongly enters the articulation of daily life, mutates into a control mechanism. And here the concept is lost.
William Davies, in his study Nervous states, how emotions have taken over society, emphasizes: “Until the second half of the 20th century, the body's ability to experience pain was generally considered a sign of health and not as a something that had to be altered using analgesics and anesthetics (…). The patient who simply asks ‘end the pain’ or ‘make me happy’ is not demanding an explanation, but the mere cessation of the condition (…). The border that separates the interior of the body begins to be less clear (…). In essence, it strips suffering of any larger sense or context. It places pain in the position of an irrelevant and completely personal phenomenon ”.
The social pain, the collective suffering, the consciousness of suffering, fades into an experience impossible to be communicated. It loses all its strength. Being happy, eliminating pain or diverting it towards a personal experience, deactivates social and political criticism, joining antisystemic behaviors.
But at the same time, the pain is instrumentalized. In this context, it is an effective weapon. It seeks to create pain, enhance its effects on people. Make it part of a flexible and submissive behavior, where pain paralyzes. In this sense, the construction of behaviors based on pain management is favored by the development of Big Data and the interconnection of devices capable of penetrating the depths of the mind-brain.
Augmented reality under artificial intelligence makes it possible to expand the world of pain in all directions. The so-called Internet of things becomes an inexhaustible source of emotions and feelings, forging states of mind capable of bending the will under the political control of social pain. And most worryingly, it is in the hands of private companies.
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