Forced labor on a population in crisis in the era of global polycrisis

By JD Goulet

Summer 2023 (exact publication date unknown)

I am in a perpetual state of feeling big feelings these days. Mainly rage. It’s the curse of being the kind of person who is motivated, more than anything else in life, by a sense of moral justice. There’s so much injustice in the world. It causes me great anguish. I’ve been trying to sift through all the things in my head to write this piece for several days now, scaling it back from over 7,000 words to something hopefully more manageable to the busy, modern reader. My mind isn’t as sharp as it once was, for reasons you will see. For better or worse, I’m just going to get this out there. Out of my head. So I can move on. So many drafts… so many things I want to share with you… things I want you to know… things I need out of my head…

So, I’ve narrowed this post down to using two catalysts of wrath that crossed my path last week that intersect to touch on the following three points:

1. The morbidly rich members of the Ruling Class class are continuing to enjoy the extraordinary benefits of their ill-gotten status.
2. The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) in corporate-controlled media and higher-ed institutions are deploying propaganda operations to manufacture consent of the masses.
3. We, the ordinary people, are left scrambling to cobble together enough resources to survive the global polycrisis¹ that has been created and upheld by the former, the Ruling Class and the PMC.

Catalyst the 1st

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze mid-sentence, possibly experiencing a stroke or seizure, while delivering a press conference last week. I despise this man for the incalculable damage he has inflicted on the people of the United States (and the world, since nothing in the U.S. stays in the U.S.), but I also know exactly what it feels like to suddenly experience the effects of a traumatic brain injury in the middle of addressing a group of professional colleagues. However, I also know what it’s like to lack the privilege of getting timely, quality, affordable medical care and to lack the ability to take the time off necessary to recover. This extraordinarily evil man, his colleagues, and their owners are the ones to blame for that.

In February 2022, I was rear ended by another driver and a nightmare scenario unfolded. As the primary income earner in my household, I had no choice but to keep working despite suffering from a concussion and debilitating physical injuries. (I eventually learned, many months after the accident when I could finally get an MRI in the overburdened and failing U.S. medical system, that I’d sustained a stroke-like brain injury.)

The choices I had available to me were to work through the pain and mental fog as best I could, at the risk of a more prolonged and less complete recovery, or face imminent homelessness with my loved ones. The violence of the capitalist system demands we keep making the Masters money or die.

This is so, even when:

• We can’t afford housing.
• We can’t afford healthcare.
• We can’t afford to heat and cool our homes.
• We can’t afford our food.
• Millions of us live where our governments are pivoting hard right into fascism and stripping us of what little rights we had remaining.
• Our planet is becoming increasingly incapable of sustaining human life.

“Get back to work,” we are told. “There’s nothing to see here, and if you do see something, well it’s your own fault or your individual problem to solve.”

We are, quite literally, existing in this mind-bending liminal space between having to go to work and facing our own extinction.

Catalyst the 2nd

The social media content below, posted by the very organization I had been working for throughout that previously mentioned year of hell, sent me into “Your honor, it was clearly an act of self defense!” levels of outrage.

How to focus at work when the world is falling apart… There will be moments when world events break our hearts: a series of murders targeting Asian women in New York, the fall of ­­_Roe v. Wade_, the war in Ukraine, mass shootings, nationwide political polarization. Personal grievances are often things we need to manage and overcome individually. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, “Don’t look up.”

This is what psychologically abusive capitalist propaganda masquerading as empathetic workplace mental health advice looks like. The message is, “We recognize everything is terrible, and even though we are a significant part of the problem, we want you to believe it’s just your personal problem. Oh, and remember, you are all alone.”

In his latest book, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture,” Dr. Gabor Maté wrote:

A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment… We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.

The best way I can find to cope with all this rage I feel is to use it to call out the bullshit and hopefully get more people to recognize the techniques the Ruling Class, their PMC goons, and the capitalist simps are using to keep people blaming themselves and each other instead of placing the blame squarely where it belongs.

Your enslavers, and that’s really what they are, want you to feel alone and powerless. They want you to blame “others” who are even more vulnerable than you are. They want to wear you down to exhaustion and keep you too mentally occupied to think your own thoughts. These are strategies to keep you in your place and maintain the balance of power in their favor. The world they have fashioned strips us of our agency and our humanity. But we don’t have to fall for their abusive, gaslighting propaganda. Learn to recognize who is behind these messages and what their motives are.

I want to tell you something else. It’s about mental health. Mental health is something I was told I lacked for most of my life. I was told it was genetic. A chemical imbalance. Poor habits. Poor diet. Poor character. My suffering. My fault. My problem to deal with. Choose: the pills that disable me or the mental illness that disables me? Choose: the pills I can’t afford or losing everything. Your job. Your family. Your home. You’re useless. Surplus. Disabled. A burden.

It was all a lie. And they are lying to you, too.

You aren’t depressed and anxious (or suffering from attention “deficit,” but that’s a topic for another post) because of a “chemical imbalance.” You are depressed and anxious because those are normal reactions to an unsafe environment (though sometimes these feelings are reactions to past unsafe environments, I’m going to focus on the present sources of distress for purposes of this writing).

I had a revelation a few years ago…

When you touch something dangerously hot, your natural reflex is to stop touching the hot thing that could cause your body physical harm. Feelings of depression and anxiety are your body’s natural, reflexive response to something unhealthy and dangerous in your environment. These are signals that you need to leave or alter the unsafe environment you are in.

I’m not advocating anyone to stop taking drugs that may actually help them cope better. But as a society, we need to insist that large numbers of people having to take anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications in perpetuity isn't a desirable or viable solution to our systemic ills. Without addressing the sources of our collective harm, we're all continuing to touch the too-hot thing and getting burned. Maybe the medicine will make the pain more bearable for some of us, but we're still burning.

Understand that labels and diagnoses are and always have been political tools of the powerful. The word “work” and other terms related to employment appear in the DSM-5 over 400 times (seriously, I ran a term search on the PDF myself). The measure of health, as determined by the PMC intermediaries for the Ruling Class, is how capable a person is of being productive at work. It seems to me that the structural goal of mental health treatment has been less centered on individual wellbeing, and more on maximizing the surplus value that can be extracted from us.

Those who benefit from maintaining these conditions would love nothing more than for everyone to take (expensive) prescription drugs (but definitely not the illegal ones Big Pharma can’t profit from) forever to mask the symptoms and keep on slaving away while our mental and physical health continues to deteriorate.

We are being collectively gaslit, drugged, worn down, and violently forced into compliance. So, what do we do about it? We organize. We unionize. We show the Ruling Class that we—the ones that perform the labor that creates the goods and perform the services we need and want—are the only real source of value in the world. We stop allowing these useless parasites to steal everything from us.

We stop believing that choosing between Politican A or Politican B is enough to save us alone. It’s just not. We recognize that the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended. We recall that no oppressed group has ever been simply handed their liberation, ever.

Liberation comes by fighting for it.

Liberation comes by inconveniencing complacent people.

Liberation comes by disrupting normal routines.

Liberation comes by making the comfortable feel uncomfortable.

Liberation comes by making the people who look away see.

The more they resist, the more we increase our efforts until we defeat our oppressors and win our liberation. The alternative is laying down and dying.

I am not willing to lay down and die for them. Are you?

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JD Goulet (they/she) is an American-born former corporate writer/editor & learning product designer, political leader, Planned Parenthood board member, and secular movement leader. Throughout her career, she has been an educator and champion for inclusion and wellbeing, especially at the intersection of disability, neurodiversity, sexuality, gender, and class. Their bylines appear in Harvard Business Review, Tumbleweird Magazine, Solarpunk Stories, and various regional publications. She lives in Portugal with her wife and two dogs.

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Footnotes

1. Global polycrisis: the interconnected global crises that are entwining and worsening one another in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. For further reading, see We’re on the brink of a ‘polycrisis’ – how worried should we be?, ‘Polycrisis’ may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes, and Navigating the Polycrisis—Life in Turbulent Times. ↩