Liberation psychology and Occupy

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover how demoralized people can regain the energy necessary to take back the power that they had handed over to illegitimate authorities.

The Occupy movement has tapped into the energy supply that many oppressed and exploited people ultimately discover. We discover it when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy.

With liberation psychology, we no longer take seriously the elite’s rigged games that had sucked us in and then sucked the energy out of us. We move beyond denial and depression that the U.S. electoral process is a rigged game, an exercise in learned helplessness in which we are given the choice between politicians who will either (1) screw us, or (2) screw us. We begin to engage in other “battlegrounds for democracy.”

Corporate-collaborating journalists, politicians and other lackeys of the elite ask, “What are the goals of the Occupy movement?” They are deaf to the answer no matter how loud we yell. If they did understand, they would then have to stop being lackeys. But their elite bosses do understand that the Occupy movement is a demand for economic fairness—a frightening prospect for the elite. The elite then divide into two camps: (1) throw the demonstrators a bone so they go away, but give them no power; or (2) give them nothing, just destroy them. This is not news to liberation psychologists.

Origins of Liberation Psychology

Ignacio Martin-Baró (1942–1989) was both a Jesuit priest and a social psychologist in El Salvador, and it is he who should be given credit for popularizing the term liberation psychology. As a priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed marginalized people throughout Latin America.

Martin-Baró’s liberation theology, his liberation psychology, and his activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life.

Read the rest at AlterNet

How the Occupy Movement Helped Americans Move Beyond Denial and Depression to Action

by Bruce Levine, a practicing psychologist

How often do we hear people say that they aren't going to bother to vote or otherwise participate in the political process because what they do "doesn't make any difference?"

With critical consciousness, individuals can identify both external oppression and self-imposed internal oppression. Critical consciousness is aimed at ending fatalism so that one can free oneself from self-imposed powerlessness.

This is a sine qua non of ending the social, political and economic that neoliberalism has wrought globally.

While mental health professionals are trained to believe in the political neutrality of prevailing psychological theories, these theories are not politically neutral. Martin-Baró astutely observed that many mainstream psychological schools of thought—be they behavioral or biochemical—accept the maximization of pleasure as the motivating force for human behavior, the same maximization of pleasure that is assumed by neoclassical economic theorists. This ignores the human need for fairness, social justice, freedom, and autonomy as well as other motivations that would transform society. [emphasis added]

As Aquinas wrote at the outset to his On Being and Essence, paraphrasing Aristotle: "A small mistake at the beginning becomes a great one by the end." The idea that the pursuit of individual pleasure, which economists call "maximum utility," is bad philosophy and pernicious ethics, and it results in dangerous politics and disastrous economics — as should be obvious to anyone with who is not a sociopath. Apparently some folks were out to lunch when mirror neurons were passed out, and they have managed to get themselves put in charge.