A Key Aspect of Status Quo Maintenance
“We need to look for structural problems…that’s very hard for Americans to do. When we see that there is a problem, we immediately think in terms of individual responsibility or personality or commitment. We do this a lot, with everything. If there’s crime, we assume ‘well, people are evil, we have to lock them up’. If that doesn’t work, ‘lock more people up for longer periods of time’. If there’s poverty, it’s because people lack the desire to take responsibility for their own lives, get them on track, and so on. If we have what we believe are educational problems we assume the teachers are unqualified or the kids are not motivated. We need to punish or reward them until they finally see the light. As opposed to looking at the structural analysis of problems.” - Alfie Kohn
In social psychology, fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute behavior to aspects of the individual, rather than the environmental pressures on that person. In my opinion, this tendency serves the maintenance of the status quo. Status quo maintenance requires putting the focus on the squeaky wheel, rather than the structural factors that cause the wheel to become squeaky in the first place.
Another example would be in a dysfunctional family system where the person that points out the underlying, intergenerational trauma becomes the designated “sick one”, in a kind of collective delusion. Efforts go into modifying that person, rather than leveraging their awareness to improve the whole system, such as having everyone’s true needs met.
In an education-related example, Alfie Kohn says, “Internalizing self-discipline is often toxic....The people focusing on ‘grit’ and ‘self-regulation’ are not fixing the schools to make them better, they’re fixing the kids to make them conform to whatever they’re told to do. Cui bono, as the Latins say - who benefits from focusing on self-regulation and grit and fixing the kid. The people who now don’t have to make the schools worth going to, because the problem has now been individualized, the way our culture loves to do.”
In addition to schools and families, you see this in the mental health and psychiatry industries, where professionals will unconsciously engage in a kind of victim-blaming. Individuals that are victims of dysfunctional systemic dynamics are told they have a “brain imbalance”. There are even mental health institutions that believe it’s more humane and holistic to say that such individuals have character defects rather than problems with their physiology. This logic invites more overtly abusive treatments. Commenting on this issue, Psychiatrist Dr. David M. Allen says, “These sorts of interventions presume that if someone is upset, angry, or unhappy with the way the world is treating them, then, therefore, there must be something wrong with them. Even when they are in fact being abused horribly.”
On this issue, psychologist and critic of psychiatry, Dr. Bruce Levine says, “In addition to pathologizing normal behavior, the mental health profession also diverts us from examining a society that creates the ingredients—helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, and isolation—that cause emotional difficulties. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are natural human reactions to loss in our society of autonomy and community. Thus, the mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo.”
This approach can be perceived as helping the individual, but in reality, it’s helping to maintain the status quo of the environment, to the distinct detriment of the individual. For example, kids forced to adopt a “growth mindset” or “grit” with regards to stupid tasks, may enter adulthood and find that they have lost contact with their soul, and may wonder why they have anxiety, depression, or substance abuse problems. This is because those mindset interventions ignored the true underlying issue, which is that the environment was encouraging the individual to passively accept meaninglessness. Even worse, they may be conditioned to shame themselves for these mental health issues, as though it’s some kind of a character flaw, when in reality, it’s the result of the conditioning of a flawed environment. This would become clear to the person, as they do the inner work to resolve those issues. That self-shaming is the internalization of the misguided thinking of those that caused the problem in the first place.
This bias towards individualizing problems, rather than validating how people are affected by their environment, would indicate that an enormous number of people are being programmed with false and toxic ideas about themselves. The impact and loss of value as a result of this lack of awareness is potentially enormous. I would humbly submit that it would be better to determine the actual needs of the person and lean towards empowering their authenticity, even if that challenges the status quo in some way.
You can only truly empower the individual to transcend their problems and stop being a victim, by actually dealing with how they really are a victim to larger systemic forces. Yet our culture often confuses denial with empowerment, when we tell people to “stop being a victim.” Avoiding victim mentality is important, but it can’t happen without doing the work on any genuine victimhood.
This aspect of status quo maintenance is a barrier to progress because dealing with systemic issues can help us find creative solutions that could dramatically improve things for large numbers of people. Turning the individuals against themselves so that they stop making noise about systemic problems hurts people and promotes a kind of mediocrity that we can’t afford.
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