#Healing

Modern ideals of healing and where they come from

A hyper-individualist sees the individual as an self-sufficient unit. The relationalist says, A person a node in a network; a personality is a movement toward others.

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Hyper-individualism leads to tribalism. People eventually rebel against the isolation and meaninglessness of hyper-individualism by joining a partisan tribe. This seems like relation but is actually its opposite. If a healthy community is based on mutual affection, the tribalist mentality is based on mutual distrust.

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism. Society tells her to want independence, but she has declared her interdependence. Society says we live in a materialist reality, but she says we live in an enchanted reality. Society tells her to keep her

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Much of modern social thought, drawing on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and modern economics, sees human beings as fundamentally selfish. Children, Freud wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” Most of modern thought was written by men, and often a certain sort of alpha men,

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Building solidarity infrastructures, entrenched in opposing hierarchy and centralisation of power, is crucial. This requires addressing the ways in which we have internalised the oppressive systems around us and dismantling those structures, first within ourselves and in our day-to-day relations. This might require at times venturing into... See more

Leil Zahra Mortada • Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism — Against Catastrophe

The mindset of singularity takes away from the collective processes of healing and self/collective care which centre addressing systematic injustices. For example, instead of healing through a collective process of transformative justice, one is made to understand that justice - as a cornerstone for healing - can only be attained and understood... See more

Leil Zahra Mortada • Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism — Against Catastrophe

This misconstrued belief around the singularity of catastrophes renders living under injustices in times of so-called normalcy as acceptable, not requiring urgent intervention. It also renders the daily struggles due to, say, structural racism, as “personal problems.”

Leil Zahra Mortada • Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism — Against Catastrophe

ll be justice someday, high in heaven. Here on earth, charity does not disturb injustice. It only seeks to disguise it” (Galeano, 1998). Furthermore, saviourism/charity is not interested in justice, nor in changing conditions of exploitation, for it is dependent on the continuity of suffering in order for it to exist. Suffering needs to continue to... See more

Leil Zahra Mortada • Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism — Against Catastrophe

an, 1982). As could be seen during and after Hurricane Katrina in the United States (2010) and the earthquake in Haiti (2010), the grave problem with Friedman’s argument is that “real change” and “alternatives” are the very opportunity through which - as Naomi Klein argues - “think tanks and land developers started talking about ‘clean sheets’ and... See more