What if there were enough for everybody?
Sounds like communism.
In a previous post, I talked about how trauma and trigger issues cause people to behave badly, and that led me to thinking about scarcity and how artificial it is, and how it’s used as a tool to enforce hierarchies.
If you’re $250,000 in debt and have no health care, there’s no way you can just go out and start a business, create art, do something radical and creative and possibly world-changing. You have to get “a good job” and blah blah blah.
How do you correct trauma and return agency to people? The same way you do to a reactive or shut down animal.
The first thing you do is make them feel safe. You give them shelter; you remove the threat of punishment; you let them withdrawn and process if they need to. You make very small demands on them and let them heal. Wounded creatures have to heal.
My friend C. L. Polk expresses it well here:
So what if we stepped away from the Libertarian root-hog-or-die model of society and just… gave people the space to feel better? Made sure they were fed and housed to a minimum standard, let them have access to books and television and health care? Exactly what you would do with a rescue animal, in other words.
We know this works. We follow the damn Instagram accounts and watch those fucking youtube videos. Why are we so willing to believe that it works to heal a traumatized animal but insist on believing the way to make things better for traumatized humans is to punish them?
What we're doing now is making things worse. What if we were just kind?
We’re mammals too. What works on a horse will work on me.
I know, because I have experienced it.