psyCommons

Today I attended ‘leadership’ training. Yet strangely, there is no context to our work. No mention of social welfare cuts, care worker’s low wages, endless organisational restructures or organisational penny pinching; this is all off the agenda. Something we must ‘park’.

We must also implicitly ‘park’ other messy realities that may not generate ‘value’: the anxiety, stresses, strains, impulses, pressures, incontinence, medication errors, poor judgments and living conditions – and instead try to stay focused on suffocating the human, social and political being within and instigate ‘positive thinking’. ‘Polly-Annas’ are here preferred to ‘Eeyores’.

I subsequently spend the most part of the day trying to reconcile this with what we intuitively know to be true about the current social and political moment. The austerity agenda obscured by the so-called ‘efficiency’ drive and the incumbent organisational actors, practices and processes that remove senior managers and policy makers from seeing or being truly responsible and accountable for the human consequences of their decisions.

This is being physically, socially and psychically absent. Disembodied decision makers. Facelessness, alienation and obscurity, a symphony of life under neoliberalism. « Read the rest of this entry »