Learned Helplessness and the new New Deal

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 08, 2005 · 7:32 PM PDT

2005/10/08 · 19:32

I am dismayed to hear the right wing talk about why people failed to "take care" of themselves in New Orleans. The party line is that the "welfare state" causes people to become dependent, so they don't take care of themselves, even in a hurricane.

However, there is another, much better psychological state which well explains what was happening - the concept of learned helplessness.

This was derived from animal models. When animals are placed in an environment and shocked, they escape quickly. However, after they are restrained and then shocked repeatedly, they will fail to escape, even when an escape is readily available. They will just cower and whine. This complex response has been used to explain depression in humans.

This is analogous to what was experienced by many of the poorer people in New Orleans. They have spent a lifetime trying to succeed with little improvement in their lot. When they try, they fail, because they are in a system that works against them. Finally, like the animal that cowers in the face of pain rather than trying to escape, they just sit and wait for the pain to pass. In this case, waiting placed them in the way of the hurricane, and then in the Superdome, and then in the military state that New Orleans became. They no longer believed that they could make things better, not because they had been pampered by a welfare state, but because they had never had success no matter how hard they tried.

Because I work with poor people, I see this every day. Asked what they want in life, those who have been out of work for only a little time talk about their wishes and plans. But I also see people who have been injured and have gone through a worker's compensation system that thwarts them at every step of the way, telling them that they are faking their very real pain. I see people who have applied for every available job and never gotten a call to say thanks for the application, I see people who are knocked down again and again by a system that makes achieving even the basic necessities almost impossible.

And when they are confronted with disaster, many of them just freeze. They wait for it to pass, not knowing that they can do anything to change their lives. They have never seen the system really help them. Any God they worship is distant and negative. They have ceased to believe that they have basic rights to security and happiness.

A public policy that responds to people's needs, programs that ask people what they need, what they can do to achieve that, and what kind of help they need to succeed is very different from a "hand out welfare state". We need to find ways to give people that strength to care for themselves. We will never do it by blaming them for the depradations of a system that cares nothing about them.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.