John Clarke, former major organizer of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, posted the following on Facebook a couple of days ago:
Not long after OCAP got started in the early 90s, I got an invitation to talk about our struggles at a community meeting in a small town in eastern Ontario. The organizers asked that we meet in a local restaurant to discuss the agenda of the meeting before it got started.When I got there, I found that another guest speaker had been invited and he represented an initiative that, in its own unattractive way, was quite remarkable. He had given his venture a name that escapes me but, since it really came down to the concept of positive awareness, I’ll use that term.This man had gone to the appropriate ministry and obtained a huge grant to travel the province promoting positive awareness and this particular evening was one of his stopovers. He had a budget that provided hotel accommodation and meals, travel costs and a salary befitting an upscale professional.The only promotional material he had was some one sheet outlines of the philosophy he was advancing. It was simply a succinct expression of bourgeois ideology asserting that, with the right attitude and motivation, you could be anything you wanted to be. The ideas of the dynamic and ambitious shape the world. Calvin, Hamlet and Bishop Berkeley were all there in simplified form.What was quite astounding, however, was the utter charlatanism of the whole exercise. There was no course of education being offered, no advocacy of any kind and no local groups were being formed. He was just travelling around, at public expense, spouting some abstract ideological propositions.Of course, he had some basic talents to pull this off. He had a line of patter, read people well and had a supply of jokes at the ready. He was obviously well aware of the risk of an emperor’s new clothes situation where someone would expose the fact that his whole operation was meaningless fluff. During the meal and again in the meeting, there were a couple of situations where perplexed people asked what exactly his positive awareness venture was doing. He deflected this by explaining that the question couldn’t be answered because the great beauty of positive awareness was that it was something different for everyone, like a Divine Mystery.What’s fascinating about this scam is that it was an exercise in publicly funded uselessness that was taking place in the midst of brutal social cutbacks and under the mantra of austerity. Yet, this trickster could submit a funding proposal and line up this soft little number with the full approval of bureaucrats who were otherwise busy defunding important community services and valid advocacy initiatives.It goes without saying that the PA man wasn’t unique. Provided the right notes get played, even under the harshest austerity regimes, there is no end of money available for bullshit.
My own experience is that many so-called professionals (social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, government bureaucrats, principals, superintendents of schools) express “meaningless fluff”–which the left rarely challenge. For example, many psychologists use “mindfulness” these days as a cure-all, but mindfulness is largely quackery in disguise. How many leftists challenge such quackery?
Much of the left these days is so afraid to challenge anyone out of fear of being “isolated” or being “sectarian.”
The Abolitionary 