[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about why the ruling paradigm has been deaf to HR demands and what to do to confront it. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–A crude form of Social Darwinism* pervades the modern ethos. (S. Razavi)
—Is the existing gap between our intuition and its applicability one of our main weaknesses?
*: Survival of the fittest, i.e., inequality, wealth gaps and power hierarchies are considered natural and justified; justifies laissez faire Capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and racism.
1. In the context of the modern Western hegemonic discourse, progress has meant and means inequity and inequality; reason has meant and means self-interest, and individualism has meant and means greed. (M. K. Hassan)
2. Furthermore, the Western development paradigm can be accused of intellectual incest –a situation that leads to negating and shutting out new ideas, i.e., to a situation of near self-imposed blindness. (V. Ramaswamy)
3. Actually, the mainstream approach of the above paradigm is primarily one of damage control, i.e., “make the minimum changes to effect the maximum preservation of the status–quo”.
4. So, to preserve the status-quo, training (and the clever use of the media) are closely related to conscious or unconscious efforts to westernize, i.e., to fit its tenets into the ruling paradigm so that, for instance, the higher the technical skills, the higher the social status. Training reproduces a social division of labor where an educated elite performs the leadership role. Training does not contribute to a more egalitarian social division of labor; it reinforces the capitalist division of labor by producing more efficient technocrats, planners, engineers and skilled workers** —thus the need to transform educational and training institutions. Students are not to be taught to imitate; it is for them to be educated to think by themselves. (Moreover, ponder: only the rich countries have the luxury of adhering to a scientific education detached from immediate applicability). (Kihinde Mushakoji)
**: In the Capitalism-centered economy, knowledge, skills and labor are marketable commodities; they are sold for a price. In the new paradigm, economic means, knowledge, skills and labor rights are to be given to the world community in an exercise of responsibility and of stewardship. (Management Institute for Social Change, Malaysia).
What history is asking us to do
–Be reminded: No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. (A. Einstein)
5. Among many other priority actions, we are asked to confront the ruling paradigm more in the spirit of dialectics than just criticizing its use of linear causation to explain the sorry situation we find ourselves-in.
6. Maybe, civil disobedience will be needed. But civil disobedience has to do more than disrupt. It must enlighten people and enable them/us to see the problem, as well as the (potential) solution and how our futures are connected. (Stuart Gillespie)
7. Social revolutions happen in two phases. First, people realize the current system is not working and then they realize that everybody else has realized it too. This is when things start to take off, when people come together, energies converge and coalesce and a movement is born. (Brian Eno 2022) Where are you/we on this?***
***: Following the old proverb about preferring a known evil to an untried good, so many of us are reluctant to accept, and act upon, the new worrisome world reality; this, for personal reasons, either for religious or ideological reasons or from having received favors from the (former) regime and not being decisive enough to tackle the old, dying reality (paradigm). (Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Il Gatopardo)
8. It thus becomes a matter of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard over the guardians? …of the dying paradigm) Only ourselves, because these guardians of the paradigm have betrayed us and will continue betraying us. (Alfred de Zayas, r.i.p.)
9. So, unless we revolutionize the ideological foundations of the (Western) dying paradigm, little is going to happen in terms of real sustainable development. (T. Verherst) Therefore, updating the meaning of human development requires militancy and ways of doing politics that move towards the new paradigm. (Luis Weinstein)
Bottom line
–The crisis of the current paradigm consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot (yet) be born. (Gramsci)
–Yes, we live in a world that is still in need of new truths –or old ones that no one has, for too long, wanted to believe-in and act-on. (Claudio Sepulveda) Actually, irrationally held truths have been more harmful than reasoned errors. (Henry Huxley) …or more facetiously, it has been said that half truths are like half bricks –you can throw them farther. (J. S. James)
The way things work, knowledge is owned by the ruling scientific paradigm
—Western social sciences often use models of reality whose ideological function is obfuscation and the establishment of political parameters for stagnant or retrogressive social policies. (R. S. Edari)
10. It seems to be much more satisfying to Western social scientists to do basic research than to cause something basic to happen. So much knowledge is built-up for so little benefit!**** (Alan Berg)
****: I always thought the divide between research and action and the idea that researchers should not hold political views to be completely unrealistic and self-defeating. There is a quaint old notion that this would compromise a researcher’s objectivity and credibility. But we all have positions, values and beliefs. We need to be explicit about them, not disavow them. Any professional (researcher or activist) needs to demonstrate honesty, integrity and open-mindedness in whatever she or he does.
11. Working with a research organization that is supported by a public or private entity is to implicitly take a position. Silence and inaction are not neutrality! Only by researching real-world facts allows us to see the same roadblocks, entry points and windows of opportunity claim holders see. Most of the barriers to change lie in ‘black box’ zones of political decision-making. We need to shine a light in these boxes. (S. Gillespie)
12. Structural changes can neither be expected from new ideas that retain the old chaos nor from more transfers into vessels without a bottom. The vessels have to be given a bottom. (F. Nuscheler). But beware: If good ideas are to have an impact, they must have instructions attached for the users!
13. We are in the midst of a state of paradigmatic void in which the loss of values, confusion and the erosion of any project or utopian purpose predominate; we are in the midst of asick social state and a moral condition in deep crisis. Irreverent words do not crystallize into possible models; we need concrete and realistic proposals. (Leonardo Padura, Personas Decentes).
14. He who knows more has a greater obligation to humanity. (Isabel Allende) A strong hypothesis is a good enough argument for action: Absolute proof is not needed when we are experimenting with the future of our own lives and those of our children. (Herman Daly) So, ditch the despair, act now, play the long game! Le succès est un voyage et non une destination!
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–It takes three years to get something new into textbooks; it takes 6 months to refute it; and it takes 20 years to get it out of the textbooks. (Gerson de Cunha) The transformation of society is not a horse race. Speed is not the primary measure of success. (Janos Kornai) Time makes more converts than reason. (Thomas Paine)
–Resolutions arrived-at in UN consensus documents are predictable; they tend to be at-the-cutting-edge-of-conventional-thinking. While accepting (?) that UN agencies are not political, they do not operate in a political vacuum. Is working for the UN a place where staff is put in a position to live a life without worrying too much about a political compass? (C. Sepulveda)