The Social Worker in an Age of Alienation

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Image credit: Earth Acupuncture 

Have Systems Grown Too Large for People to Matter?

In yesterday's class we talked about the sense of alienation that many people experience in modern (and postmodern) society. The most common complaint I hear about the government and the political process is that people don't believe they have a voice in it any more. They say, "It's supposed to be a democracy, but how do I get to participate? I get the sense that my voice won't be heard and that nothing I can do really matters."

With the candidates of the two major parties for president of the United States, in 2012, raising nearly $1 billion to promote themselves -- not counting the money that is raised by outside sources -- it is not surprising when people ask, "What can I do to have any impact on the political process? I don't have any money to put into a political campaign."

I have circulated petitions to get candidates on the ballot during several elections. This is a normal part of the political process; all campaigns must do this. I went door-to-door to get the petition signed, precisely because this is the political process. I was surprised by how many people would not sign the petition because they had never been asked to do this before. They had been buffered from a fundamental step in the democratic process. Usually petitions are circulated and signed by political insiders; the general public does not engage in politics on this level. They are only brought in later, as spectators, to watch political ads and to cast their vote for the candidates who survive the initial rounds of vetting, including fund raising and petition signing.

And what chance does an ordinary person have of being heard above the din of special interests after an expensive campaign? For many people it feels as though the two major parties are only paying attention to the top 20% of income brackets, and some would say they only pay attention to the top 1%.

When people are uncertain about how to participate in the political process they become alienated from politics altogether. They suspect they won't be heard above the lobbyists. Those who are motivated enough, or sufficiently angry, take to the streets to call attention to their pain. In the past four years we have seen the rise of the Tea Party movement, on the right of the political spectrum, and Occupy Wall Street on the left. While the political agenda of the two groups is very different, the underlying concerns of the two groups are not. Both protest movements are reactions to the sense that policy is made by elites who are insensitive to the suffering or ordinary people. There is a sense that nobody at the top is listening, and nobody cares anymore. People are being crushed under the burden of student loans they can never repay, mortgages they can't afford, medical bills that are forcing them into bankruptcy -- yet the party continues at top, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power. Some of the newer grassroots political movements are reactions against the apparent deafness and complacency of political and economic elites.

This alienation leads people to distrust conventional institutions that used to be able to form social consensus. There was a time when people thought they could rely on mainstream media to find out what was going on in the world; these days the relevance and credibility of major news outlets is practically a joke. The kindest label attached to the mainstream news is that it is merely there to entertain us. Darker visions see it in conspiratorial tones. Increasingly, people treat the conspiratorial narratives of the blogosphere and online videos as being more credible than conventional sources. At least the blogosphere speaks to people's frustrations and pain, while mainstream media are busy trying to sell them products they can no longer afford.

I have felt, for some time, that if there is a role for social workers to play in the 21st century it is to contribute to the restoration of social networking and the sense of community. The role of the 21st century social worker should be to make the legal and medical systems -- two professional and economic mammoths in American society today -- accessible and comprehensible to people in the bottom 20 to 40% of income brackets. The role of the social worker may be to give a human face to otherwise impersonal social systems -- above all, it may be to make those systems more responsive to people without financial resources and professional social contacts.

On the other hand, the internet is also very good at giving lay people access to professional insiders and linking people in virtual communities -- and it is good at mobilizing real people in real time for events, and potentially for collective action.

Budget cutters will no doubt be tempted to ask, "Why do we still need to fund social workers when people can empower themselves through the internet?" Social workers better have a convincing response to this question. If they don't become more than just dispensers of information and providers of referral services they may soon be relegated to the category of irrelevance along with other aspects of social life from the last century.

C. Matthew Hawkins