As an aside,
I always find, in such cases of argument, recalling a few beautiful passages from Paolo Friere:
When, however, at a certain point of their existential experience,
those who have been invaded begin in one way or another to reject
this invasion (to which they might earlier have adapted), the professionals,
in order to justify their failure, say that the members of the
invaded group are "inferior" because they are "ingrates," shiftless,"
"diseased," or of "mixed blood."
Well-intentioned professionals (those who use "invasion" not as
deliberate ideology but as the expression of their own upbringing)
eventually discover that certain of their educational failures must be
ascribed, not to the intrinsic inferiority of the "simple men of the
people," but to the violence of their own act of invasion. Those who
make this discovery face a difficult alternative: they feel the need to
renounce invasion, but patterns of domination are so entrenched
within them that this renunciation would become a threat to their
own identities. To renounce invasion would mean ending their dual
status as dominated and dominators. It would mean abandoning all
the myths which nourish invasion, and starting to incarnate dialogical
action. For this very reason, it would mean to cease being over
or inside (as foreigners) in order to be with (as comrades). And so
the fear of freedom takes hold of these men. During this traumatic
process, they naturally tend to rationalize their fear with a series of
evasions.
The fear of freedom is greater still in professionals who have not
yet discovered for themselves the invasive nature of their action, and
who are told that their action is dehumanizing. Not infrequently,
especially at the point of decoding concrete situations, training
course participants ask the coordinator in an irritated manner:
"Where do you think you're steering us, anyway?" The coordinator
isn't trying to "steer" them anywhere; it is just that in facing a concrete
situation as a problem, the participants begin to realize that
if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper they will either have
to divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them. Divesting
themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that moment,
an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those
myths is to reveal themselves. The only way out (which functions as
a defense mechanism) is to project onto the coordinator their own
usual practices: steering, conquering, and invading.
[From Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pgs. 156-157]
Happy holidays everyone,
Ahmed Ansari
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