Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
I saw this recently on the 'Recommendo' newsletter. It looks like a good set of questions. Twitter thread of self-fulfillment questions |
Greg Isenberg says he asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves and then he shared them in a Twitter thread, as a list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The ones I’m pondering are:
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'Lightning Rods'. Published 2011. Started 16.8.22-Finished 31.8.22
Thoughts? Beautifully written. Remarkably funny. Huge degree of intelligence on the part of the writer. Could not recommend this enough! Sadly this couldn't have been written by a man these days.
The mechanism for preventing sexual harassment suits against male workers in corporations is given full expression. My favourite novel of 2022 until, that is, I started reading 'The Last Samurai' - More to follow on that.
The primary object of social work is to create a society where it has no need to exist.
Right away we are approaching a battle. A battle against systems that would deliberately create a dedicated organisation where a specific type of activity which we may call surveillance social work is brought to bear upon the poor. Surveillance /measurement/ Secret monitoring/ Professional Cabals/
A mean spirited social work that fully participates in the poverty and inequality and discrimination against those who may be poor while paying for families to live in overcrowded and filthy accommodation, children to be abandoned to private social work provisions lacking any sense of obligation and service to anything other than profit. (WELL CLEARLY I’M GOING TO GET LOTS OF MY CHEST!)
The primary object of current social work however, appears to be to engage in a project of technical bureaucratic intervention in a society that invades every aspect of the lives of the poor, most particularly by a creeping intervention in family life, without reference to the capacity for transformation and, even if such transformation were positively acknowledged, without the resources or skills to accomplish it in any meaningful sense.
In this project that I shall call neo-liberal welfarism, the social workers are joined in their interventions by the various tribes of the welfarist universe, united by this project of child protection under the disguise of soft policing by chronic programmes of endless assessment, innumerable meetings, diagnostic determinations, psychological categorisations and psychiatric considerations, various cabals of professionals-only discourse, and endless judgement and measurement. Labels of all kind abound with all manner of evidential weight attached. All underpinned by a legal system chronically obsessed with process and timescales over potential and possibilities and legislation often enacted in fear of further tragedy rather than in hope of better outcomes, with all the practice implications that are embodied in fear of failure, and public excoriation in the hallowed and considered prose of the gutter journalists who delight in the character assassination and moral dismemberment of all social workers unfortunate enough to be involved in the tragedy of the death of a child at the hands of his or her parents.
And so we proceed, marking our milestones by the death of the innocents and 'drawing conclusions on the wall.' We must be risk averse, ever watchful, we must record every detail, we must act before disaster strikes. We must establish modes of ruthless surveillance. And as the gutter press so gleefully command, we must stop these evil monsters bent on murdering children, in their tracks. We must be relentless and give them the damnation they so richly deserve.
