The Antisocial Socialist

More than one of you have asked for my rant about A Complaint Free World, so here it is.

In Bright-Sided, (sorry to keep going on about this book, but it's that good), Ehrenreich talks a fair bit about this insidious trend, but I actually heard about it about six months earlier. A fellow teacher had read the book, or seen it on Oprah, I'm not sure which, and was telling me about it and how she would like to bring the campaign to our school. I raised one eyebrow, then the other, and said very little because, well, I like her, and it was nice to see her excited about something. I figured it would wear off; these trends usually do. But Ehrenreich frames it as part of a larger current in the way businesses and institutions function, and this current—one of mandatory and pernicious optimism, even in the face of stark reality—is something unlikely to go away any time soon.

So, I've heard two stories about how the Complaint Free World thing got started. One is on the website, and you can look it up for yourself. The other was told at the ACC rally yesterday, and adds an interesting class dimension. I can't find an independent verification and I'm not going to read the book to see if it's true (I read the Overton Window, exceeding my quota of awful for the year), but it was told by an adherent of the campaign.

Rev. Will Bowen is the pastor of the One Community Spiritual Center in Kansas City, which was experiencing a rapid swell of membership. He wanted to build an extension on his megachurch, and that required more money from parishioners. Unfortunately, his mostly rural community was not financially well-off, and they complained about the extra tithe.

To combat this whining, he gave a sermon on complaining. He challenged his parishioners to go 21 days (the length of time it takes to break a habit, According To Science) without complaining or saying anything negative. Instead of spending money to build the extension himself, or trying to improve the economic conditions of the community, he brought purple rubber bracelets. Parishioners would wear them on the right wrist; every time they complained, they had to switch wrists and start counting from Day 1 again. This was popular, and landed him on Oprah, and now (according to the website) 60 million people have them. At first the bracelets were free; now you need to pay $10, and profits go to supplying them to schools and prisons—places where one would think the inmates have every right to complain!

Okay, you can probably already guess what I think is wrong with this, but let's backtrack a little, because I don't think I've ranted on the Rubber Bracelet Problem enough.

( cut for those who have heard my Rubber Bracelet Rant already )

But on to my bigger complaint, which is that complaining is a good thing. Let's take the classroom as an example. Sure, it would make my job easier if kids kept their complaining to themselves, but they would also have a poorer quality of education. I don't hear "Miss, this is boring" very often (because I'm that great), but when I do, it's a big red flag. It means "Miss, you are going too slow or too quickly." It means "You need to switch tracks, you need to do something different, or you're going to lose half the class and they won't learn anything. "I'm tired because I didn't get breakfast today; if you give me a granola bar, I will pay attention." Either way, it is a call for me, as a responsible educator, to do something different. I am great, but I'm not a perfect teacher, and the only way I can reasonably improve is to have the kids tell me when I'm doing something wrong.

On a larger scale, complaining is the first step to creating change. If I'm disgruntled at work and I keep my negative thoughts to my thoughts, and you do too, how will we ever know how the other feels? How can we band together to form a union and address the conditions of our labour?

And if everyone acts happy about being a slave, then no one can ever band together in revolt. And that's what the campaign is about at its heart, really. It's about knowing and accepting your place. It's about being barefoot and pregnant and knowing it's your fault that he hit you. It's about working the cotton fields with a smile on your face and bowing and scraping to your master. If you think this is hyperbole, check out what Bowen says on his site.

How can we affect positive change without complaining?

Complaining spreads negative energy and negative energy cannot create a positive outcome. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t stand before thousands in Washington, DC and shout, “Isn’t it awful how we’re being treated?” No. He shared his dream of a day when all children of all races would play and live together in peace and harmony. His vision galvanized our country and created positive change.

It's stupid when right-wing racist white people make claims about Martin Luther King Jr., because most people know how to use the internet, and that speech was filmed and transcribed. You can find it yourself, but if you're dead curious, here's some of what Dr. King actually said in the "I Have a Dream" speech:

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

I could go on—it's a wonderful speech—but you get the point. He starts out his call for change by illustrating what is wrong—by complaining!—as one does. Because change is not created by closing your eyes and wishing really hard visualizing how to optimalize your implementation for a solution. It's created by identifying a problem and then fighting like hell to fix it.

Not only does Bowen want people to be happy slaves, he seems to also want people to die.

Isn’t blowing off steam by complaining healthy?

Actually, studies have shown that complaining about one’s health actually tends to make a person’s health worse.

Ah, the infamous "studies show." Have some links. I can't find the actual study I want to show you guys, but the gist of it is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And by "grease" I mean "survival." There's no evidence of complaints causing worsening health. What does correlate are patients who complain about pain—patients who advocate for themselves, essentially—getting more tests, earlier diagnoses, and, accordingly, prompter and more effective treatment. One of the reasons why women live longer is that men are reluctant to admit pain and ill-health and don't seek treatment until it's too late.

Complaining can save your life, people.

I'm pretty sure that we're going to start seeing this in Canadian schools and workplaces, so be ready. This is a gift to the authoritarians of the world, who would like nothing better than for you to bend over and shut your mouth. But you guys know better than to do that, right?

Via springheel_jack:

"The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia - friendship, comradeship or brotherly love... the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success. The presence of open homosexuals in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros - which unlike philia is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive - will be unleashed into the environment, manifest(ing) itself as sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism, all of which undermine the nonsexual bonding essential to unit cohesion, good order, discipline and morale."

- Wall Street Journal contributing editor Mackubin Thomas Owens

There are few, if any, paragraphs that have ever failed quite so spectacularly as the one above. Marvel at the fact that the author must have never so much as been in the same room as a history book in his entire stunted and pathetic life.

Just. Wow.