Learned Helplessness - An Oppressor's Tool

 

April 2014

I was the dorm parent for the first batch of tenth graders at Pathashaala (a residential school near Chennai). They were two of them and they stayed back in school during the summer vacations to write their board exams. We were good friends most of the time, but it was a daily challenge to meet their youthful storminess, with few other adults around.

The washrooms in the dormitory were serene spaces during the day. But since school was on vacation there were barely any people staying on campus. And these spaces became the playhouses of Bandicoot Rats during the nights. 

When problem turned crisis, we had half a dozen rat traps bought and set up in strategic places in the dormitory. The rats were lured like thieves to gold, to the smelly coconut pieces and masala vadas we used as baits. 

This way we quickly managed to do away with most of the rats partying in the washrooms. In fact, we caught all of them, except one. And this last one was a mysterious creature. We never managed to see it. But whenever it was caught in a rat-trap, the wood near the grill on the trap’s roof would be gnawed away and the rat would be missing inside. Many of our traps were laid to waste by it this way, and we finally gave up on trying to catch the strange creature. Now and then the soft screeching of the tiles or a thud on a bucket would remind us of its presence. But what it was, how it looked like, how only it managed to free itself time and again, we never got to know.

A few weeks passed by. My two companions had completed their exams and had gone home. The other teachers too shortly left for their holidays. Having chosen to remain here during the vacation, I was alone again in the campus in the company of trees, birds, and the skies. Then during one late-night hour as I stood by the dorm courtyard listening to the crickets, the enigmatic creature revealed itself. There it was, creeping down the corridor, sniffing along the floor meticulously as if it did not want to miss a single molecule of air. The sole survivor of its tribe. I silently switched on a solar lamp to have a better look at this animal. It heard me and froze in its tracks. It was an extraordinarily alert creature. Its ears and whiskers twitched to the softest breeze. Its toes carried it like they bore no weight at all.  I watched it without breathing. The rat then turned in my direction and began to creep towards me as it sniffed along the wall. Its eyes were milky white, devoid of any pupils, filled with cataracts. It was a blind rat. And its blindness had extraordinarily amplified the rest of its senses. I had to shuffle my feet only slightly for it to pick up the vibrations on the ground and discern my presence. Instantly it turned around and bolted away into the darkness.

I set a trap for it again that very night, not so much to catch it but to observe its methods. Then I lay sleeplessly shifting on my bed. This was no ordinary rat. It had survived to adulthood despite its great infirmity, in a land teaming with snakes, raptors, dogs, cats and mongooses.

When I heard the door of the trap snap shut, I leapt and ran to it. The caught rat was scratching around inside the wooden box. It could not comprehend what it had run into. It only knew that it felt the cold air from above through the grills. Catching onto the metal grill with its tiny paws it gashed its incisors on the grainy wooden edge of the roof with a frenzy to break free. In no time it chipped away enough of a gap, climbed out and on muffled feet thrust itself into darkness again.

Why didn’t the other rats do the same? Some of them were much bigger, brawnier, with front teeth like chisels. They could have cut through steel if they had wanted to. Why didn’t they attempt to escape, the same way as their blind comrade?

Research by American psychologist Martin Seligman throws light on the behavior of these rats. Taking Pavlov’s methods a step forward, Seligman gave mild shocks to two groups of dogs which were free within a small barricaded space over which the dogs could jump over and escape from the discomfort. In the first group were dogs who were subjected to these shocks for several days while they were tied on a leash. They could not escape their fate. The second group was not subjected to any shocks previously. When dogs from the second group were put in the closed space and given a shock, they immediately jumped over the barricade and ran away from the hostile stimulus. The dogs from the first group, those who were already conditioned by the shocks, tolerated, and accepted the maltreatment even though they had an opportunity to escape. They had “learned to remain helpless” and Seligman called this behavior ‘learned helplessness’. It is a strange case where getting used to bad treatment curbs one from liberating oneself even when there are opportunities.

How much of our realities are we merely accepting as given without attempting to participate in it? Another famous psychologist, Daniel Kahnemann, says the mind thinks that ‘what it sees is what there is’. But what we ‘see’ is susceptible to all kinds of conditioning.

So, considering the blind rat who stalked the washrooms at night, its disability freed it from the conditioning the rest of its troop was under. It escaped because it could not see the trap. It escaped because it never knew it was trapped.

Climate Strike - Chennai, Nov '19. PC - Jignesh

October 2020

I have returned to this essay about 6 years after the episodes described in it took place. I am still a teacher but no longer part of a closed community. By now I have been part of several campaigns, rallies, social and environmental movements. The world is in its post-Covid phase. During the months of lockdown, all of public were occupied with attending to the safety and health of family and self. Millions of migrant laborers struggled with loss of income, food shortage, and travelling home. Health workers across the country strived day and night fighting the disease outbreak, attending to the ever-increasing number of cases. These were the ground realities. However, the central government politically capitalized the lockdown period. It took it as an opportunity to pass several anti-people and anti-environment legislations and decisions. It began with 40 environmental clearances given to industrial projects in protected areas, in a single meeting of the National Board for Wildlife in April 2020. Streets – the main canvas of peoples’ campaigns were closed, and this was an unmissable advantage to the cabinet in power. The draft EIA 2020, an overtly corporation-friendly notification at the cost of ecology, was put out for public review during this time of medical emergency. Mining reforms followed as another windfall for industries. The anti-farmer amendments to the Farmer laws were pushed through– which opened the agricultural sector to private players, brought in free trade policies and washed off government responsibilities from market and price regulation. This happened unconstitutionally, without giving the Rajya Sabha opportunity to vote or discuss it. The FCRA law was amended, cutting off foreign funding to all Non-governmental organizations. This period of public suffering was made full use of. But to the right-to-information requests made by people asking for data on the number of migrant laborers and health workers who died during the pandemic, the government responded saying it had Nil data – in violation of one of its most basic responsibilities of accounting for deaths of its citizens.

 Oligarchies, authoritarian governments, oppressors of all kinds strive to create collective ‘learned helplessness’. They subject people, by design, to more and more injustice, inequity and abuse – so that they may grow numb, so that their voices tire, till such a way of things become the new unquestioned normal, solidify into the customary structure of society. Psychology of this field tells us that when the ‘outcome-response independence’ is internalized by the victim, it is extremely hard to unlearn it. Geopolitical analyst Eszter Nova writes that “Oppressive regimes thrive on helplessness. A population reduced to helplessness is docile and passive – even when it is outwardly loud and belligerent. Its symptoms include the dissolution of individual perspectives, active inaction, as well as the onset of a survival mentality”. This phenomenon needs recognition as a tool of despotic and hierarchical social and political systems. Strongly vertical and bigoted power-structures need it vitally. Another psychologist, Mathias Sager, says that “Even small daily exposures to oppressive structures of economic and political/social environments influence people’s psychological internalization of observed superiority and inferiority. Conforming behavior provides the necessary practice to develop the tendency to obey the “unavoidable” orders of oppressors in a learned “helpless” manner”.

 Massive dissent to the centre’s capitalization of the pandemic was largely spearheaded by youth movements across the country - like Fridays for Future India, Yugma Network, Adivasi Students’ Forum, Let India Breathe, Extinction Rebellion, etc. This daunted Ministers and public authorities. Made them push policy review deadlines further, cancel some clearances approved in National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries, slap terrorist laws on youth groups. These events gave reason for hope and worry. Had the collective ‘older public’ gotten used to the maltreatment? Had they turned into the first group of dogs in Seligman’s experiment? In my own experience rallying in public spaces and collecting signatures - against a coastal road which threatens a beach and will displace fishing communities, a metro station project which seeks to replace the few green parks left in Chennai, a port which will decimate a biodiverse lagoon – in general, it is the youth who are forthcoming in giving their solidarity and joining the cause. The net older population prefers to ignore, walk away, sometimes leaving one feeling embarrassed of campaigning.

The philosopher J.Krishnamurti said that “ it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. The capacity and space to dissent is a good societal health indicator – something the larger political scenario of India is impoverished in right now. Dissent-space is a two-way political-thermometer. It shows that the individual in society is active, questioning, sensitive and alive. And it also indicates whether governance is listening, learning, concerned, and open.

‘Learned Helplessness’, ‘imposed social incapacitation’ can create cultures bearing centuries of atrocities. They can establish deadly status quos and spaces of loaded, brutal silence – which act as its reproduction chambers. The Hindu caste-system prevalent in India reflects this glaringly. How did such an inhumane, irrational system root itself so deep in this country? Who gets to classify human beings? What political soil perpetuates such a practice? Such questions face difficulties in their collective emergence when their subject has been so thoroughly mainstreamed, by afflicting people to it for centuries. The abuse and lynching of Dalits under various pretexts, the culture of rape and patriarchy, the subjugation and downgrading of women, have been so conspicuously normalized – their advent tracing back to Hindu texts written over 2000 years ago. These are social inventions, not natural order. Though all religions have their merits and demerits, and Hinduism may have other holistic and important theologies which are even opposed to discrimination of any kind, casteism as we know it and witness it in India was invented in this religious climate. Its other more humane teachings have failed to supplant it. Data from the National Crime Record Bureau reveals that much of the rape in India is caste-based, committed by so called ‘upper-caste’ men on Dalit, Adivasi and other women labelled as lower caste. The entitlement men feel towards the bodies of women from these communities has been socially conventionalized. Opposition to this is met with autocratic measures and manipulation from the governments and systems which uphold this casteism. Tragedies, crises, and incidents of atrocity – as is being seen in Uttar Pradesh right now - catch public attention for a while. They may even shift status quos. But during the rest of the time, silence is a temporary convenience privilege gives – to those who have it.

To find all means to inoculate ourselves against learned helplessness is indispensable for a ground-up climate of democracy and humane society. It is to be responsible ancestors. To resist it is to hold hope in the way Rebecca Solnit describes it – “an ongoing series of acts of defiance”. Against the injustices we see outwardly of course, but perhaps more importantly defiance towards and within ourselves –to becoming habituated, to the temptation and facile comfort of indifference, silence.

M.Yuvan, October 2020

Some References –

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (1976). Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(1), 3–46.

Nova, E. (2016). Demand for Populism as a Symptom of Learned Helplessness, 4Liberty.eu.

Sager, M. (2017). Learned Helplessness and the Need to promote Hope, mathias-sager.com.

Farhart, Christina. (2017). Look Who Is Disaffected Now: Political Causes and Consequences of Learned Helplessness in the U.S.. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy.

Kakati.K, (2018). A review of the text Manusmriti on the role of women in the home, International Journal of Advanced Educational research.

Mahey. S, (2003). The status of Dalit women in India’s caste based system, Culture and the State: Alternative interventions, critical works from the proceedings of the 2003 conference at the University of Alberta

Duwadi. E.P, (2013) Portrayal of Women in Major World Religions, Bodhi : An Interdisciplinary journal.

Sharma.A , (2014). Status of women: A socio-historical analysis in different ages of Indian society, Research Journal of Language, Literature and Humanities.

Express News Service. ‘No Place Dalit and tribal girls in India, says NCRB data; UP fares the worst’, 1^st October 2020, The New Indian Express.

Human Rights Watch (1999). ‘Attacks on Dalit Women – A pattern of impunity’, Ch IX, ‘Broken People : Caste Violence Against India’s Untouchables’, www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/.