The Problem of Useless People

1 Presentation in XIV World Congress of Victimology 1988. Pisa, Italy 26-28.6.1988 Vuokko Jarva The Problem of Useless People1 Study on Structural Victimization Dedicated to my great mentors Kettil Bruun (1924-1985) and Nils Christie (1924-2015) Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 2 What is Uselessness? ............................................................................................................. 3 The Human Commodity ................................................................................................................. 3 Individual and Human Dignity ...................................................................................................... 5 Individual and Threat of Uselessness .......................................................................................... 7 Uselessness Crisis and Crisis Overcoming ....................................................................... 8 Crisis Overcoming ......................................................................................................................... 10 Crisis Intervention ......................................................................................................................... 12 References: ............................................................................................................................. 13 Abstract In this article the suffering and failure of a human in industrial society is studied in terms of collective and even structural victimization. Il-fare in a wel-fare society, failures have many profiles from suicide to dropping-out, mental illness and labeling as deviant etc. This kind of histories are usually studied in terms of self-victimization or victimization by other individuals, but with the help of those it is not possible explain catastrophes caused by structural factors, for example by sudden economic recession – as in question of over-indebtedness in many countries these days. The problem of structural victimization arises in industrial society because people are made commodities, which only have utility-value, no human dignity. Other people assess the value of an individual in relation to his/her achievements in continuous competition. If they are rated high, they become temporary winners, if they are rated low, they become losers, victims of the structures of the society. The winner and the loser, the victimizer and the victim, are players in the same game: the roles can change any moment. Because of this the basic problem is: how to transform society and societal structures so, that people get their human dignity and do not need to become either victimizers or victims. 1 Revised and some sources added 2015. At the time of writing I did not systematically use page number in text references and it would have been difficult to rediscover them all, so I did not. Sorry! 2 Introduction A couple of years ago a friend of mine committed suicide at the age of forty four. She was an especially talented and well educated person but she could not stand to be a "remote terminal" of a formal organization as she herself expressed it. Her victimization began already in the beginning of the seventies when she began to avoid her duties and was labeled as mentally ill. She had been removed to pension because of "disability to work" a few years before her suicide. On pension she felt very free and began to write, which was what she always wanted, but there was no market for her writing, and when she lost the only human being who really needed her, she decided to commit suicide; two months after her mother's death. The usual way to explain this kind of life stories is to say that there was something wrong with the person, she was deviant, she did not adjust to society or the like; in one word: in terms of self-victimization. The other common way to get the thing settled is to explain that someone else was guilty, to discuss the history in terms of victimization by someone else. Victimizers are then usually found in the close surroundings of the person: family, workplace and so on. A mediating link between these approaches is represented by Freudian-based theories, which explain adult self-victimization by victimization as a child by parents. But this kind of explanations can at their best give partial picture of the situation. Maybe a good psychologist can find this kind of explanation in all cases of suicide, marginalization, burnout, recidivism and others where the individual does not properly perform her expected role as a successful one in our industrial society. Explanations of this level do not help a lot if the stories of the losers are to be prevented, and far too often the attempts to control the influencing factors only lead to the formation of a new suppressive mechanism, the big brother grows even bigger. The third approach of victimology, the collective or even "structural" victimization point of view, seems far more relevant in this case. If victimology is taken as a concept indicating a social structure, new dimensions can be found in these miserable stories of human unhappiness and suffering. This is the path I am going to take when trying to go deeper into the essence of the case told in the beginning. I have to take a roundabout way, and it may seem at times, that I am digressing from the theme, but the patient reader will see in the end, that it is not the case. I have given the name "uselessness crisis" to a special turning point where changes in life force the individual to make a major decision concerning her life. In this article I am going first to study the preconditions of such a uselessness crisis, then to describe the crisis and crisis overcoming, and in the final part to comment strategies of crisis intervention. 3 What is Uselessness? A uselessness crisis can be defined as a major disturbance in an individual’s life resulting from a loss or similar change endangering the livelihood and/or identity of a human being. This kind of crisis is the result of interplay of objective and subjective factors, and can be studied with the help of concepts of "individual", "human dignity" and "power" in a Western industrial society. My analysis is strictly restricted to this type of society and does not claim any universality outside it. The Human Commodity The friend of the afore-mentioned story described herself as a "remote terminal" of a social machine, an organization - as an object, an instrument. A human as object has been discussed widely – even the focal aspect of victimology is to consider human as object, victim. A few researchers have gone even further. A Finnish psychiatrist, Martti Siirala, considers the basic evil in our culture to be instrumentalization or objectivication2, which for him means the reduction of a human into his/her exploitation aspect. He gives as an example the instrumentalization of "corporality" in medical care where the scientifictechnological knowledge of the body has substituted the actual corporality. (Siirala 1984) German Klaus Ottomeyer deals with this process in his politico-economic theory concerning the reproduction of capital, which he divides into three spheres: production, circulation and consumption. In the sphere of production workers have to develop an indifference towards the production process and this requires the workers to reify both themselves and the others. In the sphere of circulation, one has to develop an indifference towards other people's needs because the vendor and the customer are only means, instruments for each other. The fact that in the sphere of consumption human relations are separated from common production goals and only need to reproduce workforce, makes them only compensatory. (Ottomeyer 1980) Ottomeyer also emphasized the transfer of reification – created in exchange of commodities – even outside the actual exchange relations. This reification tends to dominate all relations with other people. Self-reification learned on the labor market where one has to sell one's labor, and in the circulation where one becomes a means of exchange, has the same tendency. As result, according to this theory, human relations have become instrumental throughout and the human has become a commodity like any other. The interesting thing is that researchers representing very different schools have come to the same conclusion concerning the dominant value of an individual. Siirala represents the existentialist school of psychiatry and his, albeit original, ideas can be traced back through other existentialist psychiatrists to humanist 2 Different researchers have used variant terms on this phenomenon. Siirala speaks about instrumentalization, Martha Nussbaum (2000) about objectivication. Axel Honneth also mentions instrumentalization and commodification. The most often used term is, however, reification, based on marxist teories by Karl Marx himself and especially by Georg Lukács. In this article I have chosen reification, because it has been studied most extensively. (Lukacs 1967, Honneth 2006) 4 individualism represented by, for example, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Ottomeyer represents Marxist-humanist Frankfurt School, the ideas of which are rooted back to the ideas of Marx himself. Already Marx studied the "commodity" aspect of a human in the case of salary worker as if he named the commodity aspect of an individual "workforce" which was to be sold. To study further what this idea of "a human commodity" consists of, the wage slave forced to sell her workforce to earn living is a good example indeed. The phenomenon wage slave as predominant mode of making a living in a society is a fairly new one; its origin can be traced back to the birth of industrial society in the eighteenth century, and it has spread all over Western countries - and nowadays the whole world. The rise of industrial society was based on the faith that new technology could bring new welfare to more people than ever. The supporters of technological innovations were not only worried about their business profits, but about the exhaustion of natural resources and poverty of the majority of people. Through new technology work places were quickly created available to those who could not safely earn their livelihood in agrarian society, salary work promised more guaranteed livelihood than the capricious forces of nature. (For example 'Lunar Society' see Hart-Davis 2001). But this was only one side of the coin: rising industry needed cheap workforce, so the willingness of people to enter the labor market was guaranteed by public intervention such as legislation concerning land and vagrancy, and not least by the new institution of punishment as Foucault (1980b) has shown in his studies concerning the history of prisons. As result of these two phenomena, promises of a better life and the threat of punishment, vast numbers of people changed over from agrarian society to industrial society, i.e. became wage slaves. This is illustrated for example by the fact, that a new term "unemployment" appeared in the language even in the peripheries of Europe – Finland, Sweden and Russia – as late as in the middle of the nineteenth century (Uotila - Uusitalo 1984) coinciding with their industrialization. But the change to industrial society from agrarian society was not painless. It implied the creation of a new type of human: the salary worker personality. The worker had to be disciplined to obey the rules the machines and the superiors imposed, to perform his role. Critical school researchers have invented a term to describe this: obedience-competence (Masuch 1972). To guarantee the quality expected from salary workers an innovation was made and is still working – the public school. In agrarian society children were organically members of the community, they learned their skills from their parents and thus learned to perform their role. In industrial society this link was broken; parents had to go away from their homes to where the machines were and follow the timetable of the organization. Children were left alone and had to be stored somehow. The public school offered a double solution to make children useful. It acted as store where children could be controlled while their parents were away, but even more, it offered a method through which children could be educated to become 5 proper salary workers already before entering working life, they became raw material to be processed. (Christie 1977; Christie - Bruun 1986) School sociologists have during the last two decades paid a lot of attention to the "hidden curriculum" of the school. According to one research, pupils are taught first of all patience and forbearance, to stand continuous interruptions in their work, to complete tasks, of which they cannot see the importance, to leave an uncompleted task when the lesson is over, to restrain from helping their schoolmates, and to submit to authorities without questioning. (Uusitalo R. 1984) The obedience of the forthcoming salary workers is guaranteed by rewards and punishments. Rewards one can gain through competition and obedience. The basic forms of it are good grades and social acceptance. Punishments vary and, according to Foucault, they concern the same things in school as in work places, the army or other institutions, namely: time, action, behavior, articulation, body and sexuality (Foucault 1980a). There are strict rules concerning all of these areas and deviation is punished. If the child is not capable or willing to reach adulthood defined according to the rules of the industrial society, she is in danger to be dropped out at a very early stage. Representative examples are seriously handicapped children and their specific "career" in our societies. Other socialization devices, like family education, religion (cf. Weber 1950), kindergartens and non-governmental organizations support the school-factory. The "normal" adult is supposed to be so well socialized in her role as an instrument of the industrial machinery that she can perform as a salary worker. But all people do not perform properly as human commodities, as salary workers. They drop out in a way or another – or they are dropped out, become victims of society. In fact, the dropping out is not an automatic process caused by some mythological "society", but a real world phenomenon, caused by other people's decisions. To study how this happens one has to proceed from the study of the salary worker to the study of the other type of personality in industrial society the entrepreneur. Individual and Human Dignity There is a phenomenon the study of which can shed light on both the bad performance of the expected salary worker as well as on the case of the victimizer: the individuation process (C. G. Jung 1946, p. 562). The entrepreneur as the ideal type of free, emancipated individual seems to be a theme expressed in most of the claims of liberation movements in Western countries. Ann Oakley quotes resolutions of the first American women's suffrage convention in 1848. There the ideals of freedom are expressed in reverse terms, as something taken away from women. Her list consists of political power (elective franchise), nonexistence as juridical person (when married), private ownership (property and wage), power in private matters (divorce), employment (discrimination and low wages), education and self-confidence. (Oakley 1981) In brief: women have been deprived of their individuality, entrepreneurship, economic and political (public family) power, and their whole subject character as human beings, they have been reified. But they express their objection against the 6 status quo. If they were completely reified, totally obedient, they would not object. While the instrumental value seems to be the dominant value in our societies, we are taught from our very childhood another Gospel, the Gospel of human dignity, the inherent value of each human being. The history of the human dignity -concept shows that it really is a Gospel in the traditional sense: the origin of Western individuality and human dignity has among specialists been traced back to the Christian religion. For example, the ancient Greeks did not know the concept of individual as such we do. (Lukes 1973, Asplund 1983) During the Renaissance the idea of the value of the individual, human dignity, was praised and has been nurtured since in the intellectual tradition called humanism. Typical of it are the famous words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is too noble a being to serve simply as the instrument of others..." (cit. Lukes 1973) In Western thought the individual is considered as a self-evident entity, which idea is supposed to fit all societies and all epochs, to be universal. A true individual is supposed to be “Equipped with given interests, needs, instincts, or whatever while society is only an institution which more or less well corresponds with these interests, needs, instincts, rights etc. which are independent on society." (Asplund 1983, 46) To learn to expect society and other people to correspond to one's needs and to be able to fight for them is the focal aspect of the individuation process. This is the other function of the public school system: to create the egoistic, competitive personality who is capable of winning in the war of all-against-all on the human commodity-market. Without the sense of individuality one could neither be disturbed by being used as instrument nor use others as instruments. Organic chains of Gemeinschaft -type of society are broken in industrial society. (Tönnies 1887) The writings of my afore-mentioned friend, left behind, demonstrate that she was not unable to work or produce. On the contrary, she had remarkable literary activity going on throughout the years, even when treated as a mental patient. The conflict was between her activities and the expectations of the organization; the organization did not have use for her kind of talents or her way of comprehending the goals of the organization. The conflict was between her individual goal oriented action and the action of superiors in the organization. It was a question of uselessness in terms of power. Industrial society is organized throughout according to the machine model. Both private and public organizations have the character of a huge machine where everything is to function in relation to the other parts of the machine. This would not be possible without strict discipline. The individuals working in these machines are given some measure of power in relation to their duties as well as their subordinates. They are supposed to show indifference to the consequences of their power-exertion on the individuals inferior to them. Their focal duty is to guarantee that the part of the machine subordinated to them functions in relation 7 to the other parts of the machine. Good performance of an organizational unit is measured as output, results. If the unit does not produce the results the higher units expect, those responsible for its performance endanger their own status. A subordinate not performing well does not only endanger her own status but the status of her superiors as well. The human subordinate is not a complete, but an individual with her own worldview and own identity. She/he can see the goals from another perspective than the immediate superior as was the case with my friend. Year after year she kept thinking of the right things to do and what were the most important goals of the organization. This resulted in a conflict between organizational goals as understood by her superiors and her performance: both tried to do the right thing as they understood it to be. The subordinate was bound to lose because it was the superior who had the power to drop her out of the organization. The results of this kind of "structural indifference" and power exertion can be read in the statistics on suicide, mental disease, early death, work accidents, marginalization etc. Inferiors become victims, superiors become victimizers. Individual and Threat of Uselessness The three Basic characteristics of a human in the industrial society have been analyzed above as being: - Reification, which is here expressed by the term 'human commodity'3, - Individuation, which is expressed by the term individual - Outer-directedness, which is expressed as human dignity experienced as usefulness-uselessness – market-value of a human. If these are accepted, the conclusion is that there are not two different kinds of people, commodities and individuals, but we all are more or less outer-directed individual-commodities. If this is added thereto that the basic threat is no more a natural catastrophe, but the threat of uselessness, the duality of the picture fades out. Individuals fighting for their worth on a human commodity-market are basically fighting against the threat of uselessness, of being rejected, and at the same time to make their lives safe by rewards given by others. The basic rewards are money and status. This is of course an extreme picture, but it makes the situation very clear: the actual winners are potential losers, the actual losers are potential winners. The actual victims are potential victimizers and vice versa. This might explain the mechanism referred to in studies of victimology that previous victims fairly easily become victimizers. The mechanism of victimization through power-exertion is learned in actual victimization situations. Is it then so that there is no escape from the welfare prison of industrial society, no prospects of breaking the chain of victimization? I am not here going to go deeper into this question, because my studies have focused on analysis of the uselessness crisis as a social and social-psychological phenomenon. But it is 3 Zygmunt Bauman (2004) speaks even about 'human waste' in case of those pushed out of society in one way or other. 8 possible to draw some preliminary conclusions on the subject of crisis intervention. To understand why results of "normal" power-exertion in our societies can become so dramatic, one has to study what happens when a human encounters the kind of loss, which endangers not only the livelihood but the identity as well. Uselessness Crisis and Crisis Overcoming To make the definition of uselessness crisis more concrete, I refer here to the last three uselessness crises of my friend: • having been removed to pension in the mid-eighties was result of a process where my friend could no longer stand her status as "remote terminal" of the organization, and began to avoid her duties and finally was punished by being put on pension, • thereafter she began to write, which is what she had always wanted to do but there was no market for her writing and she did not succeed in publishing, and • finally she lost her mother who was the only person who really needed her; then she committed suicide. All three events were losses, but they hit her identity and integrity as well. She was a person with well internalized "Protestant ethics" and tried to perform her role as worker in the organization as well she could. Unfortunately her ideas of the organizational goals and those of her superiors did not match. She was not rewarded for her performance and when, year after year, she had hit her head against the wall, she finally gave up and began to avoid her duties. The reaction of the organization was to drop her out as useless. This was a major defeat for her integrity because work was for her not only a means to get money, but calling. The failure to get her writings published was as dramatic: she honestly felt that she had something important to say to help other people, but the publishing machinery did not see it the same way. Again she was rejected. The third loss, her mother, was too much. She was single, had never married, and even her sisters had their hands full with their own professional duties and family life, unable to give her the feeling of being needed, being useful. Life changes, which endanger one's livelihood, continuation of the career, or break ones identity as a loved one, often lead to crises. One hears in these kinds of situations comments like: "Nobody needs me." or "I do not fit anywhere, I am useless." or "Nobody cares for me." In major life changes the critical factor takes over the whole life, a narrowing of the perspective takes place and the other factors easily seem meaningless. Shock combined with human inertia, slowness, causes a major disturbance in an individual's life, which is widely discussed in psychiatric crisis theory. Psychiatrist Gerald Caplan gives a clue to the background of the term crisis by describing the "normal" state of a human with the word "equilibrium" and "crisis" as state when the equilibrium is shattered and the person fails to bring it back in short time with usual means (Caplan 1964; Sifneos 1980). Crisis is thus actually a 9 relational concept, which is based on ideas of "normal" and "abnormal" states of a human. Caplan remarks that defining a situation as crisis depends on the degree of magnification but that: "The significance of a crisis is in its temporal telescoping of development. Major alterations may occur in a relatively short period and may subsequently remain stable for a long time." (Caplan 1964, 39) Psychological stress theory lists lots of major life changes, which cause enormous stress and can result in crisis. Among these are deaths of close people, economic disasters, major crimes and their consequences, even marriage and falling in love. To distinguish the uselessness crisis from any other potential crisis one can simply say, that the uselessness crisis is a crisis of the defeated, the victim. Klaus Ottomeyer gives a case of unemployment: "Nobody wants to employ me", says a female laborer without education. "It is hard feeling oneself useless. I feel ill...There is no hope and no future. I am 52 years old, there is nothing more for me to do . . . I might as well be dead," (Ottomeyer 1980, 120). The core of uselessness crisis seems to be a deep experience of having no value, having no prospects in life. If positive identity in our society is connected with success and victory (achievements, as Parsons has remarked), the negative identity is connected with defeat and failure. This has been discussed in existentialist psychology tradition. Rollo May comments: “The loss of the experience of one's own significance leads to the kind of anxiety that Paul Tillich called the anxiety of meaninglessness, or what Kierkegaard terms anxiety as the fear of nothingness." (May 1980, 37) The basic character of the individual-commodity of our industrial society has been widely discussed by researchers of a wide variety of disciplines and schools. The typical personality has been called "the organization man" (Etzioni, May), "one dimensional man" (Marcuse), "other-directed man" (Riesman). The Riesman characterization is interesting. He claims that instead of tradition or inner-directedness by the so-called conscience, the individual of today is mainly dependent on the reactions of her surroundings, evaluations of other people. According to Riesman only through a lot of inner work can a man reach the level of being "autonomous", relatively independent of the judgments of others. (Riesman 1958) Concerning human dignity, the other-directed man is not able to experience his self-worth but reflects evaluations of influential others. If these others reject him/her, his/her human dignity falls in pieces. This kind of "instant" value works as exchange rate on the human commodity-market. The instant value depends on one's achievements, and not for example on hereditary status. It is changing all the time according to the fitting together of one's performance and other people's expectations and criteria. If expressed in this way, there is no more difference between instrumental commodity value and human dignity, self worth; both are formed in instant interaction with other people and vary in relation to the market value of one's performance. To lose the experience on one's human dignity in the case of a 10 threatening defeat, no longer – according to this interpretation – seems symptom, alienation or deviance, but a normal reaction to real-life loss. The whole body of theories – including the alienation theory – based on the idea that losers are deviant can no more be utilized, if this approach is taken seriously. The uselessness crisis cannot be treated as mental disturbance, but as normal result of the structure of life as it appears in industrial society, as result of structural victimization. Crisis Overcoming In a crisis situation a human has the same possibilities as any living organism. When circumstances become unbearable the organism either tries to adjust, to transform the environment, or moves to another environment. The specifically human choice to commit suicide could be classified as moving to another environment - irrevocably. (Lagerspetz 1981) The strategy of adjustment and attempts to transform the environment are in most cases so tightly interwoven that there is no point in separating them. They can be discussed in terms of different types of action strategies. In personality psychology different action strategies have been discussed in terms of personality typologies and traits (e.g. Lazarus 1971) but no consensus has been reached. In psychological theory of coping strategies different orientations have been discussed (Lahtela 1983; White 1974; Antonovsky 1980) as well as in sociological theory on individual adaptation (Merton 1968). Because the discussion is fairly new and no agreement has been reached – to avoid too much complexity – I take another line of discussion. Gordon Allport (Allport-Odbert 1936) began his 'Trait theory' with the help of a dictionary, I choose literature science. It is commonly agreed that literature has been able to describe human life more comprehensively than any scientific explanation, as though literary descriptions do not reach the exactness of scientific modeling. The study of literature has at any rate shown that there are certain characteristics by which literature is divided into different genres, depending on the interpretation of human life. It is a widely accepted practice in science of literature to divide literature into epics, lyrics and drama. Emil Staiger considers these a kind of orientation and speaks about the epic, the lyrical and the dramatic approach. He distinguishes these genres based to their solution of the subject-object relationship. The lyrical style is subjective, the epic objective and the dramatic synthetizes these two approaches. This means that in the epic approach a human is considered an object, in the lyrical a subject and in the dramatic both these characteristics are combined. (Staiger 1946) In the epic orientation a human – as in classical epos – takes what fortune brings. She/he either can remain an observer of life without reactions (cf. Riesman's "anomic") or end up for example, as Schaff (1985) calls it, in a sate of "social pathology" and be unable even to defend her health. To the archetype orientations one has to be added, typical for our industrial societies and probably created by them: the analytical orientation. Michel Foucault (1980a) has discussed the creation of the analytical man, and Sheridan comments: 11 “The régime of "truth" gave the intellectual, who's régime the truth was, a certain "universal status". "The disinterested" intellectual represented the conscience of society as a whole." (Sheridan 1982, 222) The distinctive characteristic of this new analytical man was disinterest, which is similar to Ottomeyer's indifference. The disinterestedness/indifference is focal characteristic of reification, as Axel Honneth has analyzed (Honneth 2006). The new indifference created in the industrial economy was made an idol of the representation of truth, knowledge. The importance of this phenomenon can only be understood if this attitude towards Newtonian natural science as an idol is compared with the "participative knowledge" of Enlightenment, the ecstatic reason. The power to know, to understand, the truth, was given in hands of people who had best internalized the new indifference imposed by the industrial economic structure – the specialist of truth was legitimated and given status. The analytical man was not supposed to take part in social events, only to observe them and tell the truth. In brief, the basic characteristics of these four orientations are: • • • • EPIC: sense oriented, passive, object, ANALYTICAL: cognition oriented, passive, object, LYRICAL: sense oriented, active, subject, and DRAMATIC: both cognition and sense oriented, active, subject-object. I have called my friend's strategy "avoidance" in which characteristics of these basic strategies are combined. She never made the decision to step outside the organization with which she was in conflict. This is a characteristic of epic strategy. She became depressed when things went wrong, what is a characteristic of lyrical strategy. She showed analytical traits by being able to understand and describe her status as "remote terminal" of the organization. And she also showed dramatic characteristics by avoiding her duties what was in her case a form of civil resistance. Her strategy had characteristics of Lagerspetz’s third mode as well, i.e. those of an organism to react in an intolerable situation: to move to other environment. She changed her workplace a few times, but this was not for her the dominant way to move into other surroundings. At least a human has another chance. The dominant strategy of my friend was to move over into the inner world without moving into other geographical or social surroundings. This is documented in her writings. She spent a lot of time in meditating different problems, following her internal logic and not the logic of the "real world" - as we call it. The internal world became for her more real than the intolerable surroundings. As a result of the strategy used in crisis situation a human can thrive, suffer or languish (von Wright 1984). The result in the referred case is known: she committed suicide. Yet it did not happen when the first intolerable situations arose, in the beginning of the seventies, but more than fifteen years later. The human is generally very durable even after an accumulation of injuries. This is well described by writers who tell their stories of years in German concentration camps during World War II (e.g. Bettelheim 1986 and Frankl 1980). Even when all hope is lost, humans tends to stay alive for long periods more like "walking corpses" (Bettelheim 1986) than human beings. 12 Because of human persistence the problem of useless people is not decreasing in our industrial societies as they are transforming to post-industrial societies where losses entailing life changes are expected to increase at least during the transition period. But the problem is not only the problem of the loser, it is a problem of the winner, too. It is not only a problem of the victim, but a problem of the victimizer as well. Crisis Intervention The term "intervention" means that someone intervenes with the flow of events. This can happen as well when something actually has happened as beforehand. It can have either first aid or preventive character. One could implement Rescher's (1972) division of justice to "distributive" and "corrective" justice and speak about "distributive" and "corrective" intervention. In the case of actual uselessness crisis situation, intervention has a corrective character: the loss has already happened and the intervener can only minimize the damage. But if the actual structural victimization mechanism works as analyzed above, corrective intervention can, indeed, be only first aid. The main line of intervention has to be in distributive activities. But there is at least one way to avoid this distinction. The original meaning of the word crisis (κρίση) in Greek refers to a turning point, where decisions have to be made, to a crossroads (Collins Greek Dictionary 1988). What makes the uselessness crisis so dramatic is the apocalyptic character of the suffered loss: the experience of a blind alley. It is basically epic, fortune cannot be avoided or fought against, a complete reification of oneself. The Apocalypse experience cannot be abolished by any social engineering or psychological trick as long the real apocalypse is in ambush: the threat of uselessness. And the threat of uselessness exists as long there exists the institution of usefulness, dependent on the achievements and instant value of a human in the zero-sum game of the human commodity-market. The queue of victims needing help remains longer than the row of helped ones however much society would be willing to invest in corrective machinery. Crisis intervention both on the individual, corrective level, and the societal, distributive and empowering level cannot be social engineering aimed at making the human or social machine work better. It is creative work where the intervener has to be able to react quickly in kaleidoscopically changing, often unexpected, life situations and social settings. The intervener cannot be the "disinterested" analytical observer but is bound to get involved and use "the ecstatic reason" in which ones own life experience is combined with theoretical comprehension of phenomena. This is well known to all conscious field workers who deal with their patients' or customers' real life problems. A crisis intervener is rather like a designer, who creates order out of chaos, than a scientist who tries to find waterproof explanations. How close crisis intervention actually comes to design is illustrated well by a Viktor Papanek quotation: “At the most basic level, design and architecture are activities that affirm life. By bringing order and meaning to chaos, the designer holds back the dark entropic forces of anarchic disarray that often make our lives seem pointless and our efforts random. Design is the pattern-making impulse of human 13 beings. Design and architecture are tools mankind uses to change and adapt to its environment, extend human capacities, and thus comprehensively change itself." (Papanek 1983) At the moment, on the basis of my studies of the problem of the uselessness crisis and my own experience, the path to be taken is to study seriously the only inexhaustible resource: human creativity and inventiveness. And especially use them to transform societies to more humane, causing less structural victimization than in the war of all-against-all of industrial society. References: Allport, G.W. & Odbert, H.S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Review Publications Vol XLVII, No. 1. Princeton N.J: Psychological Review Company. Retrieved 16.10.2015 from http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/courses/psyc5112/Readings/psnTraitNames_Allport.pdf Antonovsky, Aaron. (1980). Health, Stress and Coping, Washington: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Asplund, Johan. Tid, rum, individ, kollektiv. Stockholm: Liber Förlag Baumann, Zygmunt (2004). Wasted lives. Modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1986. The Informed Heart, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Caplan, Gerald. 1964. Principles of Preventative Psychiatry. Fifth printing. New York: Basic Books. Christie, Nils. 1977. Hvis skolen ikke fantes, 11.upplag. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.∆∫x∆ Christie, Nils - Bruun, Kettil. 1986. Hyvä vihollinen (Den gode Fiende), huumausainepolitiikka Pohjolassa, Espoo: Weilin+Göös Collins Greek, Pocket Dictionary. 1988. London and Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co.Ltd Foucault, Michel. 1980a. The History of Sexuality I, New York: Vintage Books Edition Foucault, Michel. 1980b. Tarkkailla ja rangaista (Surveiller et punir). Keuruu: Otava. Frankl, Viktor (1980). Elämän tarkoitusta etsimässä, Helsinki – Keuruu: Otava. Hart-Davis, Adam (2001). James Watt and the Lunatiks of Birmingham. In Science, Vol. 292 no. 5514 pp. 55-56 Retrieved 15.10.2015 from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5514/55.full Honneth, Axel (2006). Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Berkeley: University of California. Noudettu 14.1..2015 sivulta http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/h/Honneth_2006.pdf Jarva, Vuokko. 1989. From Purola's Three Circle Model to Social Tools Design, Futura 2/1992 Jarva, Vuokko. 1986. Nuorten putoamiskriisit ja kriisityö in Heikkinen, Anja - Jarva, Vuokko: Peruskoulusta putoajat ja kriisityö. Esitutkimusraportti. Helsinki: Helsingin Yliopisto, Sosiaalipolitiikan laitos, Tutkimuksia N:o 1/1986 Jarva, Vuokko. 1988. Onko lapsi tarpeeton ihminen? seminaarialustus, in Lapset ja joukkoviestintätekniikka. Helsinki: Liikenneministeriön Joukkotiedotusteknologian tutkimusohjelma. Jarva, Vuokko. 1989. Tarpeettoman ihmisen ongelma, hyvinvointiyhteiskunnan tarkastelua uhrin kannalta. Helsinki: Sosiaalihallituksen julkaisuja 5/1989 Jung, C. G. (1946). Psycholgical Types or The Psychology of Inidividuation. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. LTD. Retrieved 16.10.2015 from http://monoskop.org/images/8/8d/Jung_Gustav_Carl_Psychological_Types_1946.Pdf Lagerspetz, Kari. 1981. Sopeutuminen biologisena ilmiönä Turku: Kollega 1/81 Lahtela, Kari. 1983. Coping - yleisperiaate vai psykosomatiikan työväline, in Psykosomatiikan uusia virtauksia, ed. Markku Hyyppä Turku: Kansaneläkelaitoksen kuntoutustutkimuskeskuksen julkaisuja M2: 33 Lazarus, Richard S. 1971. Personality, Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall 14 Inc. Lukacs, Georg (1967). Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. London: Merlin Press. Retrieved 14.1.2015 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm Lukes, Steven. 1973. Individualism. Bristol: Basil Balckwell. Masuch, Michael. 1972. Politische Ökonomie der Ausbildung, Lernarbeit und Lohnarbeit im Kapitalismus. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. May, Rollo. 1980. Psychology and the Human Dilemma. New York: W.W.Norton & Company. May, Rollo. 1986. The Discovery of Being, Writings in Existential Psychology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Merton, Robert K. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure, 1968 Enlarged Edition. New York: The Free Press. Nussbaum, Martha (2000)- “Objectification,” in Sex and Social Justice (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 8. Oakley, Ann. 1981. Subject Women. London: Fontana Press. Ottomeyer, Klaus. 1980. Ökonomische Zwänge und Menschliche Beziehungen, Soziales Verhalten in Kapitalismus. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Papanek, Viktor. 1983. Design for Human Scale. New York: Norton. Rescher,Nicholas. 1972. Welfare. The Social Issues in Philosophical Perspective. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press. Riesman, David. 1958. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: ?? Schaff, Adam. 1985. Wohin führt der Weg. Zweite Auflage. Wien: Club of Rome and Europa Verlag. Sheridan, Alan. 1982. Michel Foucault, The Will to Truth, London: Tavistock Publications Ltd Sifneos, Peter. 1980. Brief Psychotherapy and Crisis Intervention, in Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry/III Vol. 2, 3. Edition. Baltimore-London: Williams & Wilkins. Siirala, Martti. 1984. Pahuudesta. Helsinki: Ajatus 41, Ihmiskäsitysten filosofia, Suomen filosofisen yhdistyksen vuosikirja. Staiger, Emil. 1946. Grundbegriffe der Poetik, Zürich: Atlantis-Verlag. Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Fues's Verlag. Retrieved 16.10.2015 from https://ia700408.us.archive.org/12/items/gemeinschaftund00tngoog/gemeinschaftund00tngo og.pdf Uotila, Jaakko - Uusitalo, Paavo. 1984. Työttömyys, laki ja talous, Helsinki: Tammi. Uusitalo, Ritva. 1984. Nuoret ja koulu. Sosiaalipolitiikka 1984, Vammala: Suomen Sosiaalipoliittinen yhdistys. Weber, Max (1950). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons and London: George Allen & Unwin LTD. Retrieved 1.7.2015 from https://ia801404.us.archive.org/27/items/protestantethics00webe/protestantethics00webe.pdf White, Robert W. 1974. Strategies of Adaptation: An Attempt at Systematic Description in Coping and Adaptation. New York: Basic Books Inc. Publishers.