The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

by Peter Joseph

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW eloquently put it, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

True intelligence is self-awareness—including a sense of just how wrong you likely are most of the time as a result of your biases.

Douglass’s literary style itself was also influential. His writing is deliberate, incisive, and motivating. There is idealism and yet pragmatism existing at once.

We are all one. And if we don’t know it, we will find out the hard way.1 — BAYARD RUSTIN

A social system is defined as the means by which a society organizes itself to facilitate survival, prosperity, and, ideally, peaceful coexistence. From networking the behavior of individuals and institutions, to characteristics such as security, medical access, resource management, political processes, and transport infrastructure, the defining features of a social system can vary.

Overall, a social system serves to maintain and improve public health

How a society organizes its resources, labor, production, and distribution is by far the most defining and influential feature of culture.

Modern poverty is actually not an inevitable byproduct of humans’ sharing a planet that is supposedly deficient in resources. Rather, poverty today is a systemic consequence native to our current economic mode. In other words, its existence is artificial and contrived, not natural.

The more economic inequality, the unhealthier a country’s people are on average.

socioeconomic inequality is the greatest detriment to human health and social stability in the world today.

I wish to reiterate that the real issue of concern today isn’t moral; it is structural. It has little to do with people’s general, day-to-day intent and everything to do with the organizing framework of global society. All the best intentions in the world are not going to stop the existing and emerging problems as long as the current socioeconomic framework remains unaltered.

the abolition of abject slavery or apartheid didn’t occur through polite, rational conversation, at no time has the march toward social equality and rational societal adjustment been fluid.

Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them . . .

Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.1 — DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Systems theory was made popular by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the late 1960s.

The term biopsychosocial is commonly used in the public-health community to embrace such mixed

As will be explored further, our habitat and its dynamics influence our social and personal lives in complex ways. For instance, any large-scale environmental disaster could deeply affect our biopsychosocial condition. An earthquake that creates a water shortage in a city is an example. This could trigger social disorder, reducing public safety in terms of both poor sanitation and stress-induced crime. Those suffering from dehydration could suffer serious physiological harm. Likewise, a person genetically predisposed to anxiety disorder might have behavioral reactions that in turn negatively affect others. Some may become so desperate that they end up drinking unsanitary water, triggering the spread of disease. This would further increase negative social stress and other chain reactions.

Niklas Luhmann

Luhmann basically reduces all social-system phenomena to processes of

Just as we completely depend on adults for survival in the first years of life, evolution has wired us for social connection and bonding in deep and profound ways throughout the life

King Frederick II of Sicily conducted a wildly primitive experiment. Curious what the “natural language” of human beings may be, he commandeered some children from his kingdom and had them raised in complete isolation for years.

Unfortunately, the experiment was inconclusive as all the children died of what is called stress or psychosocial dwarfism.7 Also known as Kaspar Hauser Syndrome, this is the phenomenon in which extreme emotional deprivation leads to endocrinological disturbances that harm development and can even lead to

supportive emotional bonds can have powerful, long-term positive effects on children, even in infancy. For instance, caring for infants in very deliberate and physical ways has been linked to stronger immune

A prominent study conducted by Tiffany Field of the University of Miami School of Medicine found that simply touching premature infants each day in neonatology wards sparked growth-hormone reactions that increased development rates by almost 50 percent, along with a host of other positive

the American Academy of Pediatrics directly linked an increased unemployment rate to child

Localized perception is what you see directly around you, drawing conclusions and building associations from the incomplete sensory data coming through your five-sense reality. Systems perception or systems thinking is about understanding intersecting processes and chain reactions. Unfortunately, such thinking does not come naturally to us. We tend to see the world as a façade, perpetuating illusions of reality. In fact, I would argue that this perceptual flaw is at the root of most all superstitions and false theories of the past.

Even the most commonsense perception you have of yourself is largely an illusion. We experience our bodies as closed, free-moving systems. Our minds have a powerful sense of individuality and free agency. Yet the air we breathe, the gravity that defines our movement, the sun that powers life itself, and the culture that orients our values are just as much a part of us as the arms we extend.

Today, we have firm understandings about social preconditions that lead to probable outcomes such as terrorism, violence, property crime, family abuse, mental disorders, sexual perversion, conflict, drug addiction, and a host of other behaviors once relegated to the realm of free will

To see ourselves as connected to and the same as everything else in the world, as science has shown, is a very unromantic detour from ancient belief systems determined to convince us that we are special. Hence, systems thinking puts into doubt the major foundations of religious belief, eliminating the idea that human beings have a privileged position in the universe.

Today, intellectual progress has literally left the socioeconomic-political system behind. A massive sociological cultural lag has been occurring for about a century now, wherein modern understandings that can dramatically improve human life go utterly unincorporated.

The truth is that if the potential for positive change were truly realized, the entire architecture of society would be forced to shift dramatically. As such, there should be little wonder as to why modern sociological revelations have gone mostly ignored by policy makers.

The United States not only incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world, it incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world.21 Racism is literally built into the entire system, as almost half of those incarcerated are of African descent, with black youths six times more likely to be incarcerated than white youths for the same

As civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander notes: “[Y]outh of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than their white

A 2013 study produced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that: “Estimates based on over 35,000 juvenile offenders over a ten-year period from a large urban county in the US suggest that juvenile incarceration results in large decreases in the likelihood of high school completion and large increases in the likelihood of adult

While approaches vary from country to country, the idea that operant negative conditioning will deter unwanted behavior is the central theme. In other words, punishment or the threat of punishment is the assumed means of control. While the term “rehabilitation” is often used in regard to incarceration or parole, it’s hard to take that term seriously when the mechanism is mostly punishment.

the words of Bertrand Russell: When a man is suffering from an infectious disease he is a danger to the community, and it is necessary to restrict his liberty of movement. But no one associates any idea of guilt with such a situation. On the contrary, he is an object of commiseration to his friends. Such steps as science recommends are taken to cure him of his disease, and he submits as a rule without reluctance to the curtailment of liberty involved meanwhile. The same method in spirit ought to be shown in the treatment of what is called “

While effective rehabilitation is important, real success lies in preventing a criminal violation to begin with. This means the proper social preconditions that help ensure human well-being and the avoidance of criminal or offensive behavior must be in place. Hence, if the goal of society is to stop such behavior, the main focus can only be socioeconomic reform, not punitive threat. As research has shown, reducing negative social stress is critical, for such pressures can alter one’s

The intersection of historical, socioeconomic, legal, and cultural factors has created a dynamic that generates racist outcomes without directly racist intentions. In other words, it isn’t the outcome of a sea of overtly bigoted police officers, lawyers, judges, parole officers, and other personnel. Rather, it is a confluence of America’s racist historical baggage, the primitive legal logic of the justice system itself, and cultural bias that is subconsciously generated by the repetition of disproportionate minority arrests, along with the socioeconomic reality of minority poverty and inequality. These four preconditions ensure destructive and punitive outcomes against blacks and minorities throughout the system.

The 1960s civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael was perhaps the first to popularize this kind of systemic observation. Coining the term institutional racism, he stated: “Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks [and] in the operation of established and respected forces in the society [that] receives far less public condemnation than the first.”41 He continues: “This is not to say that every single American consciously oppresses black people. He does not need to. Institutional racism has been maintained deliberately by the power structure and through indifference, inertia and lack of courage on the part of white masses as well as petty officials.”