Social exclusion and unemployability

Most young people these days are going to be pretty much unemployable in their 40's and 50's. This is not because they are not well educated, or lacking in intelligence, or anything like that. This is simply because the way the socio-economic system and employment market is set up. Plus of course the failing political systems of mainstream politics which just look at GDP and perpetual economic growth and steadfastly refuse to even think about social issues, social exclusion, or quality of life experience.

I'm not going to be partisan or single out a particular party, but there's a popular belief that you can somehow run an economy without social security.

Okay so what happens when you develop a disability, a chronic major health issue, or a mental illness? Where are you going to find the social support networks, the social care, the actual welfare payments, investment and support? Where are you going to find the accommodations from prospective future employers?

Truth be told there is none. All you're going to get is birdsong, mouthing platitudes, and a fair amount of victim blaming. You know? Could have, would have, should have.... Most organizations only care inasmuch they get to cover their own arses. Also please keep in mind that any organization is a fixed, rigid structure which is incapable of effecting any significant or meaningful social change or progress. You have a hierarchy, a mission statement, a set of policies, a set of procedures. Any variation or diversification from that structure 'breaks' the organization so what you have is a commitment to a mission or purpose.

Therefore any expectation or reliance on any organization to bring about meaningful or significant social change is, generally speaking, an exercise in foolishness. What any organization needs to be about is possibility or opportunity. But see considering possibilities or opportunities requires getting out of the mental straitjackets of ideology and preconceived notions.

The myth of work being a route out of poverty

For some reason the vast majority of people in society buy into the myth that work is a reliable route out of poverty. No let me change that. Myth isn't strong enough. See when you have a myth you can have a metaphor and a myth can contain some truth. Work being a route out of poverty is a lie. In many cases work can often be a route into exploitation and hardship. You could believe that work is a route out of poverty if you see work as an economic activity from which you can obtain income and money.

But see first and foremost work is a social activity. In order to find work, any sort of work, you need an Ego (which you put into words on a CV or resume). Society is held together by people who work and the social bonds which exist between people who work. If there are no dentists, you're stuck with toothache. But to see work as primarily an economic activity ignores the vast amount of unpaid work done by not just volunteers, activists, artists, people involved in sports, it also ignores much of the work undertaken by women worldwide - childcare, domestic servitude and social care. Much of this work undertaken by women worldwide obviously isn't paid, but rather more often than not is taken for granted. This is significant. If you paid the work most women do at minimum wage and organized it into an organization you'd end up with a vast multinational corporation some 25 times the size of a global corporation such as Apple.

So therefore for all the noise and statements made by the equality and diversity industry that gulf between gender pay and equality is still impressively vast. Think Pacific Ocean scale of vast. That's just between men and women.

So now let's move onto the next part of the lie or untruth which is the lie of the shirker, the economically inactive, the people who don't work and subsist on welfare benefits. For some reason this is the bane of most mainstream politicians. It's such a problem because the vast majority of mainstream politicians see work as an economic activity which contributes to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), economic growth and profitability. Through my work and activism over some years I have had direct dealings with many politicians. I've twice stood as a candidate to be a local councillor. I've been a member of three different political parties and I can tell you that the vast majority of politicians I have come across have been woefully ignorant of not just social exclusion (one of my major activist planks) but also the social implications of work. Quite simply, they just don't get it.

This is important because work isn't an economic activity at all. Nobody pays you just for turning up to work. You've got to actually do the work, put in the hours, complete various tasks and duties. In other words you've got to actually do the work. Any economic activity takes place after you've completed the work. But see in order to do the work you need to be socially engaged and involved. You don't work all by yourself, do you? Therefore, if you're following my train of thought here, work is primarily a social activity.

In fact I would even go as far to state that even if you have someone subsisting entirely off welfare benefits and handouts they are still economically active. Anyone subsisting off welfare benefits entirely still has to spend money. They still have to pay for their housing. They still have to pay their bills. They still need to buy food. They still need access to the internet and to buy clothes. Furthermore they still have to interact with other people in order to spend money and pay bills. For most people subsisting off welfare benefits does not allow them to live 'off grid' and completely shut off from either the community or society.

The other thing I would like to point out is that the poor and the destitute create more than their fair share of work for other people and collectively they keep a lot of other people in work. This is something that isn't really spoken about or even thought about. We're sold the lie that those who create the work and the jobs are the investors, wealthy CEOs, the people at the top of the economic food chain. Not true. Those at the top tend to be those who are creaming off the profits and end products of other people's labour. It's actually the people at the so-called bottom of society, the homeless, the destitute, people with disabilities and chronic health issues, who are providing a lot of work for others in the form of social workers, key workers, doctors, housing officers, support workers, carers and so on and so forth. Then you have the civil servants and the people who work in the welfare benefits system.

So where are all these moochers, layabouts and shirkers? Well generally speaking they don't exist and to believe that they do displays a profound ignorance of social stigma and social exclusion.

Social inclusion v. social exclusion

Now this is where we get to the more complicated or 'difficult to understand' part. I'm going to write about something which which lies beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of elected politicians out there, the vast majority of political candidates, the media, and also a large section of society. As I have previously stated work is primarily a social activity rather than an economic activity. In fact I do not believe that other than the valuation of someone's labour in monetary terms that work is an economic activity at all. Outside of direct renumeration for their labour, most people who work do not derive any other economic benefits from their work.

Please keep in mind here that I'm writing about work as an activity, i.e. something we do.

Now, if you are doing any form of work, any form of work at all, social interaction is the primary activity. It does not matter whether you are dealing with colleagues, customers, or clients, service users, patients, superiors, line managers, or so on, you will be expected to socially interact with other people as part of your work. That is, unless you are completing tasks or activities which are for the benefit of other people, in other words producing an end product, or a service.

Generally speaking the ability to seek and find work - if you are without work and jobless - is generally much easier if you are already socially included, i.e. you are already part of 'society', have access to a social network - family, friends, and a social support system, rather than if you are socially excluded, i.e. without any existing social bonds or relationships.

See when you are socially excluded, whether it be through social isolation, loneliness, a major long term illness, a disability, or through social stigma and having a social marker as part of your identity, your ability to seek and find work is impaired, greatly diminished, and there may even be actual barriers which prevent you from going back into work. This is because social exclusion comes with various barriers:

• Practical barriers

  Social exclusion throws up many practical barriers, which may arise out of such issues as housing, lack of white goods, for example a washing machine and the ability to wash clothes and do laundry, and so on.

  Within these practical barriers you have also health issues and disabilities. See in order to work you need energy to get through the day, a regular sleep cycle, good mental health, and not be experiencing physical difficulties or pain. Keep in mind that most limited capability of work or fitness to work tests in the UK do not make any distinction between activities of daily living and work focussed tasks. They do not take into account the sustainability of doing specific tasks repeatedly. Sure you can pick up a bag from the floor and hold it, but can you do it repeatedly for over an hour? Does that activity cause you discomfort or pain? How long does it take you to be able to pick up that bag? Are you energy efficient? Does picking up the bag tire you out? None of these finer nuanced abilities are taken into account.

• Financial barriers

  Then you have the financial barriers from social exclusion. Work requires a certain amount of financial expenditure. If you are travelling to a workplace you have the costs of fares and commuting, you also need to be able to purchase lunch or food, containers if you want to bring food from home. You need clothes, footwear, toiletries, cosmetics, and so on. Even if working from home you may need additional equipment such as a computer and/or need to pay for additional heating and energy usage.

• Social barriers

  Then you have of course social barriers. Socially excluded people generally do not experience the softer human skills such as empathy, kindness, appreciation, they rarely get unsolicited attention from other people or experience what is known as primary social interaction. Here I'm referring to social interaction which is positive, pleasant, reaffirming. This is very significant, because generally how we see ourselves is strongly influenced by our social interactions, relationships, and how other people generally perceive us.

  When you have nobody to wish you Happy Christmas, Happy Birthday, or even getting in touch with you to ask you how you are, it has an effect on your psyche. Some people affected by social exclusion often do not have a genuinely social interaction or conversation for years. All their social interaction can be described as 'functional' - dealing with officials, doctors, civil servants and other representatives of organizations and businesses.

  These social barriers can have significant and devastating effects on one's mental health and from this, one's physical health. Social isolation and loneliness can be just as physically damaging as smoking cigarettes to one's health. Then you have a certain amount of degradation and reduction in cognitive functioning abilities - such as strategies for getting attention, risk calculation and threat assessment, problem solving, and so on.

• Emotional and psychological barriers

  Then you have the various emotional and psychological effects of social exclusion. You might be able to relate to this if we consider various negative social encounters. You might have experiencedd what it feels like when people forget your birthday. You might remember what it felt like to be the last person to be picked for a team. You might recall what it felt like not to be invited to a party or social event to which all your friends have been invited. Yopu might recall what it feels like to be judged or believed to have done something which you haven't done. You might have experienced social injustice.

  People affected by social exclusion experience some or all of the above on the daily. It's relentless. Furthermore they are expected to constantly seek work, which reinforces feelings of rejection and exclusion, on a daily basis.

  When there are discussions about work and welfare benefits including the tropes about people 'not wanting to work' none of these what I've written above is ever taken into account in such discussions. Nobody considers the very broad social issue of social exclusion, social stigma, or the many significant emotional and psychological effects you experience when you are affected by social exclusion. Think about this. Exactly how well would you do if you were faced by constant rejection, exclusion and even criticism and prejudice on the daily? Think about it.

Most experiences of social exclusion are multi-dimensional, i.e. the exclusion has different dimensions which together make it virtually impossible for the person affected to transition back from being socially excluded to social inclusion, which is the desired state to be able to take on work. This is because of the many different barriers and obstacles which social exclusion throws up. If you're socially excluded and isolated any change in circumstances carries with it a risk of falling deeper into social exclusion. Moving into work from a socially excluded lifestyle carries just as much risk as relocating and changing where you live. Social exclusion tends to therefore make those affected risk averse, and given the fragmented nature of social support systems and even welfare benefits system once you become embedded fairly deeply into social exclusion, some degree of risk cannot be avoided.

The false assumptions of free will and determinism

I've stated repeatedly previously (and repeatedly) that human society doesn't work out naturally because of our evolutionary mistake millenia ago of a widespread belief in separateness and belief that the Ego (conceptual reality) is actual reality when it's not. But to understand the difference between social inclusion and social exclusion we also need to pay attention to the fact that the vast majority of human beings make other false assumptions and believe certain things to be reality when they are not. These basic assumptions and illusions all arise out of social conditioning and they are a belief in either free will or determinism, or both.

Both free will and determinism are illusions. There is no such thing as free will. Existence - any existence - is always relative to an environment and you are never ever free from an environment. Life is an experience of an environment. Even before birth you are relative to the environment of your mother's womb. The only freedom you have is the freedom to love another human being. That's it.

Similarly there is no such thing as determinism. This is why we have chaos. This is why we have trauma. The only constant in existence is change and that is because everything is constantly changing, evolving and growing. For sure you can have patterns, rhythms and cycles, and situations which crop up repeatedly, again and again, but the only point at which anything is determined is at the completion of a cycle and the start of a new cycle. It's a point in a cycle or a circle. Everything else is subject to change, evolution, trauma, and growth.

So if free will does not exist and is an illusion, and if the same thing can be said about determinism, then what actually exists? The answer is very simple. There is only the environment, environmental awareness, and how we as individuals respond to a specific environment. Our lives are determined by the kind of environments we find ourselves in, relationships within those environments, e.g. to other individual people, and how we respond to both our environment and in our relationships with other people.

This is where we find common ground with other species of animals and plants. Most animals, for example birds, are far more pragmatic and environmentally aware than most humans. When you get a flock of birds, say pigeons or gulls, and if one perceives a threat, all the birds in that flock will take flight and retreat to a safer distance from the threat. Birds instinctively know that they must reproduce, and reproduction requires a mate and a nest. If a bird needs food it will seek it by scouring the environment. When it finds food it will eat. There is no Ego, no emphasis on conceptual reality, no separateness, no beliefs. Animals live in almost complete environmental awareness. Humans don't. Therein lies the major difference, and this is precisely why human society is so fragmented, so divided, and also why we have social inclusion and social exclusion.

Social security: the benefit of Ego

So onto my next point.... The lack of free will and determinism is why we fall short and make mistakes in life. Failure and mistakes are just as inevitable in life as trauma, simply because life and existence is all about change and all about relationship. Any mistake you make in life gives you two things. Mistakes involve trauma, whether it be loss, suffering, or some other trauma. But see mistakes also give you an opportunity to learn something, to grow, to evolve. Of course you don't have to. But if you choose not to learn from mistakes or at least pay more attention to your environment and relationships, you create the kind of karma which invites further trauma and the same patterns repeating themselves.

I make this point so you understand that this evolutionary mistake Mankind made some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago has brought us benefits. See in embracing separateness and developing what we understand to be the Ego, we shifted our collective human consciousness into a focus - the focus of conscious attention (which is the Ego) - and discovered that we could conceptualize the past and the future. Based on these concepts, of past and future, we unlocked the power of our memory - and human memory in terms of the phenomenon of life is extremely powerful. We realized that we could provide for the future. Out of this we got science, religion, art, culture, and so on.

From this we got the concept of social security and social welfare.

So onto my next point.... My next point is about power, and our illusions about power. All too often we confuse power with control. But that is because the best example of power is political power which is about seeking to control society. But see as there is no free will and no determinism there is also no control. This is where we come to a fundamental truth about society or human beings in general. Nobody is in control. Yes there are people who think they are in control, or who seek to have control, but there is such a thing as environment and it is the environment which is in 'control', never an individual or a group of people. There is no control, because environment is everything else which isn't you coexisting in relationship in ways that neither you, me, nor anyone else can properly understand. Our power to comprehend life and existence is limited to memory and language. But existence and the universe, this planet, all functions on the basis of some elaborate code.

But there is another kind of power, mystical power, which is dependent on not being in control, but being able to live in cohesion with one's environment, just like animals and plants. However being able to make use of this power requires a certain level of environmental awareness and paying attention to what's going on. Not being sufficiently aware of one's environment or relationships, but instead living on the basis of the past or one's beliefs or ideologies, it leaves you wide open to trauma and constantly being caught out by not sticking to the truth. You're living on the basis of a distorted perspective and perception, and so may end up misunderstanding the trauma you experience and also misunderstand relationships.

There is a point to social security and that is to mitigate the effects of human trauma, human ignorance and human (conceptual) illusions. Social security is absolutely essential for the proper, natural functioning of human society.

Compounding our evolutionary mistakes and pathology

This is where we come to another far more nuanced mistaken assumption that very many people make in life. It lies in the assumption that life will somehow pan out a certain way and out of this assumption we base our beliefs. On the basis of our beliefs we make even further assumptions about how our life will pan out and so what you end up with is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which gets further and further away from the truth. Many people believe in morality and have some kind of moral compass, a belief in right and wrong, good and evil, and they base their lives around such beliefs.

But what we often don't realize or understand is that with each mistake or failure in life the course of our life and its trajectory changes. There is no such thing as making a mistake, or making a bad choice, or failing, and then correcting that bad choice or mistake to return to some sort of predetermined trajectory or course in life, or go back to normal. There is no normal. Choices have consequences. This is the whole point of karma - the relationship between physical memory and physical action. Thinking, saying and doing are all action in terms of karma. It's all relative and relative to what is known as the mystical transaction.

What I would like you to grasp or understand, at this point,is that karma is both instantaneous on one level, and on another level it's not. If you make a mistake or fail at something, you become affected by the resulting trauma. If you eat badly cooked meat or meat which is off or infected that you bought from say a takeaway you will get sick and experience food poisoning. Trying to learn from the experience by deciding not to buy anything more from that takeaway will not cure you from food poisoning. Nor does deciding not to buy anything from that takeaway ever again erase the memory you have of being sick, vomiting and suffering from food poisoning. This is one example of how any stupid decision, mistake or failure not only affects you in life, but also affects your mystical transaction, i.e. your relationship to your environment. This is an example of how karma works. Any choice you make based on your relationship with your environment and circumstances will invariably bring short term and long term consequences.

So let me come to another example - the mental health issue of depression. One of the effects of depression is that it strips away much of your social conditioning and belief systems. Instead of perceiving your environment and relationships as you have been conditioned to perceive them, you generally perceive everything as it actually is. You lose the false sense of confidence that comes from your Ego and self-esteem. You usually fail to get any false sense of joy or elation from your achievements. Instead you perceive a sense of hopelessness, a sense of despair, you perceive trauma, you perceive suffering, and you're no longer motivated by a false sense of purpose. You live on the basis of a different level of reality to other people in society who are still relatively socially conditioned enough to believe in the illusions of free will, determinism, and the whole she bang of separateness.

But if you struggle with a depressive mental health issue such as bipolar depression, or unipolar depression, you will still be affected by social conditioning from other people. You will be labelled as sad, as lazy, as unmotivated, as unproductive. In other words you're not buying into the illusions of separateness, free will, determinism, and so on. But it's important to remember that human society is conceptual rather than actual. Take a look at the image of the Microsoft building above. Notice how the building is square or rectangular, with straight lines, organized, tidy. This is the giveaway of a human influence on the environment. Nothing in the natural environment is square, or rectangular, or straight. It's squiggly, curly, curved, intricate, uneven, imperfect.

Now please don't think I'm trying to explain away depression or the seriousness or complexity of this mental health issue. I'm not. I'm actually pointing out the opposite. What I'm looking to explain away is the false basic premises on which much of modern society is based. You see when you stop believing in free will as any kind of reality, you also stop believing in the other false illusions of individual choice and personal agency. Of course you also wipe out the illusions of the power of choice, positive thinking, success and personal achievement. Consider that many of the factors for your success in life are as environmental as the factors if you gave been affected by poverty, deprivation or something like racism. You might think you are responsible for your success in life. But this is just your assumption and nothing more than that. But for me believing that you are successful because of your personal choices in life is as delusional as believing you are experiencing racism because you were born black.

This brings us to another illusion which is built on all the other illusions I have written about thus far - the illusion of capitalism. There is nothing natural about capitalism. Any belief in capitalism is rooted in a belief in free will, in personal agency, in individualism and individual choice. It's also based on a belief that you have control if you have enough money and also, more importantly in order to believe in any validity in capitalism you have to deny a certain reality about what being a human being means and about the human species.

These are lessons we will have to learn from our initial human evolutionary mistake 10,000 years ago. What happens when we don't learn from mistakes? We don't evolve, we don't learn, we don't grow. We also make further mistakes. Or, even worse, we compound on our distorted thinking processes and make even bigger mistakes with far more serious consequences. This is what we are doing now - with the aid of technology - in stripping away social security based on the false beliefs in free will, personal agency, individual choice and so on. We've lost security of housing. We've lost security of employment and with it security of income. We are literally sawing off the branch we are sitting on from the rest of the tree and ignoring the big fall that is going to be an immediate consequence.

Everything is relative. Such social issues as poverty, inequality, crime, destitution, unemployment, homelessness doesn't just affect 'some' people. It only does if you believe in separateness, free will, individual agency, and all the other social illusions. The reality of all these social issues, and social exclusion, is that on some level to some degree it's affecting everyone in society. It is also changing the whole trajectory of social progress and human evolution. It's important to remember that there is no personal agency or free will and so such issues as social exclusion, poverty, crime, and all the social issues demand a different approach and significant social and political solutions and measures.

When will one in five become one in three?

One thing one needs to know about issues such as social exclusion, poverty, destitution, crime, and so on is that these issues spread and evolve especially in societies which lack a safety net and social security. Also please keep in mind that it doesn't matter who you are or how you live your life, at some point in your life, usually once you've jumped through all the hoops of social conditioning, you're going to start experiencing despair and failure. Sometimes it happens when you're in your forties, but usually by the time you hit 50 your capacity to respond to changes in your environment falls off a cliff. Depending on how you've lived your life in the first half century, you may still slip into worse circumstances, poverty and even social exclusion. Work will be much harder to find, and even today for many people in their 40's and 50's life becomes a struggle.

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that social mobility upwards is largely an illusion. Social mobility for most people is an experience tied with despair so the trajectory is usually downwards or closer to social exclusion. What keeps many such people down is a widespread and fairly resistant wall of societal indifference and a chronic, persistent lack of empathy which forms a very effective barrier which closes off many different possible routes out of struggles, suffering and misery.

This is where I will leave it. Something to think about?