The inefficiency of slavery is now obvious, but to George Washington it came as a revelation. While on a visit to Philadelphia, Washington noticed that free men there could do in “two or three days what would employ [his slaves] a month or more.” His explanation—that slaves had no chance “to establish a good name [and so were] too regardless of a bad one”—was that of a practical man concerned with the bottom line, not that of a moralizer. Sadly for us, our first president did not draw the full implications of his insight. Had he done so, he might have used his immense prestige to end the indignity of slavery.

Today’s employers are not dealing with slaves, though it is often argued that wage-earners are wage-slaves, and that the dignity of salaried employees is only marginally more secure. Since Washington’s time, it has gradually become clear that negative motivation—fear of punishment—is less effective than the positive motivation that comes from being part of a team of trusted, responsible professionals.

Once a year, on Labor Day, the dignity of work is extolled from sea to shining sea. In the new book The Custom-Fit Workplace, authors Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas show how to turn that noble ideal into a year-round reality by providing a blueprint for employers intent on creating workplaces that unleash the full potential of employees.

The ill-effects of rigid work schedules, inequitable pay, and other demeaning practices are now the subject of a growing body of research documenting the damage done not only to individual employees but to the companies for which they work. It turns out that rankism—the rank-based discrimination and abuse to which most indignities can be traced—is no better for the bottom line than racism, sexism, and homophobia. All the discriminatory “isms” are self-inflicted wounds that drain away the life-blood of enterprises harboring them.

The indignities of rankism are not merely unfair, they are inefficient and counterproductive. Fear and humiliation work only so long as people lack options. The young are increasingly unwilling to put up with rankist environments, and soon these vestiges of the workhouse will become untenable throughout the economy. A culture of dignity in the workplace provides a competitive advantage because it means happier, healthier, more creative and productive employees. What does it matter if they work together in lockstep—so long as they get the job done? People who feel recognized as individuals and respected as human beings are more likely to give their best. Much as eliminating malnutrition makes for healthier workers, eliminating malrecognition makes for more reliable ones.

Customized workplaces respect employees’ dignity in ways that previous generations would have found astonishing and the next generation will take for granted. Great managers have long known that nothing motivates workers quite so consistently as pride in a job well done. In chapters on flextime, virtual and contract work, job and career lane changes, and childcare at work, Blades and Fondas provide a design for a dignitarian workplace that pays off in performance and profits.

Today, slavery has no defenders. As the liberating and empowering practices in this handbook spread through the global marketplace, the institutional indignities of the one-size-fits-all workplace will likewise be revealed as paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. When the history of the dignity movement is written, The Custom-Fit Workplace will stand as a beacon that lit the way.

1. Work: Take the trouble to understand how co-workers contribute to getting the job done and acknowledge their contribution.
If you are a boss, it’s not enough to avoid treating your employees in a rankist manner (though the example you set will reverberate through the entire organization) ; you are also responsible for making sure that your subordinates treat their subordinates with dignity. Dignitarian companies are not only happier workplaces, they are also healthier, more creative, and more productive ones.

2. Education: Create “Indignity Free Zones.”
Teachers are increasingly sensitive to the harm done to students by indignity. If you’re an educator, you can bring this awareness into the open and communicate it to those students whose bullying and humiliation of peers unconsciously mirrors that of adult society. A threat to a student’s dignity is more than a discourtesy. It is an attack on one’s status in the “tribe,” and carries an implicit threat of ostracism and exclusion. Status has historically been a matter of life and death and remains a determinant of whether we prosper or decline, so an attack on status is experienced as a threat to survival. Rankism poisons the learning environment.

3. Healthcare: Enlist your patients as partners.
If you are a healthcare provider, you can help your clients make the awkward transition from patients to partners. Ridding healthcare of its legacy of dehumanization and infantilization is good medical practice. You can also insist on respect throughout the organization in which you work. If you are a patient, have compassion for doctors, too. It’s not easy to give up one’s “deity status,” and many physicians are doing so with remarkable grace. Moreover, remember that they’re victims of rankism themselves at the hands of HMOs that often treat them less like the professionals they are and more like pieceworkers on an assembly line.

4. Sports: Have respect for the other team.
If you’re a coach, you can forbid trash talk, on and off the court, among your players and to your opponents. Show your team that they are capable of more—not by humiliating them but by teaching and inspiring them. Rent the 1973 film Bang the Drum Slowly and show it to your athletes. Its punch line—“I rag on nobody”—puts it in the anti-rankist hall of fame.

5. Religion: Exemplify rather than exhort.
If you’re a religious leader, you can refrain from pulling spiritual rank. You can do more for your flock by listening and providing them with a personal example worthy of emulation than you can by invoking higher authority, which is often little more than a claim that God shares your politics.

6. Guardian professions (policing): Bring dignity to law enforcement.
If you’re a policeman or woman, protect citizens’ dignity as you already protect their lives. Any kind of profiling is rankism.

7. Military: One part of a strong defense is not giving offense in the first place.
Indignity is the source of indignation, so to avoid escalation or revenge, take care to spare your foes gratuitous indignities.

8. Politics: Restore civility to politics
If you’re in electoral politics you can point the way to a dignitarian society, even if your colleagues aren’t yet ready to embrace your ideas. Treat your opponents with dignity. Don’t sneer, mock, or condescend. Avoid patronizing or posturing. When politicians lay claim to moral superiority, they extend rankism’s lease. Since rankism is an attack on both liberty and dignity, denounce it along with the other isms. Explain to your constituents why you’re against it—in all its forms—and then go after them one by one. Be the leader you wanted to be when you first imagined running for office. Be willing to lose an election for your dignitarian convictions. If you do lose, run for office a few years later, and win! To paraphrase Victor Hugo, dignity is an idea whose time has come.

9. Other professions: Show the world dignity through your profession.
If you’re an artist, expose rankism; put dignity on exhibit. If you’re a philosopher, define and deconstruct dignity. If you’re a psychologist, demonstrate the consequences of malrecogntion. If you’re a comedian, make us laugh at the double standards that apply to somebodies and nobodies. If you’re a filmmaker, give us heroes who overcome rankism without resorting to rankism. If you’re a songwriter, write an anthem for the dignity movement. If you’re a TV producer, stop exploiting humiliation and celebrating rankism. Sooner than you think, the staple of TV entertainment—humiliation—is going to feel as off-key as racism, sexism, and homophobia do today.

10. Be a Susan B. Anthony of the Dignity Movement.
In the 19th century, Susan B. Anthony traveled a million miles by train and gave 20,000 speeches advocating the enfranchisement of women. Sadly, she did not live to see the success of the suffragette movement she spearheaded (but her image is on the dollar coin). If you’re an organizer, create a chapter of the dignitarian movement in your area. Coordinate with other chapters and make them a national force under the slogan “no rankism” and the banner “dignity for all.” Programs to help the poor or end poverty will continue to fall short until those trapped in the underclass have found their voice and together insist on respect and equity. Do what Susan B. Anthony did for women and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. did for African-Americans: help the victims of chronic indignity find an effective way to give voice to their plight and change the status quo.

Let’s stop hurting each other. You go first. – Alta

It should be obvious by now that the call for people to love one another—whether in church or in song—carries little weight. Evidently, something keeps us from entering the house of love through the front door. Perhaps we should try the back.

When someone insults our dignity, or does something we find unacceptable, it is anger that we experience, not hatred. The key to whether anger transmutes into hate lies in agency—our capacity for acting. If fear of retaliation persuades us to hold our tongue, then anger congeals into hate as we stifle our protest to spare ourselves further indignity or limit damage already done. But if, instead of submitting to the indignity, we are able to right or repel it, then anger is discharged before it can harden into hate.

Anger is passionate—hot, liquid, kinetic. If repressed, it gels into hatred—cold, hard, stagnant.

Though its cause appears to lie outside ourselves, hate has a secret accomplice within. Its name is Fear. “Hate is the consequence of fear,” Cyril Connolly notes. “We fear something before we hate it.” Anger solidifies to hate when we fear domination or feel discounted; hatred persists if grievances remain unaddressed and dignity unrestored.

When we’re unable to stand up to put-downs, we hate those who diminish us; those who, assuming their own superiority, condescend to us or presume to know what’s best for us. When we find ourselves without resources or allies, we despise those who take us for nobodies.

Hate is caused by unrelieved indignity—real or imagined. Imagined indignities can feel as injurious as real ones, and have led people to commit mayhem and murder.

Although the command to “Love your enemies” does not provide a roadmap, it does function to keep antagonists working at the task of envisioning themselves as parts of a larger whole. Once it’s found, they can substitute the co-creation of that whole for the destruction of each other.

With a first diminution of the threat, we re-conceive our enemies as adversaries. With a hint of mutual value, adversaries become rivals—a term acknowledging each party’s role as a teacher of the other. Finally, by recognizing their mutual dependency, rivals begin to see themselves as partners. Enmity has been transformed into comity, comity into amity.

What can we do to initiate this transformation? First, we can cease to perpetrate indignities, no matter where we are in the cycle of recrimination. In order to open the door to accommodation, we have to show our antagonists the dignity we want them to extend to others and ourselves. We must be willing to meet indignity with dignity, for however long it takes, while not slyly sabotaging the process by taking pride in our own forbearance. Maintaining civility doesn’t mean giving in to others’ demands, but it does mean dealing with them respectfully.

A second line of defense against hatred is to recognize that when real indignities do occur—and they are inevitable—a flash of righteous anger or a sharp verbal riposte preempts the slow burn of hate. As we gain confidence to protest against the indignities that befall us, and to apologize for those we ourselves commit, we deny hate the hothouse required for its gestation.

As we remove hate from human intercourse—either by eliminating the causes of indignity or by restoring agency to indignity’s victims—we give love a chance. There are no shortcuts. This procedure applies not only to relationships between persons, but also to those between groups and nations. Love is shy, but it will turn out to be ubiquitous and abundant once it’s safe for it to show its face.

Ever let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home…
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
– John Keats

Most kids visit their grandparents by car. Not me. Mine lived on Puget Sound and to see them my mother, baby brother, and I (at age five, and on a return visit, at nine) rode the train for a week–from New Jersey to Seattle. We had a roomette to ourselves, but roamed the train under the watchful eyes of “porters,” all of whom belonged to The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the vanguard union for African-American labor.

No African-Americans lived in my town. None went to my school. As a child, I didn’t notice, let alone understand, that blacks were effectively excluded from many Northern towns by gentlemen’s agreements that barred them from owning or renting property. Sleeping car porters were the first African-Americans I ever spoke to. Of course, they were not then identified as “African-American,” but as “Negroes.”

By the time these men had served us breakfast of sliced oranges and blueberry pancakes in five states, daily made up our little room, and hovered helpfully from sea to shining sea, they were like fond uncles. The contrast between the prevailing racist stereotype and my personal experience of these kindly protectors could hardly have been starker.

A decade later, when I met blacks at college, my experience of the porters helped me bridge what might otherwise have felt like a chasm.

Travel breaks stereotypes. We get to see for ourselves, form our own impressions.

Like many who read Jack Kerouac’s bible for trans-continental pilgrims–On the Road–I spent several summers exploring America in old cars fueled by 35 cent per gallon gasoline.

Why did I go? To devour my country. To swallow it whole. Like a gerbil exploring its cage, I was driven to give my confines a once over and probe the limits of the Americentric vision I’d been raised on. In Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe writes of someone who consumed not books, but libraries. That rang a bell. The generation that came of age as America took its place on the world stage was voracious for experience.

Shortly after chalking up my forty-eighth state, I sailed to France for a year of graduate study. Within days of landing, I took off for Germany on a rented scooter to see if it lay in ruins as depicted in wartime newsreels.

Not a stone seemed out of place in Munich, but on the outskirts of the city lay a mountain of rubble that was all that remained of the prewar site of the legendary Oktoberfest. And just down the road was the death camp of Dachau, which left me with a life-long question, one I plan to address in a subsequent blogpost: How could the Holocaust have happened?

In the late sixties, travel brought me another life-shaping revelation, this time in the Soviet Union. Celebrated as our ally against Hitler in World War II, the USSR was now regarded as a treacherous Cold War enemy. By this time my compulsion to explore whatever cage I found myself in had resulted in multiple forays through Western Europe and South America. But Russia, the Pacific countries, and Africa remained virgin territory.

My immediate goal was to find out if the USSR was indeed a workers’ paradise, as some claimed, or a police state with an agenda of world conquest, as others insisted. An exchange with the Russian guide assigned to “mind” me, planted a question that would drive me for decades. After several days of fervent lectures on the unparalleled achievements of Soviet communism, I asked the guide how mental illness was treated in the USSR. I remember her answer verbatim: “There is no mental illness in the Soviet Union. Mental illness is a by-product of capitalism.”

I suspected otherwise, and for years I wondered if behind their official masks, Russians were not just like us. It was, of course, logically possible that they inhabited a parallel universe; that truth for them was different than truth for us. I facetiously called this the “Martian hypothesis,” and vowed to put it to the empirical test, in the manner of my youth, by riding the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia.

Ten years would pass before I could get it together to make the journey. Six years after riding from the Baltic to the Pacific in search of common ground with the Russians, I took the “trans-Sib” in the reverse direction–from Beijing to Budapest. Travel-writer Paul Theroux speaks for me when he notes, “I sought trains; I found passengers.”

I’ve since traveled to Russia many times, and every trip has been an adventure. During the Cold War, there was uncertainty about getting a visa, clearing passport control, even finding an edible meal. Foreigners and Soviet citizens alike feared arbitrary arrest. Getting anything done, felt like a small victory. I was anxious the whole time, even in my sleep.

Fear is part of what makes travel so enlivening and revelatory. You’re perpetually off-balance and on guard. After a while one yearns for the mindlessness of familiar routines. And when you do return home, old pleasures are much the sweeter for having been suspended.

Travel is like truth serum. Whether snaking across the American prairie or the Siberian taiga, crossing the Rockies, Urals, or Karakorams, or cycling through Beijing or Berlin, travel makes us porous to new customs, beauties, ideas, and dreams. I can’t think of a better vaccine against dogmatism or a quicker cure for self-satisfaction. As we struggle to reconcile what we’re experiencing with what we take for granted, we strip away what’s arbitrary in cultural practice and approach what is universal.

Non-travelers are more susceptible to habitual seeing and thinking. Traveling, jolts us awake. Even to cross the street we must cease our sleepwalking…or die. It must be admitted, however, that travel may simply confirm some in the superiority of their own ways. As Thomas Fuller observed in 1732, “Travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse.”

Travel not only invites us to see the world anew, it gives us an unaccustomed look at who is doing the seeing. None of the benefits of travel compares to the oblique glance it allows us of our selves. By placing us outside ourselves, travel provides us with the distance required to see what it is we are habitually doing and the anonymity to try out new ways of being in the world.

So, we do not travel to get away from it all. Alas, as the bumper sticker says, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Travel fails as escape but it succeeds as confrontation–confrontation with our old selves that, deprived of their usual confirmatory surroundings, may yield to a new one.

Lately, as I head to the airport, I’m starting to feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs. The self-renewal so reliably delivered, by making myself a stranger in a strange land, seems to be triggered by merely climbing into the airport van. By the time I disembark an hour later, it feels like there are enough new ideas coursing through me to justify turning around and going straight home where I can sort them out in comfort.

Once your travels have shown you what it means to see freshly, you discover that you can almost do so without leaving home. Almost, but not quite, at least not forever. There seems to be nothing like immersion in another culture for staving off the mind’s tendency to calcification and continuing the life-long process of creating one’s self anew. We travel to grow up, wake up, and stay on our toes.

The object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country… . – G. K. Chesterton

If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you …
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
– Carousel, Rodgers & Hammerstein

When we fall in love, we don’t know our beloved. She’s a mystery. We’re constantly looking for her—in our mind, on the street. We contrive “chance” encounters. When we meet, we’re jumpy and off-balance.

We want to gaze upon our beloved, inhale her aroma, absorb her essence. Everything we behold is suffused with love. The world is new.

Why do we love? To complete ourselves. To give us purpose. To know our quest. To bring us home. To accept ourselves. “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.”

In adolescence, as we struggle to put together a viable self, our basic guide is love—love for ideas, art, cultures, but above all, love for particular individuals. Love, while it sometimes leads to folly, is nonetheless the best catalyst there is for defining ourselves and identifying our task. As Charles Baudelaire said, “Nature, whether in cookery or in love, rarely gives us a taste for what is bad for us.”

Young love is fanciful, fleeting, and fragile—in a word, romantic. As we come to know our lover, we lose a piece of our innocence. Once love has been acknowledged and returned, it either evolves or turns into memorabilia. Memories aren’t experience, whereas love must be experienced or it’s just habit. Disappointed, we may conclude that love has not lasted. But, in truth, it has as many lives as a cat.

As routine displaces novelty, we may be tempted to shift our attention to someone new and taste again the thrill of romantic love. This is the point of no return. As the mystery that fuels romantic love is dispelled, we either move on or get serious.

If we follow its lead into deeper waters, love morphs into something with the potential to remake us. This is the love of familiar, committed partners, variously known as conjugal, married, or spousal love. Marriage is love’s crucible—it has the tensile strength to contain the heat of self-transformation.

Here, we know our partner. There’s neither the mystery nor the uncertainty to stoke fevered romance. In fact, relationships between mortals invariably include conflict as well as canoodling. But we do not abandon our partner or abort the process just because our ego takes a hit. The bonds of marriage bring us back to try and try again. In “sparring” with our partners, we root out the false in each other and grow.

In a long-running, committed relationship, we love our partners because they love us in spite of the fact that they may hate something about us (often the very same things that bother us about ourselves). A love strong enough to incorporate criticism continually renews its lease on life. As we respond to our partner, a subtly altered person steps into our shoes. Instead of settling into habit, the relationship is recharged by the advent of changed partners.

Sometimes the business of love completes itself for one or both partners. Two people may either hit an impasse or, for reasons they may only dimly surmise, cease to support one another’s continued development.

At moments like these it will seem that love has indeed ended, that the relationship is beyond hope. The point of the sword is hard to find, and having found it, it’s a mistake to wriggle off before getting as clear as you possibly can as to why you’re doing so. Achieving a blameless understanding of a break-up may take years, but it’s a high-return investment in the rest of your life. As we better understand how ex-partners served our development, they may come to feel like old friends.

During a long relationship, there are moments when we see our partners as we did at the outset—with beginner’s eyes. A certain smile, a fragrance, a toss of the head, a posture or gait, can make our hearts leap.

At the start, there was mystery: What does a smile mean? Will our love be returned? Now, we know. The smile holds not mystery but meaning: together, we go forward. The gaze of love holds not a question, but an answer: refreshed, love endures.

America is broken. Even if we pull through the current economic crisis, recovery won’t last absent an overhaul of our primary institutions.

• One out of ten Americans is now unemployed and the recovery is expected to be jobless.
• Fifty million Americans have no heath insurance; two million, no home.
• Two million Americans are in jail.
• Our public schools have fallen behind those of most developed nations.
• Higher education is priced out of reach of the middle class.
• Our infrastructure is in an advanced state of disrepair.
• We rank first in greenhouse gas emissions.
• Immigration, once our pride, is now our shame.
• We’re living on credit and leaving the debt to our children.

The crisis is compounded by corruption of the democratic process. Politicians who owe their seats to private and corporate money are not easily persuaded to put the public interest over the special interests of their benefactors.

If our predicament were one in which there was an emergent consensus about the proper remedy, President Obama might be able to orchestrate an epochal makeover–as President Johnson did in the civil rights crisis. Most Americans knew then that African-Americans were victims of racism and that segregation was wrong. But today, reformers are themselves divided and many of the issues are of such complexity as to defy broad public comprehension.

Despite his formidable rhetorical gifts, President Obama has yet to tell us how to repair our broken institutions. But he may be doing something even better. He may be showing us the way. America’s problems run deep, and solutions will have to be grounded in a new politics–the politics of dignity.

President Obama is a herald of the politics of dignity. He’s an instinctive dignitarian. Not libertarian, not egalitarian. Dignitarian. It matters not when and how he acquired his dignitarian manner, or that he may not conform to it one hundred percent of the time. What matters is that in his personal relations and political positions he sets an example of respecting human dignity, regardless of role or rank.

It was Obama’s inclusiveness that first brought him to national attention. As the keynote speaker of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, then Illinois State Senator Obama struck a dignitarian note. In asking us to see ourselves not as citizens of red states or blue states, but rather as citizens of the United States, Obama gave us a preview of a new politics of dignity that can extricate us from our current crises. The dignitarian politics that seems to come naturally to President Obama represents not a compromise, but a synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics, and in doing so provides an analysis that reconciles conservatism and liberalism.

Dignity for whom? you ask. Dignity for all. For blacks and whites, for men and women, for gays and straights, for young and old, for rich and poor, for immigrants and the native-born, for conservatives and progressives. Obama is also trying to engage friend and foe alike in a global dignitarian dialogue. Dignity for all.

What is the politics of dignity that President Obama exemplifies? It goes far beyond good manners, respect, and civility, though it includes these. Dignity is achieved by methodically eliminating indignities–interpersonal, institutional, societal, and international.

The American people know that indignities their nation has inflicted on the world have diminished America’s stature. And, they know that the daily humiliations that they and their fellow citizens are enduring are incompatible with lives of dignity and signify institutional failure.

How could Obama’s presidency address the indignities that manifest as unemployment, corporate corruption, failed schools, no health insurance, foreclosure, homelessness, recidivism, and the subversion of our democracy by moneyed special interests?

To combat indignity, we need to be clear about its cause. The cause of indignity is not power, nor is it power differences. It is rather the abuse of power. To oppose indignity, we do not have to eliminate differences in power, nor the differences in rank that merely reflect them. Persons of high rank who treat their subordinates with dignity are admired, if not loved.

Rank, in itself, is not the culprit. The problem is rank abuse, and it has grown to epidemic proportions. Abuses of rank have no place in a dignitarian world. Taking a page from the women’s movement, if we are to combat rank abuse effectively, we must give it a distinctive name, preferably one that puts perpetrators on the defensive. By analogy with racism, sexism, and ageism, abuse of the power inherent in rank is rankism. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere.

The outrage over bonuses for failed Wall Street executives is indignation over rankism. The power of lobbyists to override the democratic will of the people is rankism. The deregulation of the financial industry, which made a virtue of self-aggrandizement and facilitated predatory loans and Ponzi schemes, led to the financial ruin of millions and created the worst recession in four score years.

As racism denigrated and disadvantaged blacks, and sexism disenfranchised and restricted women, so rankism marginalizes and exploits the working poor, keeping them in their place while their low pay effectively subsidizes everyone else. As class membranes become less permeable, resignation, cynicism, and indignation mount.

An America in which the American Dream has become a mirage is not an America worthy of the name. The achievability of that dream is what made this country the envy of the world and made us, its citizens, proud. Making that dream good again is a challenge comparable to overcoming the second-class citizenship that has limited blacks, women, gays, and others. Building a dignitarian society is democracy’s next evolutionary step.

A dignitarian society will naturally conduct itself differently on the world stage. Nowhere is rankism more dangerous than in foreign relations. International terrorism has multiple, complex causes, but one factor over which we do have a say is rankism between nations. There is no fury like that borne of chronic humiliation. President Obama’s demeanor suggests that he understands that a vital part of a strong defense is not giving offense in the first place. His speeches abroad have begun to restore good will toward the United States, and while good will alone does not constitute a national defense, it surely beats the ill- will that we have garnered in recent years.

President Johnson, following his personal instincts, led his fellow countrymen through an about-face on segregation. Much as overcoming a legacy of racism is the work of several generations, so too is the task of building a dignitarian society. President Obama knows that solutions won’t arise out of politics as usual. His personification of dignitarian politics resonates not only with Americans but around the world. The next step is to turn from exemplifying the politics of dignity to enunciating its policy implications and molding them into a legislative agenda for a dignitarian America.

Help make “rankism” a household word—by using it—so those who are dismissed as “nobodies” can pin the label “rankist” on their abusers.
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The only thing as important as how we treat the Earth is how we treat each other. Ending rankism brings dignity to all and to Mother Earth.
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End Rankism! Don’t Put Up with Indignity! Dignity for All! 20 things you can do: http://bit.ly/bJa2r
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Looking for allies to use social media to grow a movement dedicated to the proposition of equal dignity for all. http://www.dignity4all.org
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Malrecognition usually takes the form of too little recognition. Idolization is rarer form, but it too can be fatal—Jackson, Presley, Monroe.
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Malrecognition is too little, or too much, or unwarranted recognition. Recognition is to the self what food is to the body.
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Michael Jackson died of “malrecognition.” Everyone knows what malnutrition is—and that you can die of it. But what is malrecognition?
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“Without a theory, the facts are silent.” – Friederich A. von Hayek “Without the facts, theories are dreams.” – Thomas J. Scheff
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Wherever you find a society that harbors a big income disparity between its richest and poorest, there is RANKISM. http://bit.ly/QgMxd
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Idolization does to humans what royal jelly does to a bee. It inflates and distorts and renders them vulnerable, dependent, even grotesque.
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To make change you must know 2 things: What you’re for and what you’re against. What Moms Are Rising Against at HuffPo: http://bit.ly/NDCb9
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Rank differs from class, and rankism from classism. Rankism—putting others down—is the wellspring of social inequality. http://bit.ly/deVqL
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Idolization is one form of malrecognition, which is as harmful (Jackson, Presley, Monroe) and as dangerous (terrorism) as is malnutrition.
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The idolization we foist on our troubadours is like the royal jelly force-fed a Queen Bee. Results are similar: distortion and grotesquerie.
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What is rankism? It’s what we’re seeing in Iran—it’s when one group uses power to put down, demean, discriminate against, or exploit others.
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The route from liberty to justice goes by way of dignity. As we stand up for dignity, economic justice becomes a realistic political goal.
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To secure dignity for all, we must target RANKISM—the source of indignity—as civil rights movement targeted racism.
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The original N-word is unspeakable. The new N-word is “Nobody,” a rankist epithet, & like its predecessor, headed for disuse.
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A dignity movement against rankism (humiliating, dissing, disadvantaging, or exploiting other people) is democracy’s next evolutionary step.
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When the word “rankism”—putting people down—is as well known as “racism” and “sexism,” it will be as indefensible as they are.
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At some point in this century, humankind will retire its old predatory strategy—exploiting the weak—in favor of protective strategy for all.
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We’ve tried Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity as keystones of human governance. If we added Dignity, wouldn’t the world work for everyone?
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The Ayotollahs don’t seem to understand Vartan Gregorian’s deep insight that “Dignity is not negotiable.”
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Rankism is what somebodies do to people they see as nobodies: they put them down. For 20 ways to combat rankism: http://bit.ly/B2tq6.
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If we can get “rankism” into the vocab. of regular folks, it will do for them what “sexism” has for women.
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Hard data from British team proves bleeding-heart liberals right: More Equal Societies Do Better. Explained at HuffPo: http://bit.ly/YPqwx
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New Community Model in prisons drops recidivism rate from 50 to 5 %. Pamela Gerloff blog at HuffPost: http://bit.ly/1myY8v
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Dignity works, even and especially, in prisons. A new program drops the recidivism rate from 50 to 5 %. http://bit.ly/Tzs26
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War is SO Over! (It simply doesn’t work any more. In our time, predation & indignity yield to protection and dignity for all.)
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Dignity is not negotiable. – Vartan Gregorian
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Dignity, YES! Rankism, NO!
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The Civil Rights, Suffragette, Modern Women’s, & Gay Movements are all campaigns that produced behavioral change on a national scale.
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An ass had the task of carrying the statue of Isis, & when the populace honored the statue, he thought the honor was his.–Georg Lichtenberg
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Aristotle could have avoided thinking women have fewer teeth than men by simply asking Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth. -Bertrand Russell
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Pres. Obama’s appeal comes from practicing the politics of dignity: Everyone is a somebody; no one’s a nobody. Rankism’s out; dignity’s in.
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Obama heralds a new politics of dignity. Dignitarian politics transcends libertarian & egalitarian politics to embrace equal dignity for all.
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Rankism is to mental health as pollution is to physical health. Living with chronic rankism is as bad as smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day.
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During the 21st century, humankind will retire its ancient strategy of preying on the weak & adopt a new survival strategy—dignity for all.
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President Obama is an instinctive dignitarian. More than most, he understands that dignity works and treats others without regard for rank.
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Dignity works in prison. A dignitarian community model in Virginia lowers recidivism rate from 50 to 5%. http://bit.ly/1aqE5E
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20 ways to combat rankism: http://bit.ly/B2tq6. Rankism is what somebodies may do to those they (mis)take for nobodies.
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Dignitarian politics is a synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics that can deliver on social justice. http://www.dignity4all.org
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The route from liberty to justice goes by way of dignity. As we stand up for dignity, economic justice becomes an achievable political goal.
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The only thing as important as how we treat the Earth is how we treat each other. Ending rankism brings dignity to all and to Mother Earth.
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What is rankism? Briefly: http://bit.ly/qz3yO. In depth: http://dignity4all.org. Rankism creates indignity & indignity creates indignation.
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What is rankism? It’s abuse of the power attached to rank. Typically, it’s what “Somebodies” do to “Nobodies.”
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“Somebodies and Nobodies” & “All Rise” & “Dignity for All” define rankism and call for dignity movement to overcome it. http://bit.ly/MysYQ
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If we establish the right to die with dignity, can we not also establish right to live in dignity: healthcare, higher ed, living wage 4 all?
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Dignity protected in constitutions of South Africa, Germany, Canada, Bangladesh.
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“To have a name is to be.”—B Mandelbrot (father of “fractals”). Likewise, calling abuses of rank “rankism” renders them real and resistible.
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Know you what it is to be a child? … it is to believe in belief … — Francis Thompson, British poet (1859–1907)
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Looking for fellow geeks who can figure out how to use social media to build dignity movement to fight rankism. HELP! http://dignity4all.org
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Imagine the Self not as singular and immutable, but as a superposition of selves-in-waiting, any one of which may someday take center stage.
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“Modern art [is a] cultural expression of a larger political gamble on the…possibility of living in change & without absolutes.”-K. Varnedoe
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A dignity movement that targets indignities by disallowing rankism in all its many guises is democracy’s next natural evolutionary step.
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Subspecies of rankism: racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, classism, corruption, bullying, torture, exceptionalism, one-upmanship.
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Genes encode bodies that reproduce & promulgate their genetic constituents. Memes encode selves that promulgate their mimetic constituents.
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Rankism is what “somebodies” may do to people they (mis)take for nobodies: presuming themselves superior or more important, they condescend.
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“War is a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.” —Wm. Cowper (18th c). We need to devise a better game than war.
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“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.” — Iris Murdoch (as quoted by Simon Leys in NYRB)
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A “dignitarian” society aims to equalize dignity regardless of role or rank. It disallows rankism, as now we deligitimize racism, sexism…9:58 AM Apr 28th from web
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Nobodies of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our shame.

One of the lessons of identity politics is that success requires knowing not just what you’re for, but also what you’re against. Blacks are for racial justice and against racism. Women are for gender equity and against sexism.

Moms are for ending discrimination against mothers (fair pay, flexible work, paid sick days, maternity and paternity leave, quality childcare and healthcare for all kids). But what is MomsRising against? Who or what could possibly oppose such laudable goals?

Unlike racism, sexism, and other familiar forms of discrimination, there is no group that defines itself as being against mothers. We don’t see politicians boasting that they have put mothers in their place. No, the opposition is subtler than that, and that makes the job of MomsRising, and other organizations that work for dignity and justice, harder.

Women and mothers are up against something invidious, pervasive, and formidable. It’s not just sexism, though that’s part of it. Neither is it racism, though of course racism makes things harder for mothers of color.

What mothers are up against is a tacit consensus that their jobs don’t matter as much as others’ jobs. Their work, their lives, their chance to fully realize themselves is held to be of secondary importance. Despite the love that most people have for their own mothers, on some invisible social scale, mothers rank low.

We need a name for discrimination of this sort, discrimination based on social rank. Absent a collective name, victims of rank-based abuse are in a position similar to that of women before the term “sexism” was coined. Writing in 1963, Betty Friedan characterized the plight of women as “the problem that has no name.” By 1968, the problem had acquired one—“sexism.” That simple word galvanized a movement that went on to de-legitimize a constellation of abuses linked to gender.

By analogy, the term “rankism” denotes abuse and discrimination based on rank. Put simply, rankism is what somebodies do to those they take for nobodies. To the degree that society still regards women and mothers as nobodies, they will be vulnerable to rankism. Of course, no one goes around calling mothers “nobodies.” But, relative to others, they are somehow deemed less worthy, they are taken for granted, their needs are assigned lower priority.

“Rankism” is a new name for an ancient impulse: the tendency to hold oneself superior to others, to pull rank, to put others down. Rankist attitudes are what women and mothers are up against. Rankism is the invisible obstacle that MomsRising faces in its campaign for dignity and justice.

Rankism is still below the radar. And it is still rampant. For example, when a boss humiliates a subordinate, a doctor disregards a nurse or a patient, a priest abuses a child, or a teacher or professor denigrates a student, that’s rankism. Somebodies with higher rank and more power can maintain an environment that is hostile and disadvantageous to those of lower rank, much as whites used to get away with mistreating blacks. Now, it’s mothers who, in all the ways described by MomsRising, must struggle to make a go of things in a society that, though it may praise them individually, puts them down collectively.

Apart from having gone nameless for so long, why is the malignancy of rankism hard to target and to treat? The reasons fall under two headings: institutional obstacles and interpersonal obstacles. Let’s begin with the latter.

Although we are all nobodies to someone, we are equally all somebodies to someone else. Unlike the traits that consign us to one identity group or another, rank is not fixed. We may be riding high one day, and be taken for a nobody the next.

Rank is also contextual. You can be a somebody at work, but a nobody at home, or vice versa. Because our society is predicated upon, and saturated with, rankism, our dignity is at risk if we lose rank, just as a gain in status makes us more secure.

Identity politics has functioned, until now, in arenas where victims are clearly demarcated from perpetrators. Victims have relatively clean hands, so it is easier to make accusations of prejudice stick.
In contrast, we are all victims of rankism, and truth be told, many of us are perpetrators. Accordingly, overcoming it is more complex than the campaigns against the trait-based isms. Complex, but not therefore impossible. The day we pin the label “rankism” on indignifying behaviors (as women pinned “sexism” on a range of disempowering behaviors), will mark the beginning of its demise.

Institutional barriers to a dignity movement against rankism are also high. Rankism is woven into the fabric of society as was racism in segregated America, and it won’t be any easier to uproot. But, rankism has an Achilles’ heel and it resides in this sobering fact: dignity works. The productivity gains—in the workplace and the schools—that will result from eliminating indignities and malrecognition will match, if not exceed, those that have resulted from eliminating corporal punishment and malnutrition.

For example, in the workplace the ill-effects of bullying, rigid work schedules, inequitable pay, and other abusive practices are now the subject of a growing body of research documenting the damage done not only to individual employees but to the companies themselves. It turns out that rankism is no better for the bottom line than racism or sexism. All the isms are self-inflicted wounds that limit the productivity and so drain away the life-blood, of enterprises harboring them.

Rankism is not merely unfair, it’s inefficient, counterproductive, and dysfunctional. Indignity and humiliation may have worked in societies where people had few options, but those days are gone. The young are increasingly unwilling to put up with rankist environments. A culture of dignity provides a competitive advantage because it means happier, healthier, and more creative and productive participants. What does it matter if employees work together in lockstep—so long as they get the job done?

To build a multicultural nation, we had to give up racism. So, too, to build a dignitarian society, we shall have to give up rankism. As women and mothers become aware of the rankism that pervades society, call it by name, and declare their unwillingness to put up with it, objections to their policy proposals will melt away. Embracing the broader goal of dignity for all goes hand in hand with securing dignity for a specific group because rankism is the hidden obstacle blocking them all.

Achieving equal dignity by rooting out rankism is the work of several generations, but the process has now begun. Mothers have always defended the dignity of their families. Now it’s time for us to stand up for the dignity of mothers. Once enough of us are on our feet, the demand for justice will be irresistible.

Bleeding-Heart Liberals Proven Right: Too Much Inequality Harms a Society

by Robert W. Fuller and Thomas Scheff

An important new book substantiates something progressives have long intuited. Published first in Britain and now headed for the United States, it’s by epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson and health researcher Kate Pickett, and its title conveys its message: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.

Since the French Revolution, belief in the social benefits of egalitarianism has been central to progressive thought. Now Wilkinson and Pickett have produced some hard evidence for this plank in the liberal platform. They show conclusively that the wellbeing of whole societies is closely correlated not with average income level but rather with the size of the disparity of income between the top 20% and the bottom 20%. Countries with smaller disparities like Norway, Sweden, and Japan (4 to 1) have fewer medical, mental, crime, and educational problems than countries like the Britain, U.S. and Portugal with higher disparities (7 or 8 to 1). France and Canada both have mid-range disparities (6 to 1) and place in the middle on health, education and psychological indicators. Even within American society, it’s not the absolute income level of a state that determines its social wellbeing, but rather the level of income disparity. Economic inequality and social dysfunction go hand in hand, and Wilkinson and Pickett have marshaled the evidence to make the case.

It’s one thing to demonstrate the social benefits of egalitarianism, and another to spell out the underlying political, economic, and psychological mechanisms that explain these findings. Only as we understand how the level of income disparity affects social wellbeing will we be able to generate the political will to undo the damage wrought by gross inequality.

Dignity and Its Enemy—Rankism

An explanation of the social dysfunction associated with large income disparities can be organized around the notion of rankism. Rankism is defined as a generalization of the familiar isms and encompasses them all. Specifically, in the same way that racism insulted the dignity of blacks, and sexism was an affront to the dignity of women, so, too, rankism is behavior that diminishes human dignity—black or white, female or male, gay or straight, immigrant or native-born, poor or rich, etc.

Rankism is the abuse of power attached to rank. A difference of rank alone does not cause indignity, but abuse of rank invariably does. Put simply, rankism is what somebodies may do to nobodies. But just as not all whites were racists, so too not everyone of high rank is a rankist.

Therefore, rankism, not rank differences, is the source of indignity. Indignity causes indignation, and indignation takes its toll either on the health of the individual who must contain it or it manifests as withdrawal or anger/aggression.

Rankism functions socially in the same way that racism does. No one doubts any longer that racism cemented in large, self-perpetuating income disparities between the white majority and black victims of slavery and segregation. In a parallel way, rankism marginalizes the working poor, keeping them in their place while their low salaries effectively make the goods and services they produce available to society at subsidized prices. This process, whereby the most indigent Americans have become the benefactors of those better off, is vividly described by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed. In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler depicts the less fortunate as disappearing into a “black hole” from which there is virtually no exit. As class membranes become ever less permeable, resignation, cynicism, and hostility mount.

In the economic realm, the market mechanism, at least when it’s working, functions to limit abuses of power, but political arrangements can trump the market. Large enough disparities in economic power may be used to influence politics so that laws and regulations perpetuate the economic gap.

Once established, economic inequality, if it is steep enough, also perpetuates exploitation because it imprisons the poor in their poverty. When missing a single paycheck means homelessness, people are not likely to demand better wages or working conditions. As Rev. Jim Wallis says, “Poverty is the new slavery.”

There is another important reason that eightfold factors in wealth disparity cause more social distress than factors of four. When the top 20 % are eight times better off than the bottom 20 %, far more people are vulnerable to rankism because people in the middle quintiles are also separated from the top and bottom quintiles by significant differences in economic status and power. Instead of being confined within a narrower spectrum (characterized by, say, a disparity factor of four or five), people are spread out over a broader economic range. When the first (poorest) quintile is further from the top (richest) quintile, so, too is the second quintile further from the fourth, and the third from the first and the fifth. These larger differences in economic power make possible more abuse. Economic gaps soon become dignity gaps. As rankism gains ground, more people experience its indignities and humiliations, and these individual wounds compound into illness and social dysfunction.

Dignity is to the identity what food is to the body—indispensable. By confirming our identity and affirming our dignity, respect and recognition provide assurance that our place in the group is secure. Absent periodic and appropriate validation, our survival feels at risk. Without proper recognition, individuals may sink into self-doubt and subgroups are marginalized and set up for exploitation.

Dignity and recognition are inseparable. We can’t all be famous, but fortunately recognition is not limited to the red carpet. We can learn to understand the effects on those who are either denied a chance to seek it, or from whom it is otherwise withheld. Once aware of the deleterious effects of “malrecognition,” we can act against it as we now take steps to prevent malnutrition.

Like malnutrition, malrecognition lowers the body’s resistance to disease and reduces life expectancy. For most people, just the opportunity to contribute something of themselves to the world is enough to stifle the indignation that accumulates from exposure to indignities caused by rankism. This means that malrecognition, like its somatic counterpart, is a preventable and treatable malady. To increase the supply of recognition we need only discern people’s contributions, acknowledge them appropriately, and compensate them equitably. When the average compensation of the richest 20 % exceeds that of the poorest 20 % by factors greater than four or five, the poor experience this as unfair, unjust distribution of recognition. The deleterious consequences of malrecognition manifest in the familiar array of social problems tracked in The Spirit Level—mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy, an elevated homicide rate, a shorter life expectancy, and lower educational performance and literacy rates.

More than either liberty or equality, people need dignity. In contrast to libertarian or egalitarian societies, a dignitarian society is one in which everyone, regardless of role or rank, is treated with equal dignity. The findings reported in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better suggest that as societies become more dignitarian they will, in the words of the subtitle, “do better.”

A startling example of this proposition comes from, of all places, our prison population where indignity and malrecognition are endemic. Recent work done under the auspices of The Center for Therapeutic Justice in Virginia indicates that the recidivism rate for inmates who serve their sentences in a dignitarian community drops from 50 % to 5 %.

Social Isolation and Depression

In explaining their findings, Wilkinson and Pickett put the emphasis on the lack of trust fostered by large wealth disparities. Put the other way round, the connectedness experienced in dignitarian communities is the equivalent of social oxygen.

Some thirty years ago a physician (Wolf) and a sociologist (Bruhn) teamed up to explain why, in the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, there was a group of poor Italian immigrants whose health and welfare were vastly better than their neighbors. After a twenty year study of immigrant families in Roseto, and a comparable study in a nearby, non-immigrant town, they found that health and welfare were dependent on what they called cohesion, the opposite of isolation and the antithesis of distrust. As the younger generation adopted American ways of geographic and status mobility, their health and welfare levels decreased to the level of the neighbors.

In addition to directly affecting health and welfare, disconnection has an effect on the emotions. Just as being closely connected with others leads to authentic pride, so disconnection leads to shame and humiliation. The isolated person is apt to feel rejected, if not completely worthless, and live in a more or less permanent state of shame.

One way of defending against the shame of malrecognition is to withdraw, sometimes all the way into the isolation of depression. Such withdrawal then leads to further isolation, which in turn compounds the rejection by the community and accelerates the downward spiral. Again, malrecogntion compounds into social dysfunction as confirmed in this eye-opening book.

Conclusion

In addition to caring for the weak, humans are still capable of predatory behavior towards those lacking the protection of social rank. Rankism is the residue of more overt predatory practices of the past. Now that rankism has a name, the miasma of malrecognition is visible and we are in a position to begin rooting it out. Rooting out rankism, like overcoming racism, is a multi-generational undertaking. Despite the enormity of the task, we are likely to look back on the 21st century as marking an epochal transformation from a predatory to a dignitarian era. Disallowing rankism betters human wellbeing in the same way that disallowing racism and sexism improve the lives of blacks and women. The hard evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett have provided demonstrates the benefits of dignitarian societies and validates the egalitarian instinct that has long been a mainstay of the liberal creed.

•••••

References

Bruehn, John G. and Stewart Wolf. 1979. The Roseto Story: An Anatomy of Health. Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press.

Fuller, Robert W. 2003. Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank. British Columbia: New Society Publishers.

Scheff, Thomas. 2009 A Social Theory and Treatment of Depression. Journal of Ethical and Human Psychiatry 11, 1, 37-49.

Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allan Lane

Wolf, Stewart, and John Bruhn. 1993. The Power of the Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

The Center for Therapeutic Justice, http://www.therapeuticjustice.com/. A video of the Community Model cited in the article is available at http://www.communitymodel.org>www.communitymodel.org

[Thomas Scheff is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is past president of the Pacific Sociological Association, and
past chair of the Emotions Section of the American Sociological Association.
He holds honorary doctorates from Karlstad (Sweden) and Copenhagen (Denmark) universities. His books include Being Mentally Ill; Microsociology;
Bloody Revenge; Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality; and Goffman
Unbound!: A New Paradigm (2006).

He has published more than a hundred articles in scholarly journals. There
are two current articles that are relevant to the post on The Spirit
Level. A Social Theory and Treatment of Depression (Journal of Ethical and
Human Psychiatry 11, 1, 37-49, 2009) concerns the social and emotional
spirals caused by indignities when anger is turned inward toward
self. The second article, A Theory of Spree Shooting (forthcoming in the
Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior) shows how shame/anger spirals
lead to aggression and violence when the anger is turned outward onto
others.]

Pamela Gerloff just posted at HuffPost re the dignity-based Community Model for prison reform that shows great promise in radically reducing recidivism. See her post at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-gerloff/what-if-released-inmates_b_217100.html

I visited a jail in Virginia recently that has implemented the Community Model described in Gerloff’s post. Indeed, it is as she describes. I spent 3 hours with 45 inmates locked in large room and watched as they processed events in a system of self-governance that would put most university faculties to shame. The watchword was dignity. Inmates treated each other with dignity, staff treated inmates with dignity and vice versa. Many of these men had never known dignity in their early lives, and were examples of how indignity causes indignation, which may sometimes erupt in violence. Now, in jail, they were finally experiencing what it is like to live securely in dignity with other people. The stunning drop in their rate of return upon release shows, once again, that dignity works. Chronic rankism, malrecognition, and indignity adversely affect productivity, creativity, and the bottom line of every organization or society in which they are the default state. The Community Model of Morgan Moss and Penny Patton offers America a way out of what is surely one of our largest embarrassments: our high rate of incarceration and recidivism. If anyone reading this knows how to get this message to Senator Webb, please do so. And to Governor Schwarzenegger, and President Obama. Our leaders must be made aware that there is a proven solution to the prison crisis at hand.