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It was a cold, sunny March day.
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I was walking along the street in Riga.
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I remember the winter was slowly
coming to an end.
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There was still some snow
around, here and there,
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but the pavement
was already clear and dry.
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If you've lived in Riga,
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you will know that feeling of relief
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that the first signs of spring bring,
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and you no longer have to trudge
through that slushy mix
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of snow and mud on the streets.
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So there I am, enjoying my stroll,
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as I suddenly notice a stencil
on the pavement in front of me,
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a graffiti:
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white letters painted
on these dark grey bricks.
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It says,
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"Where is your responsibility?"
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The question stopped me in my tracks.
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As I am standing there,
considering its meaning,
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and I notice I'm standing outside
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the Riga Municipality
Social Welfare Department.
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So it appears that the author
of this graffiti, whoever it is,
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is asking this question to people
coming to apply for social assistance.
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That winter,
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I had been doing research on the aftermath
of the financial crisis in Latvia.
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When the Global Financial Crisis
erupted in 2008, Latvia got hit hard,
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as a small, open economy.
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To balance the books,
the Latvian government
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chose a strategy of internal devaluation.
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Now, in essence,
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that meant drastically reducing
public budget spending,
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so slashing public sector workers' wages,
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shrinking civil service,
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cutting unemployment benefits
and other social assistance,
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raising taxes.
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My mother had been working
as a history teacher her whole life.
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The austerity for her meant seeing
her salary cut by 30 percent
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all of a sudden.
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And there were many in a situation
like hers or worse.
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The costs of the crisis were put
on the shoulders of ordinary Latvians.
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As a result of the crisis
and the austerity,
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the Latvian economy shrank
by 25 percent in a two-year period.
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Only Greece suffered
an economic contraction
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of a comparable scale.
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Yet, while Greeks were out
in the streets for months
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staging continuous,
often violent protests in Athens,
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all was quiet in Riga.
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Prominent economists were fighting
in the columns of The New York Times
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about this curious extreme
Latvian experiment
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of this austerity regime,
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and they were watching on in disbelief
how the Latvian society
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was putting up with it.
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I was studying in London at the time,
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and I remember the Occupy movement there,
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and how it was spreading
from city to city,
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from Madrid to New York to London,
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the 99 percent against the one percent.
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You know the story.
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Yet when I arrived in Riga,
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there were no echoes of the Occupy here.
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Latvians were just putting up with it.
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They swallowed the toad,
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as the local saying goes.
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For my doctoral research,
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I wanted to study how the state-citizen
relationship was changing in Latvia
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in the post-Soviet era,
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and I had chosen the unemployment office
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as my research site.
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And as I arrived there
in that autumn of 2011,
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I realized I am actually
witnessing firsthand
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how the effects of crises are playing out,
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and how those worst affected by it,
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people who have lost their jobs,
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are reacting to it.
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So I started interviewing people
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I met at the unemployment office.
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They were all registered as job seekers
and hoping for some help from the state.
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Yet, as I was soon discovering,
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this help was of a particular kind.
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There was some cash benefit,
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but mostly state assistance came
in the form of various social programs,
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and one of the biggest
of these programs was called
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"competitiveness raising activities."
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It was, in essence, a series of seminars
that all of the unemployed
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were encouraged to attend.
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So I started attended
these seminars with them.
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And a number of paradoxes struck me.
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So imagine,
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the crisis is still ongoing,
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the Latvian economy is contracting,
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hardly anyone is hiring,
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and there we are,
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in this small, brightly lit classroom,
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a group of 15 people,
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working on lists of our personal
strengths and weaknesses,
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our inner demons that we are told
are preventing us from being
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more successful in the labor market.
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As the largest local bank
is being bailed out
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and the costs of this bailout are shifted
onto the shoulders of the population,
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we are sitting in a circle
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and learning how to breathe deeply
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when feeling stressed.
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(Breathes)
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As home mortgages are being foreclosed
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and thousands of people are emigrating,
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we are told to dream big
and to follow our dreams.
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As a sociologist, I know
that social policies
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are an important form of communication
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between the state and the citizen.
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The message of this program was,
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to put in the words
of one of the trainers,
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"Just do it."
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She was, of course, citing Nike.
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So symbolically, the state was sending
a message to people out of work
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that you need to be more active,
you need to work harder,
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you need to work on yourself,
you need to overcome your inner demons,
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you need to be more confident,
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that somehow being out of work
was their own personal failure.
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The suffering of the crisis
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was treated as this
individual experience of stress
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to be managed in one's own body
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through deep and mindful breathing.
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These types of social programs
that emphasize individual responsibility
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have become increasingly common
across the world.
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They are part of the rise
of what sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls
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the "neoliberal Centaur state".
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Now, the centaur, as you might recall,
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is this mythical creature
in ancient Greek culture,
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half human, half beast.
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It has this upper part of a human
and the lower part of a horse.
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So the Centaur state
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is a state that turns its human face
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to those at the top of the social ladder
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while those at the bottom
are being trampled over,
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stampeded.
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So top income earners and large businesses
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can enjoy tax cuts
and other supportive policies,
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while the unemployed, the poor
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are made to prove themselves worthy
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for the state's help,
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are morally disciplined,
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are stigmatized as irresponsible
or passive or lazy
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or often criminalized.
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In Latvia, we have had
such a Centaur state model
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firmly in place since the '90s.
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Take, for example, the flat income tax
that we had in place up until this year
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that has been benefiting
the highest earners
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while one quarter of the population
keeps living in poverty.
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And the crisis and the austerity has made
these kinds of social inequalities worse.
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So while the capital of the banks
and the wealthy has been protected,
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those who lost the most
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were taught lessons
in individual responsibility.
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Now, as I was talking to people
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who I met at these seminars,
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I was expecting them to be angry.
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I was expecting them
to be resisting these lessons
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in individual responsibility.
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After all, the crisis was not their fault,
yet they were bearing the brunt of it.
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But as people were sharing
their stories with me,
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I was struck again and again
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by the power of the idea
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of responsibility.
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One of the people I met was Janet.
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She had been working for 23 years
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teaching sewing and other crafts
at the vocational school in Riga,
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and now the crisis hits
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and the school is closed
as part of the austerity measures.
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The educational system restructuring
was part of a way of saving public money.
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And 10,000 teachers across the country
lose their jobs and Janet is one of them.
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And I know from what she's been telling me
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that losing her job has put her
in a desperate situation.
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She is divorced, she has
two teenage children
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that she is the sole provider for.
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And yet, as we are talking,
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she says to me
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that the crisis is really an opportunity.
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She says, "I turned 50 this year.
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I guess life has really
given me this chance
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to look around, to stop,
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because all these years
I've been working nonstop,
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I have no time to pause,
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and now I have stopped
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and I've been given an opportunity
to look at everything and to decide
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what it is that I want
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and what it is that I don't want.
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All this time, sewing, sewing,
some kind of exhaustion."
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So Janet is made redundant after 23 years.
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She's not thinking about protesting.
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She's not talking about the 99 percent
against the one percent.
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She is analyzing herself.
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And she was thinking pragmatically
of starting a small business
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out of her bedroom
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making these little souvenir dolls
to sell to tourists.
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I also met Ivars
at the unemployment office.
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Ivars was in his late 40s,
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he had lost a job at the government agency
overseeing road construction.
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To one of our meetings,
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Ivars brings a book he's been reading.
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It's called "Vaccination Against Stress,
or Psychoenergetic Aikido."
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Now, some of you might know
that aikido is a form of martial art,
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so psychoenergetic aikido.
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And Ivars tells me
that after several months
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of reading and thinking and reflecting
while being out of work,
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he has understood
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that his current difficulties
are really his own doing.
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He says to me,
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"I created it myself.
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I was in a psychological state
that was not good for me.
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If a person is afraid to lose their money,
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to lose their job,
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they start getting more stressed,
more unsettled, more fearful.
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That's what they get."
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As I ask him to explain,
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he compares his thoughts poetically
to wild horses running in all directions,
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and he says, "You need to be
a shepherd of your thoughts.
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To get things in order
in the material world,
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you need to be a shepherd of your thoughts
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because it's through your thoughts
that everything else gets orderly."
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"Lately," he says,
"I have clearly understood
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that the world around me,
what happens to me,
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people that enter in my life,
it all depends directly on myself."
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So as Latvia is going through
this extreme economic experiment,
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Ivars says it's his way of thinking
that has to change.
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He's blaming himself for what
he's going through at the moment.
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So taking responsibility
is, of course, a good thing, right?
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It is especially meaningful
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and morally charged
in a post-Soviet society
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where reliance on the state
is seen as this unfortunate heritage
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of the Soviet past.
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But when I listen to Janet and Ivars
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and to others, I also thought
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how cruel this question is --
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"Where is your responsibility?" --
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how punishing.
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Because, it was working as a way
of blaming and pacifying people
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who were hit worst by the crisis.
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So while Greeks were out in the streets,
Latvians swallowed the toad,
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and many tens of thousands emigrated,
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which is another way
of taking responsibility.
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So the language,
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the language of individual responsibility
has become a form of collective denial.
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As long as we have social policies
that treat unemployment
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as individual failure,
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but we don't have enough funding
for programs that give people real skills
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or create workplaces.
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We are blind of the
policymakers' responsibility.
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As long as we stigmatize the poor
as somehow passive or lazy
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but don't give people real means
to get out of poverty
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other than emigrating,
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we are in denial of
the true causes of poverty.
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And in the meantime,
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we all suffer,
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because social scientists have shown
with detailed statistical data
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that there are more people with
both mental and physical health problems
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in societies with higher levels
of economic inequality.
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So social inequality is apparently bad
for not only those with least resources
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but for all of us,
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because living in a society
with high inequality
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means living in a society
with low social trust and high anxiety.
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So there we are.
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We are all reading self-help books,
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we try to hack our habits,
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we try to rewire our brains,
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we meditate,
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and it helps, of course, in a way.
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Self-help books help us feel more upbeat.
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Meditation can help us feel
more connected to others spiritually.
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What I think we need is as much awareness
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of what connects us
to one another socially,
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because social inequality hurts us all.
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So we need more
compassionate social policies
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that are aimed less at moral education
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and more at promotion
of social justice and equality.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)