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