A lovely and thought-provoking piece from Jim Moss in the Seminal: we need to look for the platform instead of giving up and drowning.

"Psychologists have observed a phenomenon in lab rats that is called learned helplessness:

What scientists will do is put a healthy rat in an uncontrollable situation, such as in a cylinder of water with nothing to stand on - and the rat will panic and swim and fight and fight and then, finally, when none of that works, it gives up. The rat has now learned helplessness. If you put the rat back in the water, but give it a hidden ledge to stand on, the rat won’t search for it or even try to swim, it’ll just give up and drown.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to rats, of course. It is also exhibited by human beings who are consistently exposed to life circumstances beyond their control. If someone gets beat down by an unfair system for long enough, they can lose hope that the system will ever change, and they can stop trying to fight against it. For example, listen to this comment made on reddit last week in response to a call for a grassroots movement to limit corporate power:

You can’t escape them (corporations). They own everything that you need/want/must have to live. So stop living in dreamland and come back down to reality. Yeah, it’s a good idea. But completely impossible.

...

This defeatist attitude is not limited to snarky bloggers and commenters. Especially in these difficult times, people everywhere seem to be expressing a sense of helplessness toward the circumstances that control their livelihoods. By and large, folks feel powerless when it comes to their current situation and their long-term futures, more powerless than I can ever remember. It’s the same type of feeling those rats must have felt when they were placed in that cylinder of water over and over again, a feeling that eventually led to them giving up and drowning.

The lab rats quit because they believed that there was no use in struggling, that they were going to drown anyway - not realizing that the platform they needed was right under their feet. We, too, are tempted to quit our struggle - or perhaps to not even get started with it - because we think there’s no hope; that another Depression is inevitable; that corporate power will never be reined in; and that the government will never work in favor of the people for a change.

Let us never forget, though, what happened to the rats that learned to be helpless and that stopped struggling. Where’s that platform, again?"

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