Because they want us to consume, consume, consume, the corporate/political worlds do not generally think that it is desirable to promote the idea that helpless people (particularly helpless poor people) can think for themselves.
Like corporate closed-ness already described, this thinking filters, through the Pillars, into the world of helping and influences the way we do things.
Modalities chosen by many mainstream helping agencies often contain strong beliefs that we, the professionals, know best, and that they, the helpless, must fit into our world whether they like it or not.
We then pronounce people as having failed if they don’t live up to our expectations or do what we want them to do.
While I accept that practitioners will be positively disposed to the modality that worked for them, or that they see working, I believe that this kind of thinking has significant influence on the interventions that are so prevalent in the mainstream world of helping.
Many – if not most – of us (practitioners, that is) will have experienced, and been trained, predominantly, in the CBT modality. We will also have experienced (sometimes up to 20 years) mainstream education – based predominantly on CBT principles and practices. It is natural that we are biased towards that way of working.
Poor, dependent people are universally viewed as passive consumers of professional practices, opinions, norms, values and standards with little or no value placed on the power of innate root foundations such as emergence, consciousness, love, relationship (or indeed time) to be important drivers of change.
Sometimes this reminds me of the 19th century when people who were colonised were known as the white man’s burden exemplified in Rudyard Kipling‘s poem of the same name.
(I don’t think that I’m being too hard on society in general when I state that there is a tendency in the mainstream to think that the poor are a burden on the state, and we have to do their thinking for them, like parents sometimes have to do for their children).
This, like many other mainstream beliefs, can also be held within the helping professions.
In turn, it prevents us from embracing two-way-knowledge-flow, so necessary if we wish to share power.