Blog: Somebodies and Nobodies: Dignity for All
Why Do We Want To Be Famous? Fame promises an escape from ghettos, both real and imagined.
Like liberty, we're often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.
Rankism and its counterpart–the miasma of malrecognition–lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.
Phi Beta Iota: Jim Rough, in Society's Breakthrough: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All People , provides the best available description of how we are and must accelerate shifting from a top-down pyramid to a “circle” form of decision-making. In a circle, everyone is equal, everyone has voice, and everyone has dignity. America–and the rest of the world–are at the end of the Rule by Secrecy / Empire for the Few era. If 9/11 was the start of the era when states and corporations can no longer “control” the masses, then we have 25 years–until 2026–of chaos in front of us, as the old deconstructs, often violently, and the panarchic resilient “whole” re-emerges.
Robert Fuller, in his book All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity, has done more in practical terms than any to address the root source of the death of democracy and its potential for re-birth: the recognition of the individual, in all their diversity, as the “root” that cannot, must no, should not, be denigrated, demeaned, or dismissed.
