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LadyEllen -> what makes someone "useless" (7/2/2007 9:16:09 AM)
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This came up in the "whilst you are fast asleep in your bed" thread - the idea that some people are just plain, all round useless. Not useless at some things but totally hopeless at everything in life in general, unable to or unwilling to compete or even participate in society.
I wondered how one could define such uselessness, if its possible at all? There are a fair few people in my neighbourhood who appear to be useless - perfectly fit and able, not afflicted with anything but yet not taking any part in the world at all and in fact being a drain on society with petty criminality and reliance on benefits. Yet theyre not actually useless - so is it a lifestyle choice, and if so is it a less valid lifestyle choice because they dont fund it themselves or because we disapprove of how they spend their lives? And is that why we deem them useless?
Then there are a fair few people I know who suffer depression, amongst other illnesses - they probably come closest to what I would describe as useless but not in a nasty way, but because they just have no motivation because of their illness, which is hardly their fault.
Then there is another group, which crosses over with the two earlier mentioned - the alcoholics and drug addicts. They dont work because they cant as no one would hire them, and in the main dont want to work either, preferring the haze of substance abuse to reality. But then, when I have got to know these people, they are hardly useless either, and are hooked on whatever it is because of mental illness, abuse or some other trauma which took them down that road in the first place - a reality they couldnt face which booze or drugs hid from them for a while.
And of all these groups, there a very few who, if they were to die tomorrow their deaths would not affect anyone except insofar as the quality of life for those remaining would improve. Harsh, but true. Is that what makes someone useless, in that they have negative worth in the world?
But throughout all these groups, the recurrent theme I see is of lives squandered by parental and/or peer influence and lives damaged by the same causes. The potential of a human life thrown away because of the lack of concern and care and the active demonstration of their opposites. So, is a "useless" person then the product of such a process of neglect and abuse, and a natural product at that?
And from that, do we do ourselves and our children any good whatsoever by repeating the same process with new victims for the meat grinder of life and reinforcing the notion that damaged human beings are useless, so that for generations to come we shall have the "useless" forever in society?
Or is such a categorisation inevitable in a species which is as competitive as ours, where some will fall to the bottom just as some will rise to the top, and that whatever we attempt to do, this will occur regardless because of the vagaries of what is a dangerous life in an uncertain world?
E
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