"Power Games at Play"

Might there be a link between injustice, mental health, & physical health?

What. a. time. to be alive. “Pellegrino’s Sustainability Puzzles” might need to be renamed to “Pellegrino’s Power Puzzles”. When you’re born at the bottom of the totem pole in life (youngest female with 2 older brothers), with the exception of my white privilege, power can remain a very elusive and evasive concept. At 41 years old I feel like I’m slowly waking up to many elements of power that I was previously blind to.

Some of you may know this, but at the end of July I left my full-time, full-on, intense AF, environmental nonprofit job to take a breather. After 15 years of working in sustainability and seeing little-to-no progress, which was not only demoralizing, but it prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate my approach and where best to dedicate my energy regarding my livelihood. Recently emceeing the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Circular Design Deep Dive virtual conference (I know that’s quite a mouthful), was an 8 year-in-the-making career goal. Being a bridge between product & packaging designers and downstream handlers (recyclers, composters, etc) is a professional path I plan on pursuing further. Right now I’m giving myself the time and space to be an artist. To craft songs and stories, and to follow curiosities. To learn via youtube university, books, articles, and my favorite teacher, Mother Nature.

Like many of us, I became disillusioned by the bureaucratic bloat, administrative incompetency, and the criminal racket that the U.S. healthcare system has turned into. So leaving my job without a solid health insurance plan in place no longer scared me to a point of inaction. I knew I had to take a leap of faith, and not let fear drive my decisions.

One of the takeaways from a routine physical exam when I had health insurance, was to avoid the system at all costs. We all have them, long annoying health insurance toil stories. I’ll spare you the details (they’re actually in a Substack post from April of ‘23 unsurprisingly called “Raging Against the Machine”), but the TL;DR is that the bloat, incompetence, and dehumanizing nature of the most basic of healthcare services was enough to turn me off and take charge of my own preventative care.

Repressive vs. Normalizing

I’ve been doing deep dive research into topics for a (screen)play that I’m writing for a grant that’s due next week. Some of the subjects are BIG: sexuality, religion, repression, gender, and power dynamics. Researching “the Male Gaze” and the “Bechdel test” have been particularly eye opening.

This video I came across from the youtube channel “Film & Media Studies” is called "Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Explained". There’s a fantastic back and forth that the narrator simulates between Freud and French Historian Michel Foucault. At the 6:55 mark in the video he introduces the concept of “repressive power vs. normalizing power”. I definitely recommend watching the whole video, but the crux of this concept is that repressive power is the kind of power that many of us are familiar with when we think about power (ex: dictators, the police, your boss, etc).

“This is power that is telling you what to do, and importantly, what NOT to do. But normalizing power is far more insidious, it gets you to want to do things. This is not the power that threatens you, but the power that seeps into your unconscious. The very power that influences you to have certain beliefs and desires, like the desire to get married, to produce offspring, to have a heterosexual union. It’s still power because it influences you. But it’s not repressive because it rarely takes the form of violence. It’s far more insidious and subtle.”

“Power Games at Play”

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so gripped by a news story. I remember driving into New York City with a friend last week, and it was the day after the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. I remember asking my friend about it, and we were both just sort of flabbergasted. Not just at the news of a gunned down health insurance CEO in Manhattan, which we were literally driving through at the moment, but moreso people’s reactions to the news.

The dissonance between the corporate media narrative and the general shared sentiment among Americans has been striking, and very telling. Watching news outlets fumble through the details, the timeline, and especially their cluelessness to a motive was the most staggering. It seemed abundantly clear to all of us. Or at least the vast majority of us in the working class.

This event has challenged my Quaker faith in a way I didn’t see coming. As Quakers, we do not attach ourselves to any dogma or doctrine (not even the bible, though many Quakers are ex-Catholics and find refuge/insight/comfort in the bible). If there’s one thing though that Quakers are religious about, it is our belief in non-violence and being opposed to all wars. More and more I feel like the world doesn’t need or really even ask for my opinion, especially on topics of morality. As I wrote in a journal a few years ago:

“The world needs our practice, not our opinions.”

But we seem to have reached a fever pitch in America where the shared understanding of what constitutes “criminality” and “justice” all seem to be on the table, and up for debate. We have a convicted felon who staged a failed coup about to take up the highest office, AGAIN.

It’s becoming increasingly necessary to be clear where one stands on many of these issues. For some, it’s purely a safety and survival issue.

Am I safe to be around you?

Are you going to report me?

Are you going to try to make my body, your right?

There was a time when I didn’t really question when people would say “Oh I don’t like talking politics.” I can now read between those lines as “I don’t like talking about my power, nor my privilege, because I want to keep it, and I don’t want to share any of it, nor explore the topic any further.” It’s an interesting thought experiment to replace the word “politics” with “power”. Because in many instances, that’s what it is. Politics is about what gets decided, and who gets to make those decisions.

This is not my first time writing about power (see previous Substack post on “Power and Democracy”), nor will it be my last. There are 2 excellent TED talks I highly recommend by Professor Eric Liu, first the longer one:

But if you’re short on time, I recommend this 7 minute TED-Ed talk:

The title of this post, “Power Games at Play”, is pulled from the suspected CEO killer, Luigi Mangione’s “manifesto” which some are calling more a “memo” or a “mini-festo”, and is a brief explanation of some of his motivations. I also think it’s important to question everything, and so I hold space for this not being written by Luigi, but the journalist that published the note is a seemingly credible source- independent journalist,

Ken Klippenstein

. But a growing mantra for me is ‘learn how to think, not what to think’.

Theories of Change

This story is clearly having an impact on many of our own “theories of change”. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it, "Violence is never the answer...but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands."

I wish we had a health care system, not a for-profit sick care system. AND I wish we had a justice system that actually upheld and enforced the law for everyone, not just prioritizing wealthy whites. A justice system that wasn’t beholden to the corporate oligarchs who have essentially purchased their control of our government. Among many events leading to this, you can learn about the Supreme Court decision from 2010 called Citizens United v. FEC which effectively put our government up for sale to the highest bidder.

I’m in awe of how much the United Luigi story and this particular violent act is forcing a conversation that needed to happen decades ago. While it does seem like Luigi might have had a pain-induced mental break, there are parts of the memo that I think many can relate to. The line that stuck out to me was:

But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.

While I think we all can acknowledge the integral nature of freedom of speech which is the FIRST amendment for a reason, there are already morality judgements being made around how much to signal boost Luigi Mangione’s statements. Here’s an insightful take on the ethics of publishing Luigi’s message:

Here’s the thing for climate strategy:

“the normal rules of play have been suspended”

Perhaps my favorite take on everything that’s transpired so far, I found, on all places, LinkedIn. From fellow sustainability strategist

Joseph Gelfer

:

Screenshot shared with reverence from Jospeh Gelfer’s LinkedIn page

There are many important nuggets in Joseph’s post, but the one word that stands out is “liminal”. This whole chain of events has felt a kind of Dali-level surreal (especially this 3 way interview news clip on youtube with inmates in the jail where Luigi is being held right now in Altoona, PA). Things are bound to get even more bizarre, especially as we enter a time of the year that has always felt most liminal- the time between Christmas and New Year’s.

I’ve been so consumed by this story, that I had to text several friends about it, curious to hear their take on the events unfolding. One of my friends, William Evon, shared an interesting perspective when I asked if he’d been following the story:

Oh yes. i haven’t read his manifesto, but i did read one of his goodreads reviews. Perhaps more developed? I know they took him into custody and his parents said he went unresponsive for the year prior, doing his own thing, but that’s where I’m up to. On a related note, this happens when the normal processes of petitions, peaceful protests, and civil discourse don’t work. Those methods are touted as how to make change, but when they are ignored and laughed at, those options are off the table. On the flip side, if this is successful in making change, expect more of it. So they’re going to have to NOT change as a result so as not to encourage this behavior. I think the need for reform is obvious, but they’re going to have to tie it to some other reason.

But when they are ignored and mocked as weak, these options are off the table. This inadvertently encourages acts of strength in order to make change. On the flip side… In order for peaceful activism to take place, the American people need faith that it works, and that only happens if it does work.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Even though my father tried to teach me that “might makes right”, and while historically I think that’s been accurate, I don’t believe in violence to solve problems. I thought we had left that world behind, but as Mangione points out, we are animals, and there is a law of the jungle.

In many ways violence and the flexing of an individual or nation’s “might”, has transformed and gotten more sophisticated, covert, systematic, industrialized, and technologically advanced. It’s now AI-assisted systematic denial of health care claims, and drone strikes. It’s worth noting that this story is breaking WHILE U.S. citizen tax dollars are funding a genocide of the Palestinian people, which prompts a number of challenging questions for me. Like:

• If ever, when is murder justifiable?

• Why is state sanctioned killing permissible, but called terrorism when smaller factions commit similar violent acts?

• What is justice, and who gets to define it?

• Why aren’t more of us talking about the link between injustice and mental health?

That last question has been bubbling for a while. I’ve witnesses first hand friends lose their mental stability when traumas from the past surface, and no justice or recourse has taken place. I think there’s a strong, under-explored link between injustice, mental health, and physical health. We’re only just beginning to develop a lexicon around it, with words like “gas-lighting” as the tip of the iceberg.

With all this heaviness, should you find yourself in need of a laugh, then I definitely recommend watching the video below for the reaction of the Fox News anchor when Luigi’s friend answers the question “You suggested reading Ted Kaczynski’s book? Why? Why were you interested in that?” (starts at the 17:23 mark)

Wonder no more if anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism are alive and well… On the flip side though, critical thinking and class consciousness does seem to be on the rise…

David Doel

closes out this clip by stating what I do think needs to be home base for this national dialogue, and where the debate needs to be repeatedly re-centered to:

“…Again this gets back to what I think the real discussion should be coming out of this, and that is the healthcare industry, the fact that for-profit healthcare, the idea of it, just generally is insane. And there should be a continued discussion around that, and moving towards a single-payer, or some kind of real universal system, where healthcare is guaranteed to everyone.

There likely will be no gold or silver linings to come out of all of this just yet, as there is an inescapable amount of suffering occurring. Though I’m ever an optimist, and I think hope (and joy!) in this time are ESSENTIAL, I’m kind of allergic to toxic positivity. So I won’t try to put rose colored glasses on any of this. Though death is integral to life, I’m not here to celebrate, nor encourage the loss of any life when it’s fueled by anger, rage, or revenge for unaddressed injustices. I am driven by the quest for truth though. I am committed to being a seeker, to engage in critical and creative thinking, and get at the root. To be part of a re-balancing of power, and the re-harmonization with each other and all of life on Earth.

This is a bleak time we’re living through right now. When the murder of a CEO unites a people like they’ve never been united before, it says a lot about the state of things. I am in full-on listen & learn mode, while balancing all the input with creation & expression. I hope the same for you, and let’s lean on each other to help one other stay sane in this insane world.