Why do they have to learn to be resilient? Isn’t it like asking those sentenced to death also to decorate their grave to their liking and be happy to die? They don’t want to die in the first place.
Resilience, resilience, resilience. Is there a more favoured word when discussing the wellness everyone should enjoy? If one is unhappy, this is simply because we cannot be resilient. It is our responsibility, and that is the problem with resilience.
Let’s go by part; resilience is a concept that psychology has borrowed from physics. In physics, it refers to the characteristics of a material, mechanism or system to “recover its initial state when the disturbance to which it had been subjected has ceased”. So, for example, the materials with which a building has been built would be resilient if they adapt and tolerate the movement of an earthquake without collapsing and without deteriorating their foundations. But, so far, everything is okay because we are talking about bricks and cement.
The problem is that people also face “emotional earthquakes”, crises and situations that affect us in ways we are not fully aware of. Nor do we recover when we want to, but rather when we can and after long efforts.
When talking about resilience and applying it to people, we usually hear miraculous stories in which ordinary people, after facing stressful and harmful situations, recovered, learned fundamental lessons and, in many cases, ended up preaching their resilience so that others also become resilient beings.
The problem with it is not resilience’s almost superstitious or shamanistic nature. The problem is that this way of understanding crises and difficulties leaves untouched the roots of the hardships and inequities that affect people while making them responsible for their well-being.
Getting sick and having money to attend a private clinic is not the same as getting sick and going to a poorly lit emergency post. It is like having Covid in Mali or having it in Germany. So would you ask rich and poor people alike to be resilient?
Are not the poor less responsible for what happens to them than those who know they have a greater participation in shaping the crisis we find ourselves experiencing? So why do they insist on telling us that we are all equally responsible?
The causes of the social problems afflicting us have not originated within individuals but in operating a system maintained by the profits produced by perpetuating inequality, ignorance, racism and discrimination. A system that breaks the lives of the poor and then, to top it off, asks them to repair themselves.
Why should ordinary people be responsible for the consequences produced by the elite? Why do they have to learn to be resilient? Isn’t it like asking those sentenced to death also to decorate their grave to their liking and be happy to die? They don’t want to die in the first place.
Is there an alternative to the resilience preached to us from psychological pulpits?
I prefer the words of the writer Mohamed MBougar: “Resilience! Resilience! fuck you! I desire the truth of the long fall and the infinite fall. I do repair Nothing that has been destroyed seems repairable to me. I do not comfort or console. Hanging from my belt is the most effective reliquary against evil: the desire for truth, assuming that truth is death. I look for the ruins of old buried paths. Their footprints indicate yet another path. It is not on any map. But it’s the only valid one.”
