Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
I’ve heard it said that HIV has become more complicated, that the issues surrounding HIV have become increasingly complex. Given that therapies have become simplified (one or two pills a day instead of eight or nine), I wonder whether the notion of complexity is another way the industry has manufactured crises.
As I’ve written in previous posts, I think the whole “movement” has become overly professional. Part of that professionalism is the jargon and twisted logic that supports professionalism – not people. Programs and services are centered increasingly around the educational level of the people providing the service – most of whom have degrees in one thing or another. But a degree and all the best intentions in the world don’t respond to the human condition: a condition that has been around for millennia.
And that’s where “complexity” has been created. It is a manufactured condition based more on text books and Universities and endless, tiresome research than on simply existing.
The human condition of HIV hasn’t changed one iota since the virus was discovered. In fact, the human condition has nothing at all to do with HIV and everything to do with life. As people living with HIV, we certainly experience the world through different eyes and different sensibilities, but we are not separate from the rest of humanity.
We love, we hate, we are capable of brilliance and we can be assholes. We take our medications and sometimes we forget. We drink too much, smoke too much, care too much or too little; we are vain and we are self-conscious. We feel hurt and we can hurt others. People living with HIV are as kaleidoscopic as the rest of the sorry asses on the planet, and in that there is nothing complex.
Many years ago I read “Manufacturing Victims” by Tana Dineen. A psychologist, she talks about how victims are created where no victim exists. This clever invention supports the industry, not the person as a whole and wholly inscrutable being. She mentions AIDS in that book and talks about how people with AIDS are themselves caught up in the victim creation myth. I remember people in the late 1980s reading Louise Hay (a woman I loathe), who insisted that you could heal any ailment as long as you believed hard enough – and purchased her many products. One many I knew became darkly depressed, because he wasn’t getting better; he continued to decline in health and he blamed himself, because he didn’t believe enough.
Thank you, Louise for fucking with the minds of beautiful people.
Dineen also talks about how conditions that weren’t conditions before are suddenly conditions now. Part of the AIDS industry has done this as well. While there are complications from illness and medications there are also conditions that are conveniently created to support both the NGO industry and the pharmaceutical companies and health authorities. Some may exist but others are simply another reason to prescribe a pill (generally a new pill). The DSM will have to add more axes to accommodate all the newly ill people. And there seems no end to the possibilities.
And while the industry has manufactured a variety of need, we (or many of us) have equally bought into the invented brave new world. I’ve heard street-involved people call themselves “marginalized” – a term used by the workers, not the general population. I’ve said that I don’t know any marginalized people: they all live on the page with me. But when we wear our victimhood as a badge the industry has inculcated us and, like some god, created us in its own image.
We can reject victimhood and replace it with gloriously fallible human-ness. We can blindly wander through life like everyone else, trusting that somewhere over the rainbow, the skies are a little bluer and dreams really do come true. We can be depressed and pull ourselves out of depression. We can love who we love and do our best to overcome ignorance. We can put stigma in its place and teach the world about caring and consideration.
Or then again, as my favourite bumper sticker reads, “I used to care, but now I take a pill for that…”