It had been a chilly, sunny March day. I used to be walking along the road in Riga. I remember the winter was slowly coming to an end. There was still some snow around here and there, but the pavement was already clear and dry. If you've lived in Riga, you'll know that feeling of relief that the primary signs of spring bring, and you not need to trudge through that slushy mixture of snow and dirt on the streets. So there I'm, enjoying my stroll, as I suddenly notice a stencil on the pavement ahead of me, a graffiti: white letters painted on these dark grey bricks. It says, "Where is your responsibility?" The question stopped me in my tracks. As I'm standing there considering its meaning, I notice I'm standing outside the Riga Municipality welfare Department. So it appears that the author of this graffiti, whoever it's, is asking this question to people coming to use for supplementary benefit. That winter, I had been researching the aftermath of the financial crisis in Latvia. When the worldwide Financial Crisis erupted in 2008, Latvia got hit hard as a little, open economy. To balance the books, the Latvian government chose a technique of internal devaluation. Now, in essence, that meant drastically reducing public budget spending, so, slashing public sector workers' wages, shrinking government officials, cutting unemployment benefits and other supplementary benefits, raising taxes. My mother had been working as a history teacher for her whole life. The austerity for her meant seeing her pay cut by 30 per cent all of a sudden. And there have been many during a situation like hers or worse. the prices of the crisis were placed on the shoulders of ordinary Latvians. As a result of the crisis and therefore the austerity, the Latvian economy shrank by 25 per cent in two years. Only Greece suffered an economic contraction of a comparable scale. Yet, while Greeks called at the streets for months staging continuous, often violent protests in Athens, all was quiet in Riga. Prominent economists were fighting the columns of "The NY Times" about this curious extreme Latvian experiment of this austerity regime, and that they were watching on in disbelief how the Latvian society was putting up with it. I used to be studying in London at the time, and that I remember the Occupy movement there and the way it had been spreading from city to city, from Madrid to NY to London, the 99 per cent against the one per cent. you recognize the story. Yet once I arrived in Riga, there have been no echoes of the Occupy here. Latvians were just putting up with it. They "swallowed the toad," because the local saying goes. For my doctoral research, I wanted to review how the state-citizen relationship was changing in Latvia within the post-Soviet era, and that I had chosen the unemployment office as my research site. And as I arrived therein that autumn of 2011, I noticed, "I am witnessing firsthand how the consequences of crises are playing out, and the way those worst suffering from it, people that have lost their jobs, are reacting thereto ." So I started interviewing people I met at the unemployment office. They were all registered as job seekers and hoping for a few help from the state. Yet, as I used to be soon discovered, this help was of a specific kind. There was some cash benefit, but mostly state assistance came within the sort of various social programs, and one among the most important of those programs was called "Competitiveness-Raising Activities." It was, in essence, a series of seminars that each one of the unemployed was encouraged to attend. So I started attending these seminars with them. and a few paradoxes struck me. So, imagine: the crisis remains ongoing, the Latvian economy is contracting, hardly anyone is hiring, and there we are, during this small, brightly lit classroom, a gaggle of 15 people, performing on lists of our strengths and weaknesses, our inner demons, that we are told are preventing us from being more successful within the labour market. because the largest local bank is being bailed out and therefore the costs of this bailout are shifted onto the shoulders of the population, we are sitting during a circle and learning the way to breathe deeply when feeling stressed. (Breaths deeply) As home mortgages are being foreclosed and thousands of individuals are emigrating, we are told to dream big and to follow our dreams. As a sociologist, I do know that social policies are a crucial sort of communication between the state and therefore the citizen. The message of this program was, to place it within the words of 1 of the trainers, "Just roll in the hay ." She was, of course, citing Nike. So symbolically, the state was sending a message to people out of labour that you simply got to be more active, you would like to figure harder, you would like to figure on yourself, you would like to beat your inner demons, you would like to be more confident -- that somehow, being out of labour was their failure. The suffering of the crisis was treated as this individual experience of stress to be managed in one's own body through deep and mindful breathing. These sorts of social programs that emphasize individual responsibility became increasingly common across the planet. they're a part of the increase of what sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls the "neoliberal Centaur state." Now, Centaurus, as you would possibly recall, is that this mythical monster in Ancient Greek culture, half-human, half-beast. it's this upper a part of "> a part of a person's and therefore the lower part of a horse. therefore the Centaur state may be a state that turns its face to those at the highest of the social ladder while those at rock bottom are being trampled over, stampeded. So top income earners and enormous businesses can enjoy tax cuts and other supportive policies, while the unemployed, the poor are made to prove themselves worthy for the state's help, are morally disciplined, are stigmatized as irresponsible or passive or lazy or often criminalized. In Latvia, we've had such a Centaur state model firmly in situ since the '90s. Take, for instance, the flat tax that we had in situ up until this year that has been benefiting the very best earners, while one-quarter of the population keeps living in poverty. and therefore the crisis and the austerity has made these sorts of social inequalities worse. So while the capital of the banks and therefore the wealthy are protected, those that lost the foremost were taught lessons in individual responsibility. Now, as I used to be lecture people that I met at these seminars, I used to be expecting them to be angry. I used to be expecting them to be resisting these lessons in individual responsibility. After all, the crisis wasn't their fault, yet they were bearing the brunt of it. But as people were sharing their stories with me, I used to be struck again and again by the facility of the thought of responsibility. one among the people I met was Žanete. She had been working for 23 years teaching sewing and other crafts at the trade school in Riga. And now the crisis hits, and therefore the school is closed as a part of the austerity measures. the tutorial system restructuring was a part of how of saving public money. And 10,000 teachers across the country lose their jobs, and Žanete is one among them. and that I know from what she's been telling me that losing her job has put her during a desperate situation; she's divorced, she has two teenage children that she's the only provider for. And yet, as we are talking, she says to me that the crisis is a chance. She says, "I turn 50 this year. I assume life has given me this opportunity to seem around, to stop, because of these years I have been working nonstop, had no time to pause. And now I even have stopped, and I have been allowed you to seem at everything and to make a decision what it's that I would like and what it's that I do not want. All this point, sewing, sewing, some quite exhaustion." So Žanete is formed redundant after 23 years. But she's not brooding about protesting. She's not talking about the 99per cent against the per cent. She is analyzing herself. and she or he was thinking pragmatically of starting a little business out of her bedroom making these little souvenir dolls to sell to tourists. I also met Aivars at the unemployment office. Aivars was in his late 40s, he had lost employment at the govt agency overseeing construction. to at least one of our meetings, Aivars brings a book he's been reading. It's called "Vaccination against Stress, or Psycho-energetic Aikido." Now, a number of you would possibly know that aikido may be a sort of self-defence, so, psycho-energetic aikido. And Aivars tells me that after several months of reading and thinking and reflecting while being out of labour, he has understood that his current difficulties are his own doing. He says to me, "I created it myself. I used to be during a mental state that wasn't good on behalf of me. If an individual is afraid to lose their money, to lose their job, they begin getting more stressed, more unsettled, more fearful. that is what they get." As I ask him to elucidate, he compares his thoughts poetically to wild horses running altogether directions, and he says, "You got to be a shepherd of your thoughts. to urge things so as within the material world, you would like to be a shepherd of your thoughts, because it's through your thoughts that everything else gets orderly." "Lately," he says, "I have clearly understood that the planet around me, what happens to me, folks that enter in my life ...it all depends directly on myself." So as Latvia goes through this extreme economic experiment, Aivars says it's his way of thinking that has got to change. He's blaming himself for what he's browsing at the instant. So taking responsibility is, of course, an honest thing, right? it's especially meaningful and morally charged during a post-Soviet society, where reliance on the state is seen as this unfortunate heritage of the Soviet past. But once I hear Žaneteand Aivars et al. , I also thought how cruel this question is -- "Where is your responsibility?" -- how punishing. Because it had been working as how of blaming and pacifying people that were hit worst by the crisis. So while Greeks called at the streets, Latvians swallowed the toad, and lots of tens of thousands emigrated, which is differently of taking responsibility. therefore the language, the language of individual responsibility, has become a sort of collective denial. As long as we've social policies that treat unemployment as a private failure but we do not have enough funding for programs that give people real skills or create workplaces, we are blind of the policymakers' responsibility. As long as we stigmatize the poor as somehow passive or lazy but don't give people real means to urge out of poverty aside from emigrating, we are in denial of true causes of poverty. And within the meantime, we all suffer, because social scientists have shown with detailed statistical data that there are more people with both mental and physical health problems in societies with higher levels of economic inequality. So social inequality is bad for not only those with least resources except for all folks because living during a society with high inequality means living during a society with low social trust and high anxiety. So there we are. We're all reading self-help books, we attempt to hack our habits, we attempt to rewire our brains, we meditate. And it helps, of course, in away. Self-help books help us feel more upbeat. Meditation can help us feel more connected to others spiritually. What I feel we'd like is the maximum amount of awareness of what connects us socially, because social inequality hurts us all.
