I am thinking about the subtleties of human need and the failure of social services to stretch to serve the complex human with their complex, at times contesting, motivations. Without this dimensionality, individuals and families are at risk of a lazy (or exhausted) simplification. The social worker, not given time or access to the actual contours of the client's life, will foster a facile dependence on the one hand or enforce an authoritarian isolation on the other. Thus the good become lost in a self-perpetuating system of pity and "compassion" while the bad suffer presumably for sins and villainy imagined (that "bear no relation" to the real sins committed by the broader society in its greed and wanton disdain of poverty and weakness). Again we see the human as animal, the humane erode into the animalistic. These are the colorful, chaotic edges of the tribal instinct. The powerful project "otherness" on the inconvenient progeny of their promiscuity, of their lust. And the rich have swimming pools fed by the River Lethe in which they wash away culpability and forget everything beyond the garden's wall, the limousine's shaded glass, the suburb's respectability.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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