The forest, The Trees, and The One Thing PDF

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Professor Melissa Alvare
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The Forest, The Trees, and The One Thing Johnson 1997 ➔ Plays on the old saying missing the forest for the trees ➔ Individual trees, a collection of those trees ➔ Particular relation is the difference between ‘a lot of trees’ and a ‘forest’

➔ Makes point of Humans having mental capacity to adapt to one another’s ways but we don’t…. ➔ Difference is a basis for privilege ➔ The subject of race and racism ◆ White people can’t speak to it due to an underlying guilt ◆ Some get angry, seeing it as a personal attack ● White people- racism ● Men- Sexism

➔ Individualism is: ● Isolative; harder to sustain sense of community ◆ Causes of privilege and descrimination ◆ Goes back to the nineteenth century ● Individualistic way of thinking is cause for offense when talking to a ‘privileged group” ➔ One person at a time ◆ Psychotherapy heals the individual- enough are healed then the world is healed ◆ Keeping an individual from being poor, enough can end poverty ➔ Individual psych tick ◆ The understanding of social life ◆ Society is people and people are society

➔ The One Thing ◆ “We are all participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we

want to understand social life and what happens to the people in it, we have to understand what it is that we’re participating in and how we participate in it.” ● The forest and three and how they are related to each other ◆ The cultural distinction ● People participate in systems without being part of the systems themselves ● ...But systems aren’t people and people aren't systems ➔ Decisions ◆ How to be white privilege ● I can put a stop to racist humor ● Treat people who aren’t classified as white ◆ Part of the solution or part of problem

➔ The Path Of Least Resistance ◆ Individual Agency ◆ Monopoly behavior ● Winning is what monopoly is about which is why one it feels good to win ◆ Affects how we feel, think, and act ◆ “Role conflict” ● The path of least resistance in one system is a path of much greater resistance in the other

➔ Individualistic models don’t work ◆ Misleading because it encourages us to explain human behavior and experience from a perspective so narrow it misses most of what’s going on ○ Can’t understand a social system by looking at an individual ◆ “Kinds of People” ● Incorrectly reduces a social phenomenon to simple means ◆ “Encourages us to think that is enough individuals change than the system will change but change isn’t that simple.“

➔ It’s About Us and Not About Us ◆ Understanding that something is larger than oneself helps with personal guilt- I didn’t create it, it’s not my fault ◆ No reason to feel guilty but you can’t think that it has nothing to do with

you

➔ Personal Solutions Can’t Solve Social Problems ◆ “Systems don’t change without people changing at one point or another; and no system can change through individual change alone”

➔ It’s Messier and More Interesting Than That ◆ Social systems aren’t ‘things’, they are ongoing processes ◆ We aren’t all in the same situation ● Limited by it in different ways and participate in it differently ○ Examples: Student or teacher, girl or boy, etc....