• Social Forces Creating the
  • Demand for Daycare
  • Other Social Forces

 

Five Major Industries


John R. Seeley

By the time we come to recognize and discuss in a general way any "social problem" (unless we happen to be in the vanguard; and then we will not be heard; so there will be no general discussion), it will have reached a certain state:

...At least five major industries will have grown up, been organized, and will have developed interests and weapons, and have become strategically entrenched in depth around the "problem":

1. An industry (e.g. "dangerous substance" manufacture, supply and consumption-promotion) that primarily promotes and sustains what is held by others to constitute the problem. This industry may be in the "overworld" like the greater part of the drug industry, or the advertising industry that creates burning desires that cannot be "legally" satisfied, thus ensuring a minimum level of larceny and attendant support institutions and activities, as well as a sustained level of misery ensuring "displaced" crimes (in the moral sense) against others or, more commonly, the self. The industry may be "in" the underworld, as in organized "illicit" (illegal) comfort, pleasure, or thrill-supply. Either way, it exists in a symbiotic relation with the other industries, which need maintenance and expansion of the problem for their own survival and "natural" expansion;

2. An industry that "controls", mitigates, or abates in minor degree, the first or primary industry; or, as we say, loosely, "polices" it. This second industry operates especially by developing vast enterprises of discovery, "intelligence" and "apprehension", together with mediating or sorting agencies, to prevent certain excesses or abuses, and to provide ritual satisfactions, cleansing drama, and entertainment for the less actively participating populace, and a punishment-system that serves a number of other important purposes in addition to its own self-maintenance and aggrandizement. The punishment subsystem "works", first to strengthen the docile part of the system against which it operates by providing concentrated institutions of higher education for more dramatic forms of "crime" thus also delivering a seeming "product" for all that activity: the delegated imposition of systematic suffering and dehumanization on those who have already suffered most and been most dehumanized. But, above all, it yields assurance as to the perpetuation, and, within reasonable economic limits, expansion, of the system, by cultivating and enhancing the grounds of grievance, the traumatizations, that select particular persons and classes of persons, and reselects them, for approved and licensed exemplary victimization and re-victimization;

3. A third industry, the second "control" one, ostensibly meliorative or mitigatory, emerges and expands in the shape of "helping professions", to do, for distinguishable cases, by "soft" (and perhaps subversive) means, what the second industry does by harder ones, i.e., it develops to perform a quasi-police function of diversion or abatement, though in form, claim, and appearance, at least, it is dedicated to such enterprises as "education", "therapy", "rehabilitation", "habilitation", "resocialization";

4. A fourth industry to "study" all of these: actually a vast set of empires of "research", "teaching", writing and the like;

5. A fifth industry to turn all of the foregoing to the uses of entertainment, dramatization, catharsis, offering to those less immediately engaged vicarious participation simultaneously in the exciting roles of cops and robbers, punishers and victims, safe and endangered...


Excerpted from an article entitled, The Juvenile Justice System and the Helping Professions, pp 5-20, Vol 8, Nos 1-2, 1977-78 of INTERCHANGE, ISSN 0020-5230.
John Seeley is perhaps best known for his book,The Americanization of the Unconscious, published by International Science Press, New York, in 1967, and distributed by J.B. Lippincott Co. LCCCN 66-29488