What is liberation psychology?
In simple terms, I define liberation psychology as the practice of putting psychological theories into service for human liberation.
Liberation psychology, initiated by social psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró, brings a critique to the mainstream psychology, while at the same time offers a viable alternative. In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, Martín-Baró (1994) criticized the way psychology holds to the methodology of natural science to legitimatize its field of study. This has developed a fictionalized and abstracted image of what it means to be human based on ahistoricism and the idea of isolated individuals.
Martín-Baró elucidated that such use of psychology enforces the dominant and oppressive social structures, showing how it often fails to see individual suffering and illness in the context of history and society and instead places responsibility solely on the individual.
He insisted that psychology must truly become a force for liberation, yet to do this it first must liberate itself. This led him to recognize the need for a liberation psychology; one created not from top down, but from the bottom up, on a ground of the everyday reality of ordinary people.
Martín-Baró aimed to reveal our true nature, so as to help us realize our full potential. He worked to free people from the dominant psychology’s construct of an isolated notion of self, and American middle-class insulated reality. By engaging what he calls “the de-ideologization of everyday experience”, he tried to recover the authentic experience of those whose dignity and humanity have been denied and bring it back to them as objective data.
WikiLeaks, liberatory praxis of publishing
With his fierce commitment to justice, Martín-Baró became a target of political retaliation. He was assassinated by a U.S. trained Salvadoran death squad in 1989 at the University of Central America in San Salvador during a massacre of Jesuit priests. For him, the psychology of liberation is a living process that cannot be completed and it continuously evolves through our participation.
Now, decades after his death, the struggle for liberation remains, or perhaps grows even stronger. With the advancement of technology and rapid globalization, the environment that we live in now is different than his times.
I am a new generation of liberation psychologist, whose outlook of the world has been profoundly influenced by the Internet. I saw sparks of liberation being rekindled in cyberspace.
In the Spring of 2010, a little known whistleblowing site blazed onto the global stage with the release of the Collateral Murder video. By the means of leaks bringing information to the public, WikiLeaks engaged in liberatory praxis of “de-ideologizing process”.
Their scientific journalism enabled a mechanism that can reveal an uncensored view of history, returning it to the historical record as objective data. The disclosure of government secrecy provided evidence of the way states and transnational corporations steal the original experience of people and exert control over their lives. Freed from propaganda and false narratives of their history, people are beginning to transform themselves from victims to active agents to take the reins of their own destiny.
Conscience of Chelsea Manning
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made it clear that his organization is driven by the inspiration of its sources. Catharsis for liberation of subjugated history came from the ordinary people—their courage to take enormous risks in order to bring truth.
Though her act of conscience, former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning engaged in the act of liberation. In uncensored images of modern war that depicted a US Army helicopter gunship killing innocent civilians in New Baghdad, Manning gained an access to the forbidden landscape to see the real face of those she was trained to see as ‘others’ and methodically demonized by the Bush Era doctrine of War on Terror.
The ideas that conceived WikiLeaks originated from the philosophy of the “cypherpunks”, activists who communicated through an electronic mailing list to advocate privacy by the use of strong cryptography. They are a loosely tied group that emerged in the late 1980s, who recognized the potential of cryptography in shifting the power relationship between the individual and the state.
The term cypherpunk is derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk. The word cipher is to put a message into secret writing. In cryptography, cipher is described as an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption. Through creative use of cryptography, Assange built a platform of journalism that could enforce transparency on the powerful, revealing the state secrecy, while protecting the identity of the sources.
The rise of cypherpunks
WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, which is resilient to government censorship, made it possible for the whistleblowing site to effectively carry the conscience of ordinary people and upload it online, letting its light shine on the darkest corners of the world. Contagious courage ignited through waves of whistleblowers unleashed the forces of liberation.
In ‘The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work‘, eminent computer scientist Phillip Rogaway talks about how the cypherpunks wanted more than anything “crypto with values” (p. 46) and their value was freedom. They aim to deliver this value through their action described as “cypherpunks write code”.
Adam Back, a cryptographer and one of the notable cypherpunks, explained a spirit behind this motto:
The idea is that lobbying politicians and promoting issues through the press would be a slow uphill battle. So, instead of engaging in legal and political systems, Back noted that they could simply “deploy technology and help people do what they consider to be their legal right” and society would later adjust itself to reflect these values.
Cypherpunks deploy civil liberty enhancing technology to create a new avenue for free expression. We are now seeing the fruits of their work in the invention of Bitcoin. This new programmable money can be used to liberate individuals from a central authority that tries to outlaw, restrict and regulate human activities.
New economic incentive structures encoded in a piece of mathematics gives people a choice to leave the institutional hierarchy behind and move toward creating a network of decentralization.
Psypherpunks
Almost a century ago, during the Nazis’ rise to power, medical doctors were recruited to carry out the genocide of Jews through the Nazis’ medical killing. In our time, psychologists are facilitating torture in Guantánamo Bay and developing unethical detention and interrogation practices.
Knowledge of psychology is used to manipulate public opinion through propaganda, control human behaviors by advertisement and by the CIA to influence tech firm CEO’s decisions concerning the development of science and technology. More than ever, it is imperative that psychologists critically examine their profession’s role in society and become a force that eliminates the suffering of individuals and oppression.
The task of psychology to become a liberatory force in the world continues and in order to do so, psychology now needs to free itself from theories and practices that constrain it, and reinvent itself. I believe that those who take liberation psychology seriously can find inspiration in waves of contagious courage that has emerged on the net. They can follow pathways spontaneously arising from the heart of freedom-loving people around the world creating a decentralized network.
Liberation psychologists can too become “psy(cy)pherpunks”! Just as cypherpunks who wanted to apply cryptography with morals, psypherpunks can create psychology with values. They can use the knowledge of psychology towards the liberation of all beings, creativity, and love.
Liberation psychologists “psypher”, to reveal hidden sets of commands that dictate our behavior; social expectations and cultural conditionings. We decode images and dominant narratives that are imposed by the mainstream media and dismantle unconscious scripts that control our actions. We can make the invisible become visible, aspects of ourselves that have been marginalized, rejected, projected outside and that which have become our shadow. We can now invite them to be integrated into ourselves.
Towards liberation of self
Martín-Baro (1994) advocated a creation of self that is “open to becoming different, on a plane of equality, with neither privileges nor oppressive mechanisms” (p. 182). Psypherpunks can work on building an alternative to the system of control that tries to censor and restrict thoughts that spring from our heart. Through the practice of dialogue, we can seek to secure a development of this self, and cultivate a fertile soil that embraces our differences.
So, I here invite you to join the efforts to put liberation psychology in action! Tending to the language of soul, let’s write a code that allows individuals to defy the instructions from above and help them self-determine their course of actions, led by each’s own heart’s imagining.
We can now become the psypherpunks who deploy knowledge of psychology as a tool to hack consciousness and inspire change in human action. We are here to facilitate the evolution of consciousness, helping one another break the old ego-programming and re-write new scripts that serve for our highest good.
Each individual’s awakening disrupts the old system of hierarchy, and then our collective shift into a higher consciousness creates a ripple effect that can open a free society.
Reference:
Martin-Baro, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron & S. Crone, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.