WHO'S MICHEL FOUCAULT? And why does it matter?

Has it ever seemed to you that people you know and care for have believed a pack of lies someone else has told them about, well, whatever?   Maybe about other people?  Maybe about themselves?  About the nation we call America?

Have you ever wondered why?

The late French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), was a spokesman for what in many academic circles is regarded as post-modernism with respect to human behavior.   In his writings and academic lectures, Foucault taught that human behavior is based on beliefs created by other people through what is called “public discourse.”   In his views, reality could never be objective but would always be subjective.   It would be whatever was said by others who exercised influence or authority over us or else whatever we instead told ourselves was true.

My own first exposure to Foucault’s work came when I was studying Narrative Psychotherapy in Vancouver, British Columbia back in August of 1996.   Condensed down, the gist of Narrative Therapy is that we all tend to live within a story that has been told about us until we can learn to live out of a preferred story we have told ourselves.   What other people in power say about us, principally our parents or other childhood authorities, becomes our truth or our reality for life unless we act to “change the narrative” and redefine ourselves, as it were.   People do not see themselves for who they really are, but rather for whom someone says they are.   Foucault did not believe in objective reality.   He considered truth to be all about opinion, and not about fact.   Living out our lives based on others’ authoritative opinions about us was said to have distorted our life stories, causing us to experience life as a problem narrative until such time as, perhaps with the help of Narrative therapy, we learned to restore or re-story our own lives and stop fulfilling others’ negative opinions about us.  Choosing our own beliefs and behaviors, claiming AUTHORity over our own life story or narrative, and then gaining validation and support from others of like opinion became the essential treatment goals in what is still today called Narrative Psychotherapy.

What drew me to this particular way of trying to be helpful to my neighbors I’m called to love by doing unto them as I would have them do unto me can also be condensed down.   Unlike Foucault, I am a Theist who believes there is indeed objective truth in the world, and that all creation evolved from this objective force.   I believe all subjectivity is subject to this unique Objective Creator.    One of the objective realities within creatures is our immune system that protects the self against the other, the inner person against the outer threat or invasive “germ” that does not belong.   We as persons, I believe, have a sacred boundary that prevents external threats to our internal survival.   We have, in other words, immunity against external threats as creatures of this Objective Creator in our universe.   True, I believed, for our bodies and true, just as well, for our minds.  Hence, my interest in a psychotherapy that privileged our own inner narrative as sacred and separate from others’ opinions of us or narratives for us.   Biblically, we call it “casting out the demon(s)” in terms of ancient mental healthcare, but it involves claiming our own power and autonomy and resisting the control of others who have their own labels and opinions about our life-story.  “Externalizing the problem” is the language used with Narrative therapy.   Same meaning.

Okay, perhaps you get all that.  But why is it important in any other context than my own work as a therapist?   Why does Michel Foucault matter to all of us in some way?

I believe that creaturehood (is that a word?) goes beyond the personal to the communal.   What operates within the individual is also found within the social, the community, the larger culture.                  

The entire world these days is concerned about the American story being lived out in areas of global reality.   And the American story turns out not to be an objective reality at all, but instead just a mix of different subjective opinions starting with our “public discourse.”   I say mix because with social media now blended into an array of public media opinions being presented, alongside what we have often called the "bully pulpit" of our President's microphone, there is no longer an American story or narrative.   There are thousands of them.    The closest we come to an actual story is perhaps the biblical story of Genesis 11 wherein the tower of Babel was abandoned out of sheer confusion.   There is no longer an objective America.  Such has now been abandoned. I can say with my own subjective opinion that America is an idea having to do with “liberty and justice for all” and where “diversity, equality, and inclusion” grants our immigrants opportunities for personal, national and even global prosperity and peace as a model for human life together on this planet.   I can say that, and I can even use my own blog-page as a public forum for such discourse.   

But that doesn’t make it so.

Michel Foucault was right.   We may have, if I’m right and Foucault is wrong about this, been created by an Objective Reality to which we are subjected, but we’re all intertwined in subjective reality and we’ll never know unity, harmony, justice, or peace until we learn how to define and love ourselves and then love others as ourselves by doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Subjects claiming our own power of self-determination and then empowering others to do the same.   Subjecting ourselves to one another, learning each others’ language and walking the proverbial mile in each others’ moccasins.  

That could matter a great deal.  In my humble opinion.