Understanding deprivation

Deprivation is considered to be one of the primary factors leading to social strife and human suffering. The United Nations (UN) defines deprivation as the inability of a social group to effectively participate in the larger society and sustain their livelihoods. One of the primary sources of deprivation is poverty, where extreme poverty is defined as living below US$1.25 a day. 

Several initiatives under goal 1 of the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) are underway across the world, to identify deprived sections of the society and to bring them into the mainstream. 

In this post, I would like to argue that, deprivation is a result of two kinds of factors, and it is important to distinguish between the two. 

The first form of deprivation occurs due to lack of equity within a given paradigmatic framework. Such forms of deprivation is well addressed and well understood. For a variety of reasons, several social groups get excluded from relevant opportunities that can enable them to pursue their needs and exercise their agency. Such forms of deprivation are a result of inadequate social mechanisms that can recognise deprivation within a society and implement affirmative actions to mitigate deprivation. 

There is however, a second form in which deprivation manifests, which makes things more complex. This is what I call paradigmatic dissonance. In this form of deprivation, a social group appears greatly deprived when their lifestyle is interpreted through the lens of what is considered the "mainstream" worldview, and when the mainstream tries to mitigate this deprivation through its lens, it causes more harm than good. 

As an extreme example, consider the Sentinelese tribe in the Nicobar islands. This tribe has maintained a lifestyle that goes back to more than 60,000 years. Their primary avocation is hunting and fishing, using tools like bows and arrows that are considered to be very "primitive" in the mainstream worldview. There have been several attempts to integrate the Sentinelese into the mainstream, but all such attempts have been met with immense hostility from the tribe. The most recent incident was in 2018, when the tribe killed a missionary from the US who attempted to "save" the tribe by converting them to Christianity. Such has been their resistance to "modernity" that this tribe is now protected by Indian law, and people are prohibited from approaching them. 

The tribe is clearly very deprived when seen from our mainstream lens. They still use primitive tools for fishing when they could have easily integrated into the mainstream and have opened a fishing industry on their island. They don't have electricity, running water, Internet, or any of the necessities that are needed in the modern world. 

Yet, during the 2004 tsunami where close to 300,000 people lost their lives in different countries of the world, not a single casualty has been recorded from the Sentinelese. The tsunami devastated the coral reefs surrounding the islands where this tribe lives that even destroyed the places where the tribe usually went fishing. Yet, there is no discernible change in their population or their lifestyle. 

It is not just this "primitive" tribe that knew how to survive the tsunami. There are several accounts of animals that moved to safer locales on the day of the tsunami, well before the huge waves hit. In contrast, in the mainstream civilisation, when the sea receded suddenly in places like Phuket, many tourists at the beach resort, instead of running to higher ground for safety, ventured out into the barren seabed, without realising that this is the last thing they will be seeing in this world. 

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While the Sentinelese may be an extreme example, what we often fail to realise is that human civilisation has had multiple paradigms and world-views with which it has interpreted the universe, and built its lifestyles. But when a few of them get into a "saviour complex" and actively tries to digest all other paradigms into what it considers the mainstream, we run the risk of losing important knowledge that may be critical for our overall survival. What we consider "mainstream" is typically the result of the most dominant paradigm that has become dominant primarily because it interpreted the world in a predatory fashion and actively sought to consume other paradigms within itself. 

In some of our initiatives to bring Internet connectivity to remote villages in India for example, we were met with resistance and hostility, rather than an eagerness to get out of their "deprivation" and become integrated into "modernity." In one case, the villagers had welcomed us with a sarcastic song that they had composed specifically for our workshop. The song basically went something like, "Do not try to impress us with your www-dot-com, which is of no use to us. Will your www-dot-com draw water from the well, tend to the fields,.." 

Objectively, one might argue that the "www-dot-com" can indeed help the villagers in drawing water from the well by connecting an IoT based pump water pump, etc. etc. But the main point of their sarcasm was not that. Their main concern was that this integration into the mainstream will deracinate them from their traditional and familiar way of life, in which they had learned to not only survive but also maximise their agency and express themselves in myriad ways. 

An IoT based water pump may increase efficiency in drawing water from wells, but it also gets them into a liability loop where they will need to manage subscriptions and payments, and see their lives increasingly getting controlled from somewhere else. 

This is pretty-much what we see happening today as we try to integrate the world and bring everyone onboard in our attempts at inclusion. Even when the mainstream includes something, it does so by "scooping" the other into its structure, and not by treating it as a peer and establishing a sensible relationship with it to collectively achieve some shared vision. 

In the mainstream worldview today, traditional Indian culture is all about meaningless and "primitive" rituals of expression, and the debates centre around the symbolism of these rituals. But once upon a time, these practices were not mere rituals, with only symbolic value. These practices were deeply ingrained into what was then the mainstream practice and the way of interpreting the universe. 

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For the last few centuries, the "mainstream" culture that is based on the industrial revolution and the factory paradigm, developed in a outlandishly predatory fashion, where it pretty much scooped the entire world into its framework. 

However, by the 1990s the predatory forms of interpretations had run its course with multiple dominant  world-views clashing with one another, and faintly realising that perhaps predation and might need not equate to insight and truth, after all. In these times, we saw a glimmer of hope where technology development focused on decentralisation and open architectures, rather than on ownership and dominance. It is in these times we saw the rapid growth of the Internet and the world wide web. 

But these technologies whose design principles were based on a philosophy of plurality and decentralisation are now once again dominated by few very powerful players who not only control the technology, but also the narrative; and influence how we interpret the world. 

And even in the mainstream universe these days, there are a lot of disillusioned thought leaders who understand the dangers of predation on a very powerful network like the Internet, are now pushing for "re-decentralisation" of our connected world. 

While inclusion is a noble goal to pursue, it is also important for the mainstream to preserve hermeneutic plurality (not just plurality in superficial things like dress sense, food, etc.) and really understand how to build sustainable pluralistic societies.