Jessica Leza
Nov 14, 2021
Winners Take All: “The Elite Charade of Changing the World”
by Anand Giridharadas (2018)
This was recommended to me as reading material that could help me understand the larger context of my experiences working in a “helping profession” (therapy) for both profit- and non-profit businesses. It primarily focuses on neoliberal entities (referred to as belonging to “MarketWorld”) who operate under a ‘win-win’ belief that you can do good for yourself by doing good for others – or that the people who already have the most access to money and power can do good while simultaneously enriching themselves.
I would like to continue with something that digs deeper into the dynamic in which organizations who claim to be oriented towards providing some helpful service to marginalized people eventually end up looking out for their own interests first.
I saw this when working for a for-profit music therapist-owned music therapy business, when the owner – who often shared in meetings I was paid $12/hr for and who wanted to make millions of dollars – laid me off and replaced me with a poorly trained intern with no real experience, without enabling adequate transition services, resulting in an ethical breach and harm done to the children receiving services.
I also saw this when working for a non-profit that claimed to exist to elevate autistic perspectives, and I saw this when working for a for-profit psych/”behavioral health” hospital.
At the non-profit, as soon as my work began to genuinely incite reflection and promote change amongst the intended community, I was shamed and told to apologize to the non-autistic, non-disabled people who held positions of power and authority in other, larger non-profits. I was told I needed to address these people in positions of power in a way that centered their own self-image as helpers. I was told that I was hired to make change – but not too much change, too quickly, not change that would discomfort the comfortable beyond their meager tolerance for such.
I saw this while working for a for-profit psych hospital for children and adolescents, when patients’ discharge dates were extended for petty and bizarre reasons, always underlined by the insurance approving a certain number of days or the census dropping so low the hospital no longer turned a large enough profit to please the already-rich investors. I saw this when staffing levels were decreased to dangerously low levels, resulting in several highly traumatic, near-death incidents.
I don’t propose a solution because I am still trying to understand how this issue affects me, my work, and my communities. But it seems clear to me that this is a significant issue for music therapists to contemplate.
This book uses many specific examples of people and organizations to illustrate its main points. For music therapists, these can serve as examples that guide self-reflection about our role in systems of power and help us examine the fundamental assumptions of benevolence we might be carrying into acts of philanthropy.
This book is certainly not the culmination of this topic. I still don’t have the answers I need, or the language to describe what I have experienced myself. It is certainly a useful tool on the journey.