The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007, Naomi Klein
I love challenges because they encourage me to test myself and see how far I can go. But at the same time, I fear challenges because they make me face myself, and I don't always like what I see. Accepting a challenge means giving yourself a chance to surpass yourself, and this very often does not mean winning the challenge but simply discovering our limits. Doing the 100 Challenge made me understand the importance of knowing how to stop. I understand it is challenging to recognize that you are in trouble and ask for help.
People call this stopping “failure.” If you can't do it, you are failing the goal; you are not capable enough; you are not motivated enough; or you have not followed the right strategy. Not reaching the goal you have set for yourself reveals your inadequacy and becomes a scientific demonstration of it.
Everything I study and write is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, anti-classist; in a word, anti-capitalist. Yet I realized that I don't move outside the capitalist mechanism either: the very word "challenge" is the bulwark of this system. And by accepting this challenge, I decided to move within capitalist parameters and feelings. “Challenge” is an umbrella term. Or, better yet, a shield term: on the one hand, its smooth and glittering surface reflects attention elsewhere; on the other hand, being a defensive tool, it hides well everything it strives to protect.
When a person is going through a moment of great difficulty, they often don't say that they are ill, that they are depressed, that they feel alone, betrayed, or vulnerable; they say what they're going through is a challenge. Resigning from the old job to undertake a new activity without having guarantees of success and earnings is not presented as a moment of change, a step that shows the new needs that a person feels, nor it’s presented as a phase of great uncertainty which uncovers not only hopes but also painful fears; it’s just a “challenge.” Going to University as a commuter to save money means having several hours of travel a day on overcrowded public transport without seats, most of the time late; but being a student commuter is not seen as compromising for physical and mental health; it is presented as a challenge. Not being able to make a career in the way you hoped, remaining anchored to routine work with no possibility of growth, while your friends are having success with their professions does not mean that the starting conditions were different by social class and family situation, that their characters, needs, and aspirations were different, but that there were people unable to grasp and overcome the challenges that life presents: that is, your condition is your fault or your merit.
There are no things that are wrong in life; there are only challenges. Whether one wins or loses. The word challenge is an integral part of the rhetoric of meritocracy. It is the beginning of the internalization of capitalist alienation. It is not admitting that there are problems, that we all have them, live them, or suffer them, that they are part of life, and that these same problems bring us closer to each other, to a shared condition of human vulnerability. Talking about "challenge" is often a way to divide the world, once again, as capitalism always teaches us, in a surreal binary: Into capable and incapable, into those who can and those who cannot, into winners and losers.
Using the word challenge is a way of shielding that even winners lose that the dichotomy is a Manichaean legacy and that failure and success do not exist, at least not in the way they are proposed to us. It's a way of shielding our humanity because not showing ourselves as fallible prevents us from showing ourselves as fully human and realizing what "being human" really means. That is, it prevents us from forgiving ourselves, from loving ourselves, and therefore others.