Don’t Call Me Resilient

Our ability to adapt to a shock, trauma, or crisis is phenomenal. This resilience, not just of humans but of all animal and plant life, is so powerful that the word itself has a positive connotation, suggesting a remarkable aptitude for overcoming adversity and even emerging stronger. Nevertheless, forthright statements such as Stop calling me resilient and I’m tired of having to be resilient are surfacing on a recurring basis throughout communities, in reaction to the “toxic positivity” of an excessively evoked resilience.

In recent years, the concept of resilience has become as widespread in the fields of psychology and environmental science as in that of financial management (where it has even gained the status of a buzzword). Every time there is an economic, social, or environmental crisis, it is invoked as the answer to unresolved issues or problems whose solutions are no longer even sought out. The essayist Naomi Klein writes about the “shock doctrine,” which she defines as a “brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock.”¹ 1 - Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 13. Not surprisingly, capitalism fully benefits from both these crises and the resilience they produce, because they lead to the implementation of even more extreme capitalist policies.