What is help?

Over the last week I made a complaint to Second Step whose Peer Employability Programme I had joined last October. A programme that seems to offer very little.

What is telling about this process is the response. It was almost patronising. You think something has gone wrong, we MUST listen to you, we MUST learn. Tell us all about it! Sit down, tell us, tell us! It was over the top.

My issue was that, after ignoring three emails expressing my dissatisfaction, they didn't respond to me at all, just passed them on to the person running the course. I objected to that because I felt that would be construed as a personal attack. I have no wish for her to have her confidence undermined. At the very least surely you talk to me first to understand the issues. But, as they say, whatever.

The consequence of all this is that today her line manager has emailed to discuss whether I want to continue. The problem is that I don't know what I'm continuing with. I asked her what this course was meant to offer. That was the root of my complaint: I have no idea what this Programme is there to do.

I know what they say. They give me the sales spiel; we can work with you, we can do all the usual stuff (like print out cv's), and we can boost confidence. This is a familiar pattern to me. It's the same kind of programme that all these organisations offer. It's exactly the same.

The fundamental problem is that it isn't meant to challenge the status quo while ignoring the reality that the status quo, the economic system the nature of the society within which we find ourselves, are the cause.

People don't have low self esteem because they are lazy. They have it because their society and their environment beats it out of them. The confident people that I've known have all come from strong unified healthy family and social backgrounds. You cannot 'teach' self confidence; that just amounts to fakery. A few simply 'team building' exercises, we've all seen the sort, are not a replacement for a healthy environment. That's how we, as social creatures, are meant to live. Unfortunately the world doesn't work out that way.

Of course social enterprises can't single handedly change the world and I don't expect them to, but I am not interested in buying into the "only you can change your world" mantra. That's a severely simplistic worldview. By all means engage in healthy introspection - just don't believe that your problems are always or totally your fault. That is gaslighting. It also absolves the people who have power in our society - the psychopath ruling class - of their behaviour.

What these organisations should be doing is affiliating. They should link up and present a united front on behalf of the people. That at least would be a start. But instead they affiliate with the likes of the DWp and just end up further damaging and dividing people. For this reason I remain completely unclear as to what this Peer Employability Programme offers, nor whether it's worth my time continuing. What would I be continuing with? I don't want to just toss them aside because organisations like this are the only game in town. However what connections do they have with the labour market? Can they find actual decent jobs? Do they have any real influence. What good is confidence building if it thus leads nowhere?