The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment

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It is Monday night and I am parousing around the internet when I come across a rare find: information that borders on knowledge, even wisdom.

Having just suffered through James Gleick’s The Information on cd in my car, this is not a trivial distinction. According to formal information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, information is a quantifiable property of anything worth looking at—an NPR news broadcast, a poem, a storefront, or for that matter, a face, a flower, a bark beetle—that is independent of meaning, which we assign to such information.


My trail went something like this: James Gleick --> the library of Babel --> Jorge Luis Borges --> magical realism and The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes --> the real Patch Adams, who was recently named the honorary chair of… --> the IAACM --> the originator of the idea for the IAACM, namely Martin Luther King Jr.

As it is impossible to overstate the wisdom (that is to say, the meaning I assign to the work) of Martin Luther King Jr., here simply is the link to the speech in which he says, “I'm about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment…”

Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at WMU:
http://www.wmich.edu/library/archives/mlk/transcription.html

Among the reasons these words speak to me is my own never-ending struggle to adjust to life and work at a community health center. Confronted with the daily injustices that I view as being in no small part the direct health outcomes of poverty, it is inspiring to reflect on these thoughts from King.

“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted." This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.

“But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted [to] and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.

“I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination.
“I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.
“I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. (my highlight)
“I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence."

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I never intend to adjust to a segregated health care system.
I never intend to adjust to the idea that the norm, for those who do the important work of social justice, is to burn out. (Patch Adams has some great thoughts on this).
I never intend to become adjusted to waiting for justice to come with time.

"We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”

The time is right to do right. Be creatively maladjusted!

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Some great commentary on King’s words in our modern context:

"Informed Comment", Juan Cole:
http://www.juancole.com/2010/01/mlk-international-association-for.html