Capitalism and mental illness–
Excellent article. The author traces the link between capitalism and mental illness all the back to the Enlightenment’s perverted anthropology:
Why should all of these contemporary social and economic practices and processes generate so much illness, so many disorders? To answer this I think we need to look back at the wider Enlightenment project, and the psychological models of human nature out of which they emerged.
Modern capitalism grew out of seventeenth century concepts of man as some sort of disconnected, discontinuous, disengaged self – one driven by competition and a narrow, ‘rational’ self-interest – the concept of homo economicus that drove and underwrote much of the whole Enlightenment project, including its economic models.
As Iain McGilchrist notes, ‘Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.’
Economists like Kate Raworth and Steve Keen do the same from an economic rather than a psychological point of view, critiquing the Enlightenment’s fundamental misunderstanding of human beings and the inequality, competitive stress and disregard for the planet that it leads to.
What is often viewed as some ideal era, living in “Leave It to Beaver-land,” was merely the calm before the inevitable storm that results from a value system built on materialism and consumerism. When what matters is buying “stuff” and paying for “experiences,” it’s like Jackson Browne wrote in “The Pretender:”
I’m gonna be a happy idiotAnd struggle for the legal tenderWhere the ads take aim and lay their claimTo the heart and the soul of the spender,And believe in whatever may lieIn those things that money can buy.Who thought true love could have been a contender?
The 50s are not a time to be viewed longingly. They were the era when our worst instincts were nurtured and the path chosen that led to our current polycrisis. Suburbs, happy motoring, Madmen, the two-car garage: all took root in the Fifties. That was what the hippies’ rebellion was really about. Joni Mitchell put it well:
Then can I walk beside you?I have come here to lose the smog,And I feel to be a cogIn something turning.Well, maybe it is just the time of yearOr maybe it’s the time of man.I don’t know who I am.But you know life is for learning.
We are stardust.We are golden.And we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.
We aren’t cogs stamped by some machine. We’re living beings who need emotional connection not just to other human beings but to the rest of the living beings on the planet where we were created by the process of evolution. Substituting a new 4-door F-150 or the baby back ribs at Applebees for a community of cooperators rather than competitors doesn’t work. It leads only to anxiety and depression and growing Big Pharma profits.
Brewer and Shipley saw the beginning of the rural decline brought about by capitalism enthusiast Earl Butz (working for that great humanitarian, Dick Nixon), and they wondered how we could escape the trap we’d created for ourselves:
Twenty-four hours of barbed-wire fence,Fifty-five years of pollution.Everyone knows how the puzzle was laid,But can anyone recall the solution?
The solution for us certainly does not lie in capitalism, consumerism, or materialism. These products of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution have brought us to this point of crisis and misery. The way out begins with a rejection of those isms.
Jackson Browne, “The Pretender”
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
Brewer & Shipley, “Tarkio Road“