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A Sick Individual or a Sick Society?

President Trump last week called Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, “a sick man, a demented man,” adding that “we are dealing with a very, very sick individual.” (NYT) Doubtless there was something drastically wrong in Stephen Paddock’s life that led him to act as he did. But can we separate that individual life from the way our common life is organized? Rather as changes in the global climate have to be factored into what gives rise to the recent hurricanes, so our evolving economic and political climate has to be seen as background conditions for what people do. But just as climate change does not give us a complete explanation of, for example, Hurricane María, neither does our social system completely explain what an individual like Stephen Paddock did. In fact, we do not have enough information about his life to even begin to speculate about his motives. But whatever they were, they were planted and cultivated in the soil of capitalist society and culture.

A recent article  in the UK magazine Red Pepper by Rob Tweedy makes the claim that “Capitalism is a mental illness generating system.” In the US, according to the Atlantic Monthly,  Over a 12-month period, 27 percent of adults in the U.S. will experience some sort of mental health disorder….” Tweedy cites similar figures for the UK, and asks,What if it's not [we] who are sick, but a system at odds with who we are as social beings?” Tweedy, drawing on a number of psychologists, argues in effect that capitalism makes us crazy. Again, that is not to say capitalism is the sole, or even the main, cause of an extreme case like Paddock, but it does suggest that there is a great deal of misery that can be attributed directly to capitalism. Here’s why.

First, capitalist ideology assumes that commodity civilization promotes happiness. The way we live revolves around getting and spending money on commodities that are sold on the basis that every desire can be fulfilled by buying, possessing, and constantly upgrading the right products and services. Our real desires have been hijacked, to be replaced by an insatiable craving – the lust for commodities, and of course for money, the commodity that is the key to all commodities. This vitiation of the human soul is the underlying source of our epidemic levels of mental illness, suicide, violence, depression, substance abuse and barely tolerable levels of bad behavior and misery.
Stephen Paddock’s brother Eric was assuming this axiom of consumer society when he expressed astonishment at Stephen’s crime. After all, Eric said, “ [Stephen] was a wealthy guy; he liked to play video poker and he liked to go on cruises.” In other words: Money and what it buys should make you happy.

The desire for money and what money can buy is a self-centered, individualistic desire.  The real desire that is smothered under the flood of commodity culture is the fundamental desire to be in solidarity with others. We need to be recognized and loved by others for who we are, not for what we have, and we want to recognize and love others through caring and cooperative activity. These desires are overwhelmed by the need, in capitalist society, to compete with others for position and wealth. 

Of course for most of us, getting the money we need to live requires working for wages on terms set by the owners and managers of capital. To survive, we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be enslaved to the agenda of capital accumulation, doing work that mostly makes no positive contribution to human welfare and that often does serious damage to us and to the planet. The dominant economic agents in modern capitalist society are corporations, and as Joel Baken has pointed out (in his book The Corporation), the corporation is, by definition, “a pathological institution.” Its “legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception its own self-interest regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.” “The diagnostic features of its default pathology are lack of empathy, pursuit of self-interest, grandiosity, shallow affect, aggression, and social indifference.” The courts have determined that a corporation is a person; if so, then despite what their PR and advertisements say, they are nasty persons with long criminal records.

Moreover, and going beyond Tweedy’s piece, the implementation of neo-liberalism over the past 30 years or so has eviscerated the comforting thought that at least the State, especially the federal government, had our backs. Those who control government today make it clear that they would like to see every public good or service turned over to profit seeking corporations. Their agenda of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy individuals makes the rich richer but does nothing for the rest of us, because, as I argued in my commentary last month, very little of that extra money gets invested in job-creating enterprises but is instead put into stocks and bonds and other shadier financial gimmicks.

Now of course Stephen Paddock was not part of the working class being hurt by neo-liberalism. But, like all of us, he was part of the pathological world capitalism has created, a world in which human life and human activity is valued first and foremost in terms of its market value and in which no one is really expected to act except out of self-interest. Obviously Paddock’s success in this system, his accumulation of enough money that he could spend his life traveling and gambling, could not make up for whatever damage had been done to his soul that he was trying to express or avenge.

I hope it is clear that I am not expressing sympathy for Paddock, much less trying excuse or justify what he did. It is only natural that we should want to focus our blame on specific people, either the individual with evil in his heart, or the politicians and gun manufacturers who make it possible for one man to command so much massacre-ready weaponry. But we need to look beyond the actions and motives of individuals. For as long as we allow the world to be governed in the interests of maximizing the wealth of an already wealthy elite and subordinating all values to money values, pathological behavior of many kinds will continue.


A better world is possible: one organized for the cooperation of us all towards meeting the needs of all. In fact, that better world is not only possible, but imperative.

For the Old Mole Variety Hour, October 9, 2017

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