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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