Mick Jagger / Keith Richards
Got Love If You Want It
official site
unofficial site
here
"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total... Man (sic) has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his own creations, and has lost ownership of himself."
Erich Fromm
Quoted here
Turbo-consumerism is the driving force behind crime
"Failed consumers will lie, cheat and steal
to gain the trappings of success
so that they can be regarded as normal"
by Neal Lawson
The Guardian,
29 JUN 2006
"Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 22.1 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about 1 in 5 adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. (Holy smoke. I saw this figure quoted in another article and assumed it was a mistake for "22 percent suffer a mental disorder over the course of a lifetime". 22 percent every year??? At any given time, over 1 in 5 Americans "has a mental problem"?? No wonder the world is going the way it is -- I suppose I should be thankful that things aren't worse.) (Okay, reading down the page here I see that NIMH is including Alzheimer's disease in their figures -- "an estimated 4 million Americans". So at any given time the percentage of Americans with "non-Alzheimers mental disorders" is about 13% or 1 in 8.) When applied to the 1998 U.S. Census residential population estimate, this figure translates to 44.3 million people. In addition, 4 of the 10 leading causes of disability in the U.S. and other developed countries are mental disorders -- major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time."Footnotes in original
"- In 2000, 29,350 people died by suicide in the U.S.
- More than 90 percent of people who kill themselves have a diagnosable mental disorder, commonly a depressive disorder or a substance abuse disorder.
- The highest suicide rates in the U.S. are found in white men over age 85.8 (That's news to me, and obviously skews the numbers. The highest percentage of people who commit suicide will probably be dead in a few years anyway, suicide or no, and many of them probably have existing illnesses that are seriously diminishing quality-of-life.)
- In 2000, suicide was the third leading cause of death among 15 to 24 year olds.
- Four times as many men as women die by suicide; however, women attempt suicide two to three times as often as men."
"Anxiety disorders include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and phobias (social phobia, agoraphobia, and specific phobia).
- Approximately 19.1 million American adults ages 18 to 54, or about 13.3 percent of people in this age group in a given year, have an anxiety disorder.
- Anxiety disorders frequently co-occur with depressive disorders, eating disorders, or substance abuse.
- Many people have more than one anxiety disorder.
- Women are more likely than men to have an anxiety disorder. Approximately twice as many women as men suffer from panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, and specific phobia, though about equal numbers of women and men have obsessive-compulsive disorder and social phobia."
"- Approximately 5.2 million American adults ages 18 to 54, or about 3.6 percent of people in this age group in a given year, have PTSD.
- PTSD can develop at any age, including childhood.
- About 30 percent of Vietnam veterans experienced PTSD at some point after the war. The disorder also frequently occurs after violent personal assaults such as rape, mugging, or domestic violence; terrorism; natural or human-caused disasters; and accidents."
"Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells the story of a woman who didn't like the way her husband was handling the family finances. She wanted to start keeping the books herself but didn't want to insult her husband.
The doctor suggested she try an antidepressant to make herself feel better.
She got the antidepressant, and she did feel better, said Dr. Dworkin, a Maryland anesthesiologist and senior fellow at Washington's Hudson Institute, who told the story in his book Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class. But in the meantime, Dworkin says, the woman's husband led the family into financial ruin. ...
According to a government study, antidepressants have become the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. They're prescribed more than drugs to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, or headaches."
" 'It certainly seems that the world is going mad', Canadian psychologist Dr Daniel Burston told Asia Times Online, quickly noting that an increasing retreat into 'social phantasy systems' would be more accurate. Burston -- whose work has been acclaimed in the mainstream media -- noted that famed social psychologist Erich Fromm had written on 'socially patterned defects' that enabled large groups of people to adjust themselves comfortably to a system that, humanly speaking, is 'fundamentally at odds with our basic existential and human needs'. Burston observed that this resulted in 'deficiencies, or traits, or attitudes which don't generate internal conflict when, in fact, they should'. ...
In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, (Hannah) Arendt highlighted the unexceptional nature of the Nazi bureaucrat responsible for killing untold numbers in extermination camps. Burston noted that 'with one very questionable exception, Eichmann tested normal on all psychological tests that were administered to him by mental health experts before his trial'.
Clinically speaking, Eichmann -- an individual who worked daily at mass murder for a period of years -- was quite sane.
In instances where a group's behavior becomes deviant, even destructive to themselves or others, 'it [the pathological action] becomes a source of solace and security for a person who adapts that way', said Burston. Eichmann had "adapted". And Fromm noted that, in most cases, destructive impulses are rationalized, ensuring 'at least a few other people or a whole social group share in the rationalization and thus make it appear to be "realistic" to the members of such a group.' (No close quotes in original. I assume it should go here -- ed.)
In effect, an emotional-support network is formed, providing its individual members with a mistaken sense of legitimacy. ...
'Crowds can be persuaded through specific formulas that involve frequent repetitions, in an authoritative tone, by someone who is considered authoritative. And for many people, this works -- it just works', Burston revealed. ...
(Burston) discussed how noted psychologist R D Laing's theory of "social phantasy systems" could explain this.
Citing his book on Laing's work, The Crucible of Experience, Burston highlighted that Laing believed most people develop a form of "pseudo-sanity", doing so as a function of the emotional imperative of adapting to "pseudo-realities". The upshot is that they live within a "social phantasy system" of varying degrees.
The described result for the individual is a proportionate loss of the ability to think critically, as well as limited ability to consider anyone or anything outside one's particular group, especially in a positive light.
'People who are deeply embedded within social-phantasy systems like these function effectively within the framework of those groups. But their sense of reality regarding the world outside of their reference group is profoundly impoverished as a consequence', Burston outlined. 'That makes them act in ways which -- from an outsiders perspective -- look insane'. ...
As with the 1930s, (today) there's a 'certain willingness on the part of people to absorb disinformation and take it in for fact ... no matter how implausible it appears to be', Burston said. He attributed this to the diminishing of what Fromm termed 'rational authority', authority marked by transparency and openness, and authority that breeds what has been called a ' truth-loving disposition'.
'What we see now, increasingly, is the erosion of that [truth-loving disposition] -- people are becoming more and more suggestible, more and more willing to be seduced', Burston related. ...
Burston sees the contemporary result as growing 'opportunities for people who have a hidden agenda to take advantage of the public trust. And that seems to be increasing dramatically'.
He believes that 'we are seeing a growing threat to the viability of democratic decision-making systems across the board, around the world'. Burston warned of the potential for a ' corporate fascist regime' in the US, saying the country could be 'poised on the verge' of such an event."
-- My emphasis and links -- ed.
"Incredible power characterizes this era, and yet, in truth, most of us feel increasingly powerless. It is an era of enormous material power, and yet incredible social powerlessness. A billion of us, perhaps, live without even the most basic, primal power to meet our need for food and to take care of our offspring. The rest of us feel increasingly powerless to affect the most basic aspects of our lives, to protect ourselves and our children from violence, to secure healthy food and water for ourselves, to secure jobs that have some security. Increasing feelings of powerlessness pervade our lives.
Now, what do we human beings do when we feel powerless? ...
Out of this whining and blaming and rejecting and retreating, we are creating and living within a culture of powerlessness. And this feeling of powerlessness stands is such stunning contrast to the enormous sense of material power all around us.
... if we took that time we'd probably conclude, at least we would, that they simply cannot be addressed by top-down strategies.
Hierarchical top-down measures are failing to solve the highly complex, highly-interrelated social problems we face today. These problems can't be solved from the top-down because they require such enormous creativity, such extensive changes in our behavior. ... There has to be "ownership."
In a sense, this outlines the terrible predicament we're in: While solutions require vastly increased engagement to draw on that experience and knowledge from direct encounter with the problem and the commitment that comes that involvement, in fact we live in a culture of powerlessness where people feel increasingly disengaged, disconnected. All we know what to do is whine, blame, reject, retreat. And this predicament says a lot about the challenge to educators."
-- My ellipsis and links -- ed.
"What's most interesting is not how stable such a broad coalition might be (in fact, I think it would be untenable) but that the sense of powerlessness and anger is so widespread. From middle-class kids to militiamen, tree huggers to race haters, Steelworkers to skinheads: Just how many canaries have to die in this coal mine before we figure out something is wrong?"
"... the world is a messier place than a lecture hall in Boston full of bright students, and outside academia the current debate on human nature can seem isolating and overly materialistic -- plenty of people are finding the twentieth century a sterile and loveless place. Yet Pinker says: 'We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why', he adds with a huge smile, 'are we so miserable?'
Of course, by and large, we're not and there is research to prove it but given the pace of material improvement in our lives, we're not that much happier either. Pinker says: 'One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. It might even create a need for fictive allies, especially in men'.
"The increase in depression in particular was "alarming", the survey (from The International Labour Organisation [ILO], a UN agency) said. ...depression was now the second most disabling illness for workers after heart disease ... And incidences of mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are rising so fast that they will overtake road accidents, AIDS and violence as the primary cause of work years lost due to premature death or disability."
"Sick of " politics-as-usual?" Bored with political speeches, which promise everything and deliver nothing? Scornful of a government that can't even balance its books? Tied up in red tape and laws so complex that it is impossible even to do your own taxes? Your frustration is not pathological. We have finally arrived at total gridlock, or freeze-up, to use Lazare's metaphor. Our government is now perfectly dysfunctional.
If you want a detailed account of its dysfunctionality, I recommend The Frozen Republic, by Daniel Lazare, and The Death of Common Sense, by Philip Howard. But what is the alternative?"
Government : Bureaucratic Absurdities
"Who do you know who has a really perfect life? I mean, I don't care how rich the guy is, how handsome the guy is, how sexy his wife is. There's nobody who doesn't have a hard time. I mean, when we were doing those books, Kennedy seemed to have a perfect life, and he got shot. Everybody has problems, and everybody has secret sorrows."
"In The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine [2 vol., 1967-70], architect, historian, and critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) coined the expression "the sin of Galileo" to refer to the manner in which the world had become merely an abstract mathematical object through Galileo's application of mathematics to physics. To Mumford this change was dehumanizing and ultimately productive of the alienation of modern life. As a "sin," of course, this kind of thing had nothing to do with Galileo's problems with the Church.
Mumford's idea about the alienation of modern life is really a dangerous nostalgia for mediaeval society.
The meaning of life may have been clearer in past centuries than now, but it went along with pervasive poverty and an authoritarian political and religious hierarchy. The "alienation" of modern life follows largely from the wealth, leisure, and autonomy that technology and a consumer economy make possible. People are left to figure out or decide on the meaning of life for themselves. Those with the most leisure -- intellectuals and teenagers -- suffer from such alienation the most. The disapproval of intellectuals for what most people enjoy -- television, sports, drinking, smoking, sex, and violence -- is the same immemorial moralism of mandarins, priests, and aristocrats that always disapproved of vulgar, i.e. popular, pleasures, the same yearning for the day that political authority, namely them, can once again govern meaning and morality in life for everyone."
Ross goes on to propose an interesting modern redefinition of "the" sin of Galileo.
"... the level of one's socio-economic status has meager effects on one's "sense of well-being" and no significant effect on "satisfaction with life as a whole," to quote researchers Frank Andrews and Stephen Withey.
Psychologist Jonathan Freedman discovered that levels of reported happiness did not vary greatly among the members of different economic classes, with the exception of the very poor, who tended to be less happy than others."
"Josh Harris rode the city's gilded express for half a decade. He banked $60 million from an IPO, bought a pet lizard, Maurice Jr., and started Pseudo.com, a Web TV venture in a Soho loft. ... (But now) His personal fortune is down to $1.5 million and he's leaving for an ashram in India. "I really need to reconnect," he said. "This dream's over.
There has been a fire sale on Gulfstream and Lear private jets. ... A young Madison Avenue accountant executive talks of prowling Armani, but buying at the discount shops downtown. A high-end breast implant salesman bemoans a 50 percent drop in collagen sales. Plastic surgeons report fewer customers requesting the full nip, tuck and lipo-suck.
"It's the summer season coming up, so my patients must have tune-ups," said plastic surgeon Pamela Lipkin, who has a state-of-the-art private operating room on Fifth Avenue. "But instead of doing liposuction on seven areas, they're doing three or four. These decisions are so painful. ...
Recessionary jitters are less evident among the 95 percent of New Yorkers who don't partake of $80 prix fixe lunches. Crime and unemployment remain low. ... Still, there are signs of stress. For food pantries, demand shot up 28 percent last year. Now they routinely run out of food and turn away 40,000 people some months. And families are pouring into homeless shelters in record numbers. The family shelter census is nearly as high as at the depth of the early 1990s recession.
Thousands of city police officers, firefighters and teachers are decamping for suburban jobs, where pay is better and housing more affordable. As a result, these city departments now experience acute labor shortages. ...
Further downtown, Josh Harris sat in his aircraft hangar of a loft on lower Broadway. The entire place, bedroom and bathrooms included, has been outfitted with Web-cams to record his every move. He's had three night-long parties, a machine-gun shooting range in the basement, boxing matches, rented helicopters. . . . "
"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night'. "
The Life of Raymond Chandler
by Frank MacShane
Page 50
"... we must first define "oppression". As the term is used here, oppression in its various forms (economic, social, political, and psychological) means the denial of the most basic human right: to be yourself. It means being forced into a situation where your own destiny is not in your own hands but in those of others, usually of your enemy. It is a condition of being powerless to act to gain control of your destiny, of being reacted upon by events without the capacity to affect, change, or prevent them. It means being exploited and used in the interests of the exploiter and against your own, and of being programmed for and forced into certain roles for his benefit."
Jewish radicalism: a selected anthology
edited by Jack Nusan Porter, Peter Dreier
"The Oppression of America's Jews", by Aviva Cantor Zuckoff,
Page 29
Originally appeared in The Jewish Liberation Journal,
NOV 1970
"We are often given the impression that we are experiencing such a maelstrom of change economic, social, cultural, technological, environmental that the challenge is to 'wing it'. Adapt as best we can, seize the opportunities and try to dodge the dangers. This is only partly true. At the most fundamental level, these changes are driven by our Weltanschauung, the world view or world philosophy that determines what we believe and what we do.
World views are hard issues to address because they are 'transparent' to those who hold them. They comprise deeply internalised beliefs about what is important, right and good, and so how we should live and for what we should strive. These beliefs become unquestioned assumptions.
The modern Western world view is dominated by notions of progress, of making life better, that are becoming increasingly global in their influence. Progress is largely defined in material terms, a rising standard of living, and measured as growth in (per capita) gross domestic product (GDP). Economic growth is the driving dynamic of modern societies. Existing government policy is underpinned by the belief that wealth creation comes first because it increases our capacity to meet other, social objectives. This is a model of progress as a pipeline: pump more wealth in one end and more welfare or well-being flows out the other. ...
There are several things deeply wrong with this view of growth as progress. It is, at the global level, ecologically unsustainable and grossly inequitable."
"The feelings of alienation, being an outsider, and knowing that your life is subject to forces beyond your control, as well as a sense of dogged survival, frequently associated with the Jewish sensibility and which all frequently crop up in Kafka's work would prove to be among the most widespread and common feelings among people of all religions and races in the uncertain 20th century. In a very real sense, Jewish sentiments have been made universal, and Kafka speaks to these feelings from the perspective of both a Jew and as a member of humanity in general."
"There are many men in this country who are drifters, transients. They have no place to turn. They lack the support systems, the encouragement; they're psychologically on their own. Maybe if they had the right kinds of support when they needed it, they would grow out of the problems they had as youngsters. But instead they make the same mistakes over and over and they begin to drift in and out of jobs from one state to another. I think that explains why states with large numbers of transients and drifters have the largest number of serial killings. "
"An iPod and the right phone are now essential trappings of youth -- not just because they let you talk or listen to music at your convenience, but because of what they say about you. Once we were known by what we produced (Literally: Smith, Baker, Shoemaker, Carpenter). Now we judge ourselves and others by what we and they consume. The advertisers know this; that's why they ask: 'What does your mobile say about you?' Welcome to the consumer society and the world of the turbo-consumer. It's a world driven by competition for consumer goods and paid-for experiences, of hi-tech and high-end shopping signals that have become the means by which we keep score with each other.
As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, to be a successful consumer now defines what it is to be "normal". Therefore to be "abnormal" is to be a failed consumer. The lot of the failed consumer is miserable. This new poor may be better off in absolute terms than the poor of previous generations, but in the world of the turbo-consumer what you have means nothing -- it's what others have and therefore what we must have next that counts. On these terms the new poor are falling far behind in an age when keeping up is everything. (Author Lawson casts this in intra-societal terms, but of course we can also stop to consider the envy that the global "haves" inspire in the global "have-nots"...)
The failed consumer suffers not just from exclusion from normal society but isolation. The poor of the past had each other in a community of poverty. Misery could be shared and countered through class solidarity and the hope of a different life. The new poor lick their wounds alone in their council flats, with nowhere to hide from the messages on billboards and TV that constantly remind them of their social failure. The new poor, without the right labels and brands, are not just excluded but invisible.
The final ignominy of today's poor is that they don't want to overthrow the rich to create a new order, they just want to be like them. So they are denied even the satisfaction of anyone to hate -- just B-list celebrities to envy and copy. (Well, they pretty obviously fear and hate foreigners and the "different".)
So if you want the causes of crime, then look no further than the impulse of the poor to belong and be normal. So strong is this urge that the failed consumer will lie, cheat and steal to "earn" the trappings of success. In the world of the "me generation", people become calculating rather than law-abiding in their overwhelming desire to be normal. This is crime driven by the rampant egoism of turbo-consumerism, where enough is never enough. And precisely because of its competitive nature, consumer-driven crime cannot be switched off through tougher laws. ...
Why should failed consumers play by the rules when no one at the top seems to -- when social mobility is declining; when the government refuses to implement vocational training reforms for fear of a Daily Mail backlash over A-levels (education evaluation tests); when more thick (U.S.: "stupid") middle-class children fill our universities; and when school league tables (government evaluations of school performance ) mean "problem kids" won't be tolerated?
New Labour refuses to change the rules of the market state and consumer society, and instead attempts another crackdown on the symptoms through Asbos (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders -- court orders prohibiting specific individuals from engaging in certain behaviors found anti-social or disruptive to the peace.) (Wow; I wasn't familar with these -- looks like the government is really intruding into civil society here. See "Nanny State") and control orders. Just like Thatcherism, New Labour relies on a strong state to police a free market. (Well, the State has to be strong enough to police the free market. If your bazaar is troubled by theft, feuds, muggings, or riots, the market's going to collapse, and people are going to have to dig their own coal and forge their own shovels, or do without.) The prime minister extols his respect agenda without realising that the architect of the term, the sociologist Richard Sennett, was talking about the respect the powerful give to the powerless. So Tony Blair tries to turn back the tide of crime against a rampant consumer culture of new gadgets that are designed, advertised, sold and bought to prove our normality over and over again. Nine years, 50 law bills and more than 700 new offences later, being even tougher on crime isn't going to work.
Of course, it is always wrong to mug or steal -- but unless, as a society, we are prepared to understand why crime happens then, in the words of the criminologist Professor Ian Loader, 'we are using a sticking plaster (U.S.: "band-aid") to fix a broken leg"'. You cannot build a tolerant society on the basis of zero tolerance. ...
When it is the dominance of the consumer economy that is driving so much crime, easy answers aren't close to hand. We need a different conception of the good life, in which time, relationships and care take precedence over consumerism. Next there is a political alliance to be created between the post-material, happiness-seeking middle classes, who want more time, and this new poor, who have all the time in the world but none of the money. This is what needs rebalancing: not the criminal justice system, but the wealth and riches of the nation.
The problem of not belonging, of being anxious and insecure, afflicts us all. It's just more sharply focused for those at the bottom of the heap. The social theorist Roberto Unger says: 'Almost everyone feels abandoned. Almost everyone believes they are an outsider, looking in through the window at the party going on inside.' "