Capitalism as a Psychopathology

I regret having to say this, but we may have picked the wrong president to deal with this kind of mess.

It is hard to imagine who of all the candidates running during the recent presidential primaries, outside of Dennis Kucinich and possibly John Edwards (remember them?) might have had the leadership potential to show us the road that we must now travel.  The sooner we realize that this road leads through cultural and fiscal terra incognita the sooner we may begin to build a sustainable non-toxic system for survival.

Unfortunately and in spite of all the campaign promise, Obama is not a change man.  His belief does not seem to go the heart of any problem.  If something is wrong, be it the wars raging in the Mideast or the current fiscal meltdown, his reflex is to try to fix it without really changing it.  Nearly all his cabinet appointments reflect this.  His philosophy is to make the people who are at the heart of creating the problem responsible for solving it.  Obama’s thinking suffers from an entrenched belief that most of these problems are essentially a mater of strategy—of tactics.  I’m sorry, Obama, Iraq was not just a “dumb war,” It was/remains an illegal war, an immoral war.  I suppose if the neocons had been successful in their campaign to rape, pillage and loot, he would have endorsed it. 

I don’t think this kind of thinking will get us very far in other aspects of his programs either—like healthcare.

Parenthetically, I find it so interesting, the way the press is championing popular outrage over the AGI mess.  I’m not saying they shouldn’t showboat this one—including the Bernie Madoff scandal.  It’s just that it would have been nice to see them champion any of the countless popular resistance to the previous administration’s programs, like the Weapons of Mass Destruction lies (that most of the public who had taken the time to research this issue knew were lies), the War in Iraq itself, the refusal to even use the words “Global Warming” in any policy statement, let alone acknowledge its existence.  Does anyone even still care about the fifteen billion dollar tab that someone at the Pentagon forgot to get a receipt for, etc. etc. etc.

Capitalism is based upon greed, pure and simple.  It is like the old Id in Freudian psychology.  All by itself, without any restraints, its only goal is self-aggrandizement and unimpeded gratification.  In small communities where there is face recognition, the social bonds alone are often enough to enforce a kind of de facto brake on this desire for profit at any cost.  Magnify and expand the playing field to a national and international arena and we have a situation that rapidly can become toxic without some regulatory, mitigating agency.  Of course the Capitalists are always seeking to burst these fetters and the US government has traditionally been there, sometimes a little too late, to finally reign them in—that is until Reagan.

One thing that must be understood is that, since Capitalism was conceived, it has become nearly an elemental force of nature, assumed to be as natural as gravity and virtually unstoppable.  It is this way because it appeals to one of the most primal (reptilian?) sources of human instinct:  solipsistic greed and a nearly auto-erotic desire for pleasure/gratification of the self with no concern for the consequences to others.  Present-day Capitalism represents a nearly perfect embodiment and a codification of all the qualities of a psychopathology.

Without any mitigating or regulatory forces acting upon it, Capitalism soon reaches a self-destructive level that, like cancerous, unrestrained cell growth, eventually kills the host and itself as a result.

Is it possible that we are finally seeing the death of Capitalism—seeing it and yet not fully understanding it?  If we continue looking through the eyes of Barack Obama, who hopes against hope he can remedy the problems of Capitalism without banishing the beast itself, we will perish utterly before we even know what hit us.

It is not surprising that the AIG executives raked in, with no great contrition or compunction the millions their bonus contracts gave them.  People with even a microscopic modicum of human socialization, or even a superficial sense of propriety would never have behaved so shamelessly.  These individuals are, by any clinical definition of the word, psychopaths.

I trace the malignancy, in its most current manifestation, back to the deregulation that began under Reagan.  This allowed the personhood of the corporation, a fictional entity who could never die and yet was endowed by its creator with all the inalienable rights accordant a living human, to thrive and grow.  Accompanied by its psychopathic attendants, this artificial human, this modern Frankenstein’s monster, has become something more horrific than any product of the imagination of a science fiction screenwriter.

Could it just be that the far more adaptable, more powerful, less morally restrained creature, the Homo Psychopathius, will outstrip Homo Sapiens the way we outstripped the slow, dull, benevolent Neanderthal?  I believe it is wrong to view history as the unmitigated, beneficial ascent of mankind.  There is some evidence that our minds are as unlike the minds of the earliest humans than the minds of psychopaths are wholly different from our own.

The one tragic flaw (if you could call it that), that ultimately trips up the person, clinically defined as the “compensated psychopath,” is his narcissism.  Because he has no understanding of pain in another he often miscalculates the blowback that his actions create. His devotion to ego-uber-alles self-aggrandizement, ultimately creates such a rent in the traditional social fabric that the real world finally intervenes.  Sometimes this doesn’t happen soon enough, and these people go on for years rising higher and higher over the bodies of underlings and peers until they finally reach the nearly unimpeachable seat of absolute power.

Wall Street minds, with no conscience, compassion, unable to heed their own non-existent moral compass with no moral or regulatory brake in the marketplace created the present catastrophe.  It could not have turned out other than it did.

What is really bizarre is to see the Republicans, nearly to a man (or woman) standing on the ruins of the system they championed, continuing to defend this proven recipe for disaster.  It is amazing to me that anyone has the stupidity to even listen to them let alone support their attempts to cut Obama off at the knees.  Obama admittedly has severe limitations that I have not been loath to point out.  Unfortunately he is the closest thing to a solution we have in play in the here and now.

Had the insane Reaganomics and the stupidity of deregulation been properly recognized by our duly elected in time, the severity of the present crisis might have been ameliorated.  Unfortunately Obama has surrounded himself with economic and policy advisors who represent exactly the same kind of myopia and pathology-inspired deregulation that created this mess in the first place.  These are exactly the last people who stand a chance of correcting the problem in any kind of radical, practical way.  They are all practitioners of what Paul Krugman calls “zombie economics.” In their minds, Capitalism won’t die because it can’t die.  They are so wedded to the concepts, that they don’t realize there is no longer solid ground under their feet and that there hasn’t been solid ground there for some time.

That is why, in spite of the pain and turmoil its demise is causing, I cannot mourn the death of Capitalism.  The pain could have been lessened considerably had we not been so awed by our own seductive, articulate, conscienceless psychopaths. 

If you will forgive one more metaphor.  You have all heard some variant of the following story:

So don’t get so upset that the Capitalists may take us all down with them.  It is after all our fault for expecting them to perform inconsistently with their nature.

Robert Boldt an editor of MWC News, is a freelance film/video producer living in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is active in local politics, worked on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns and is a cofounder of The White Rose Collective. Articles by Bob Boldt at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/bob-boldt

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