American Economic System Causes Psychological Depression

Society organized around meaningless work to service the rich pressures individuals towards greater drug use and escapist behavior to overcome growing misery




So it appears that the anti-depressant use in United States has risen from 6% of the population in 1996 to over 10% by 2005. It is hardly surprising that a 10 billion dollar "depression" fighting industry (that is bigger than video games) doubled the amount of regular users. After all, we've all seen the sharp uptick in glossy pharmaceutical television ads in the last few years that push advanced drugs to middle-age/elderly demographic. There's also of course the epic road that classification of actual psychiatric "disorders" has taken over the last couple of decades. The constantly evolving psychiatric bible ( DSM-IV-TR ) is not just the product of a very non-transparent and often political tug of war process by the powerful and all too human members of the American Psychiatric Association. It is also a product of the pharmaceutical industry. Here's a quote from one of numerous articles covering modern day psychiatric "science",

"Part of the debate emanates from research by Cosgrove and others² who investigated the financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of 170 panel members who contributed to the diagnostic criteria produced for the DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR. Of the 170 panel members, 95 (56%) had 1 or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. In 6 of 18 panels, more than 80% of the panel members had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies"

Pharmaceutical corporations have not yet managed to classify all of the population as requiring treatment but we're fast approaching that point. If one looks at DSM-IV-TR listings of all possible "disorders", their statistical prevalence, and instances of co-morbidity (two or more disorders afflicting at the same time) then it appears that over 70% of the population has something wrong with them. It follows that the market is not yet saturated.

Now this would all be fine if the drugs were marketed as physiological augmentation of neural hardware. As I have written on the growing field of positive psychology, all people can expand their power if they complement their brain architecture with a mind enhancer. People already do that with b vitamins and coffee and future pharmaceutical breakthroughs will give artists ability to be engineers, engineers ability to be musicians, introverts ability to socialize, etc.

What is beyond sinister is a handful of oligarchs using the fig leaf of empirical research to tell most of the population that they are sick and need to ask their doctor to feel better. Similarly to how the wealthy Roman clergy under the reign of Constantine collaborated to create the proper new testament, today's aristocracy has the power to decide how much self esteem individuals should have by control over definition of mental illness and proper functioning.

In 1850s, a certain so called scientist by the name of Samuel Cartwright came up with a mental illness called Dysaethica Aethiopica and its major symptom was "slave's desire to be free". This prevalent "mental illness" was to be cured by whipping and hard work. Sounds amazing yes? If modern pharmaceutical companies were as advanaced back then, they would undoubtedly conclude the slaves were depressed and needed a drug cocktail of anti-depressants and stimulants that make them focused and energetic during daily labor. By the end of the 21st century, a lot of what is going on with today's corporate manipulation of who is crazy or not will be looked back on with disbelief. Let's not forget how people were treated in the Soviet Union when they were depressed and dissatisfied with their socioeconomic system. Yes, you guessed it, they were deemed mentally ill and locked up in psychiatric hospitals. "Buck up comrade! just work harder and you'll get a nice promotion to head of department".
 
Today's worker dissatisfaction with the often meaningless and demeaning work that they do to survive is also increasingly labeled as a mental disorder. Unlike the Soviets, American elites found a very profitable way of making most serfs "treat" themselves. No amount of Soviet propaganda could have redirected people's dissatisfaction inward like this. People have internalized the fact that they are ill if they disapprove of their surrounding socioeconomic architecture.

Why is it "meaningless" work you say? Well imagine if all the board games were amalgamated into one. So we have Scrabble, Monopoly, Risk, etc. lumped into one giant board game. Now imagine if this giant board game was created by the rich and the points one won in it was money that buys actual international power over life and death. Finally imagine that the initial winners in the game then just hired very smart people to play for them while keeping most of the profits. These smart creative workers hired then spend decades and endless cognitive powers to create complex systems designed to score more points in the board game for their employers. Yes, one would feel that his or her job is very meaningless if one played the equivalent of Risk or Scrabble for an oligarchy. Since the financial sector in United States grew to over 20% of the economy in last few decades, it is no wonder that more and more people are feeling depressed. Unlike the industrial workers of old who slaved most of their life away making cars, telephones, and pianos, the modern corporate worker is not likely to make any tangible product.

What is even more outrageous is the stifling of scientific and technological progress that occurs because of this. The smartest people go into developing and exploiting arbitrarily and always evolving game rule books. The corporate lawyers and anybody on Wall Street making less than 300 grand a year (one needs above that to start benefiting from the system through comfortably living off capital investments) are taking away as much from social/technological progress as medieval monks who prayed daily and performed stupid superstitious rituals to get ahead in life financially. Today, (if one wants to get better food and shelter) rigorous memorization of biblical dogma is replaced by rigorous memorization of financial terminology.

It follows that technological development has been refocused into those areas. Recently there's been a great article by Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has distorted ideological notions of supply and demand by creating speculative economic bubbles in Internet companies, oil, and real estate. They have accomplished that not just through "cheating" and breaking the already malleable rules (collaboratively created by international oligarchs and their personal lawyers who are the legislative branches of world's countries). One can't even accuse the people who make the rules as they go along of cheating since the "cheating" often becomes the new rule. The best "innovators" in monetary exploitation then lobby to make their "innovation" into law since they are the best at it.

In any case, just the willingness to break the rules is not enough since all top institutions do so regularly. Major financial structures like Goldman Sachs have gotten ahead by hiring top talent to develop increasingly more sophisticated methods of "cheating". The recent Goldman Sachs victories in latency software is but a taste of the technological/personnel arms race always afoot. It is the equivalent of thousands of people figuring out how to make better loaded dice.

Now imagine being the guy who is bending over backwards to get that job interview so he overwork himself to innovate better cheating methods at a virtual monopoly board game. Then after many years of this (and probably a divorce or two after considering the divorce rates of over 50% in America) he starts to feel horrible dread and a feeling that something is wrong with the world (the mind crushing boredom was there from the start mind you). He tries to drink more at dingy bars, to take some days off to visit another country, to get a feeling of managerial power by raising a kid, to watch crazier escapist movies, or to climb mountains. But the feeling that what he is doing is stupid meaningless wasted labor that just enriches parasites doesn't go away. Often the person knows this subconsciously but thinks it's just him at conscious level. So he sees a nice TV ad for anti-depressants and goes to a doctor who tells him he is mentally unwell and should pay hundreds of dollars for "medicine" with side effects.


Aldous Huxley would have a field day today with these developments. At this rate we should see a drug cocktail named Soma in a few years (with added multi-vitamins and 1% of Soma profits going to support some nice sounding cause). But it doesn't stop there. If most people go on meds (as they are in the process of doing out of socioeconomic necessity and above mentioned subtle corporate pressure) then the amount of pain, stress, and misery they can take can be increased. Even if we had some amazing Soma that made workers:

1) love playing by the rules that a handful of rich families created and be content with the daily meaninglessness

2) have more energy and focus to play longer and be more efficient

then their workload can be increased and thus will be increased for profits. Those who don't like it will be labeled mentally ill and the process can start all over again. We have already seen this happen with the consumption of coffee. Millions take non-prescription caffeine to even get through the day and then take alcohol to relax and forget. If caffeine and alcohol magically disappeared tomorrow, the current amount of stress on people could not be maintained. It is thus economically logical when it comes to international white collar corporate competition that people will be increasingly offered better drugs to 1) get through the years of education it takes to get employed to do meaningless tasks 2) to do the tasks themselves and finally to 3) still function as a social animal.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a brilliant point when describing how civilizational development has made us more miserable. Depression is your subconscious mind telling you that the environment you're in is bad for you and to move away. A cow becomes distressed upon entering a slaughterhouse. There is no frontier anymore however to move away to and live in a small community that our brains are designed for. Globalization has made the entire world into a rigidly hierarchical structure where if you don't want to be depressed doing something meaningless in a crowded environment then you can flip burgers or clean floors.

The recent spike in traveling, exploring wilderness, and studying art is the manifestation of the need to escape a structurally unhealthy environment. The deep economic depression engulfing the world right now (2-3% annual rise in productivity and only 1% rise in total workforce numbers. do the math) can't even compare to the mass psychological depression eating Westerners alive. The number of 10% of Americans taking anti-depressants should be in the news 24/7 and not the 10% official unemployment that's an inevitable result of mechanization. American socioeconomic system has never offered freedom for most people and for the past few decades even stopped offering ability to pursue happiness. Only some mockery of life is left that is hidden under the stench of escapist perfume (media entertainment) and superficial consumer make up.

US Debt Default by Next Election is Required to Climb out of Economic Depression

Obama is well served to use a doomed currency to position strategic industrial sectors to receive foreign investment once US defaults on its debt. He must do so before reactionary political opposition can reorganize



The current high debt can only be resolved through a properly timed debt default, controlled bankruptcy, and mass restructuring in order to create:

1) an industrial base for post-default recovery
2) aggressive drive to court foreign investment

It is highly unlikely that American power elites will be able to successfully restructure while preserving large parts of both the political and economic architecture. That is due to 2009 economic foundations being drastically different than in 1870s, 1930s, or 1950s.

United States debt as % of GDP has been within 15 to 30 percent range from 1917 to 1930. The last time debt got that high was Civil War militarization and the following long recession of 1870s. Before that there was the high debt of political restructuring from colony unification and consolidation into nationhood in the 1780s-1790s period. The long recession of 1870s and the long depression of 1930s were both used by American elites to restructure minimal state capitalism into a more productive expansionary force. American power elites had access to cutting edge industry and used every crisis to expand hard industry and outproduce their European neighbors. Economic reversals in 1870s served to weed out the less efficient oligarchs and consolidate wealth in the hands of those that remained. Contraction in the 1930s resulted in a managed bankruptcy and then rapid filling of idled industrial capacity through mass military exports and production.

The chance to preserve a minimal state capitalism model in roughly the same form as it existed for a hundred years before 1930s was lost as soon as US engaged in a second large scale aggression on the European continent. American leadership's focus shifted from improving structural fundamentals ( and continuing to build minimal state capitalism in one country) to mass wartime economy. Repayment of debt became impossible due to the demands of producing goods (tanks, planes, bombs, artillery shells) that are used up without anything given in return. Once war began, the historically crushing debt ( that began with the banker supported war in 1917 and continued into the 1930s) could no longer be repaid through isolationism, protectionism, and exports to either the German or Soviet victors of European unification. Sustenance of minimal state capitalism now involved forceful expansion and passing down of the debt based pyramid scheme to other peoples of the world.

At the time of the disastrous US involvement in another European conflict there were two mid level state capitalist powers that were on the road that US would undertake from WW2 to the present. They were the forcefully expansionary and indebted economies of Japan and Germany. Both wanted to secure sufficient amount of natural resources and room that England, France, Russia, and America already had. This would allow them to become co-equals on the world stage in terms of pushing their economies, currencies, and exports on others. Japanese leadership knew that the energies of both United States and Soviet Union were heavily focused inwards on reforming and thus preserving their own systems. Just like Americans a world away, Soviets were trying to create domestic demand for its industries while consolidating a hybrid of maximum state capitalism with a decentralized socialist base. Japanese strategists calculated that Soviet Union would not be distracted into a destructive cycle of trying to forcefully impose its still developing system on all of Japan. Thus, they probed into Soviet border colonies around Manchuria in 1939 but were repelled with heavy losses. The mere fact that Soviets signed a gentleman's peace treaty after repulsing a Japanese attack led Tokyo to conclude that indebted isolationist Americans would be equally negotiable and prudent in a colonial skirmish. The rest is history as United States completely overreacted to border pressure on Philippines and Hawaii after only losing a couple thousand men. Thus began a change from Washington's focus on building domestic capitalism at home to internationalist Trotskyist efforts to violently spread it abroad.

The vacuum of imploding Western empires allowed the dollar to become a reserve currency and the Cold War provided a perfect excuse to export arms and further dollars around the world. The exports from American militarism propped industrial base allowed the national debt to actually get reduced by more than half by 1960s. Relentless Soviet pressure and China falling to Mao prevented Americans from being as reckless with their debt as they have become in the 1990s. In 1960s, US leadership actually began large scale provisions for social safety nets and moves towards mid level state capitalism as practiced in France and Western Germany. Many political theorists actually spoke of future convergence between evolution of US and Soviet systems. JFK/Lyndon Johnson's Christian democratic efforts towards reduction of socioeconomic inequality and increased role for the state complemented Nikita Khrushchev's liberalization efforts of restructuring and partial decentralizing. Both efforts got derailed by geopolitical needs of empire and ideological reactionaries.

One society broke first and the other rapidly overextended and actually allowed Trotskyist minimal state capitalist proponents to come to power (Cheney, Wolfowitz). The American debt as % of GDP is as great in 2009 as it was during the mass industrial production of WW2. This time around US does not have the industrial capacity (proportional to the size of its economy) necessary to even attempt managed bankruptcy like in the 1930s. Neither does US have the natural resources the way it did in 1950s and 1960s. It also does not have a Cold War equivalent to continue to distract the world and push the dollar pyramid scheme on smaller nations. The recent attempts to find a motivational ideological replacement for the Cold War (with combination of criminal investigation into religiously motivated organized crime and huffing and puffing over Putin's FDR style policies) is not just a pathetic joke but a worrying development studied in European capitals.

Volatility of the Dow Jones industrial average between 1925 to 1928 was 22%. Volatility of Dow Jones between 2005 to 2008 has been 21%.

Volatility in 2008 alone has been 40% compared to 22% in 1928. The housing bubble has reached its peak in 2005 just as it similarly reached its peak in 1925. Due to the regionally uneven speculation on housing, the inflation as well as deflation of the bubble was uneven and less observed. 2005 seems to have been the furthest extent in influence of the paper tiger superpower that is United States. Figure 1 shows that 2005 was the eye of the storm in terms of stock volatility nested between the events of dot com collapse/911 and the crash of 2008.

An economic depression does not happen overnight as desperate government efforts create repeated sucker's rallies. The high volatility (44%) in the first few years of The Great Depression made sure that the last drops of capital have been purged from the hopeful speculators before true bottom was hit. It's not difficult to imagine the present situation similarly deteriorating over the next few years considering the enormous initial swings that we've had already in the last half a year.

The ease of technological transfer of money and increased access to the stock market by the the masses allows greater pain to continue on longer as foreigners get in on the act of shorting and buying American assets. The globalization following Soviet collapse allows the current economic depression more potential for widespread economic damage than depression of the 1930s. Even China is not completely immune although much better protected than more globalized neighbors.

American leadership is reverting into the mode of trying to salvage parts of US economic and political system through top down restructuring. Unlike with the case of Gorbachev, most of the world's elites want Obama to succeed so US does not become a failed state. There are no rapidly adaptable ideological alternatives other than to have an international cooperative effort by minimal state capitalist countries to work together to make sure US restructuring and bankruptcy is gradual, peaceful, and manageable. US has already been stagnating like Soviet Union for over two decades with real wages not rising for large swaths of the population. Infrastructure is poorly maintained and remains 10-20 years behind more pragmatic hybrid nations. The intelligent and politically connected have already taken advantage of the decades long rot in the form of the finance industry (up to 40% GDP economic growth relying on financial non-producing sector). Cracking down on the money manipulators will be just as futile as Soviet attempts to stamp out the black market in the 1980s. Money manipulation is structurally hard wired into the capitalist system.

Obama is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to options and has very little room to maneuver. The default on debt is coming one way or the other but taking the proper road there can position American economy for long struggle for post-bankruptcy recovery. Obama must restructure the economy from the top down but not rapidly enough to cause a destabilizing reactionary backlash from federal, regional, and military elites. If he restructures too slowly, the stagnation worsens and gradual inflation risks becoming accelerated and then exponential. Obama must strike a balance when using a doomed currency to have the state take control of strategic industrial sectors. Default must occur before 2012 for reasons of social stability. The near future impoverishment of top 20% of educated people (who call themselves middle class) risks election of a leader more willing to dismantle the bonds of federal government rather than make American economy a more hybrid model. The mere fact that American population can be very divided over whether to support their democratic or economic way of life underlines the gentleness with which Obama must approach every step.

The population of the last major ideological power has completely internalized decades of propaganda as well as successfully had millions of foreigners internalize it as well. Even to socially conceptualize alternatives and pragmatic non-ideological approaches provokes instinctive distrust, misunderstanding, and reactionary anger. American people have been lied to and manipulated by their own politicians for so long that they cannot even imagine politicians abroad or at home who speak pragmatically and analytically. The idea of "American way of life" must not become one that borders on the religious since that risks the use of federal government for internationally dangerous purposes like increased militarism. The greatest burden since Gorbachev rests on Obama today and hopefully international leaders realize that they need to take some pressure off for the security of the world.