Essential Insanity
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Walk with me a while and imagine you are mad. Crazy. Insane. It’s an interesting sort of insanity–you see the world as something other than it is. You are dead convinced that people are out to get you, but these people have almost no means to harm you and fear your retaliation greatly, because you’re a powerful person and they are weak.
You believe that you are hale and hearty; but in fact you’re ghastly, obese and ill. You think you’re rich, but in fact you’re poor. You think you have the best doctor around, but in fact your doctor is worse than almost every other doctor and charges 50% more than them. You think you’re tough, and you certainly haven’t let the fact that two ninety pound weaklings seem to be able to stand up to you get in the way of that.
You think that you have the most advanced technological toys, that what you have is the best, and once you did, but these days everyone else seems to have more advanced stuff.
The illness goes deeper though, a deep decay in your brain. The parts of your brain that make most of the decisions for your body think everything is wonderful. They seem only able to take in sensations from the taste buds these days, and for the last thirty years you’ve been on a rich diet. So they think everything’s great. Your once lean body, packed with muscles, has been replaced by a flaccid one, paunchy and fat, but somehow the key parts of your brain don’t know that. They don’t feel your sore back, they don’t hear the broken down breathing and they don’t see the gut hanging over your belt.
The you I’m referring to, as I’m sure many have figured out by now, is the US. For years I’ve been writing for the US and observing it carefully, and I’ve found it one of the most interesting problems I’ve encountered in my life. Because America and Americans are very unpredictable. Now, of course, the first thing I thought was “it’s me,” and in a sense, that’s true.
Yet, here’s the thing, I have a very good record of predicting what will happen in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. And when I get it wrong, I can look back and easily figure out why. Yet I’ve never visited any of those countries and really, know very little about them. On the other hand I grew up imbibing American media, know American history well, have visited America a number of times and spent 8 years in jobs that required me to deal with multiple Americans daily.
Odd. Very odd. And something I’ve discussed with other foreign observers of American society and politics.
The first clue to what was wrong came around the time of the Iraq war. It was obvious, dead obvious, to everyone outside of the US and to US citizens who were spending a lot of time parsing news, that the war was a joke and that Saddam had no nukes and was no threat to the US. Most Americans, however, didn’t get that. The reason, of course, was propaganda.
Fair enough. Every country whips its citizens into war hysteria with propaganda. But what was truly remarkable wasn’t that, it was that somehow the majority of Americans, over 70%, thought that Iraq was behind 9/11. Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing.
Remarkable. Americans went along with going to war with Iraq then because they thought Iraq had attacked them and had nukes and could attack them again. A complete propaganda tissue of lies. But if you believe it all, well of course Iraq needed to be attacked.
What looked to the rest of the world as crazy was entirely logical. It was, however, still insane. If I see a tentacled monster from the fourth dimension attack me and I respond by grabbing a knife and slashing apart my next door neighbour who’s waving at me, well, I had a logical, coherent reason for what I did, but I still murdered him, and I’m still insane.
This is the first type of insanity in the US and it runs deep. I often feel like I spend more time correcting outright lies, outright propaganda, than anything else. Just this week I had to explain to a left wing blogger (who should know better) that single payer health insurance is cheaper and gives better results than private insurance system. Now in the US this is somehow still in doubt, but that’s insane–this isn’t in question, every other western nation that has single payer insurance spends about 1/3 less than the US and has as good health metrics or better either in most or all categories. This isn’t something that’s up in the air; this isn’t something that is unsettled. This is a bloody FACT.
Americans think they are the most technologically advanced society in the world, yet the US does not have the fastest broadband, the fastest trains, the best cellphones, the most advanced consumer electronics (go to Japan and you’ll see what I mean) or the most advanced green energy technology.
In the primary season Ron Paul was repeatedly cut out of media coverage and John Edwards was hardly covered. The majority of Americans thought that Edwards was running as the most right wing of the Democratic candidates. Huckabee was constantly called a populist when his signature tax program would gut the middle class and slap the poor onto a fiscal rack.
And when all is said and done, politicians are still running on slashing taxes and having that make up for itself, while the US runs a balance of payments higher than any other country post World War II has ever done without going into an economic crash.
That’s one type of insanity–thinking the world is something that it isn’t.
The second is worse, in a sense. When Diamond wrote his book on why societies collapse he came to the conclusion that it occurred when elites weren’t experiencing the same things as the majority of the society–when they were isolated from the problems and challenges the society was facing.
For 30 years ordinary Americans haven’t had a raise. And despite all the lies, Americans are beginning to get that.
But for the people in charge the last thirty years have been absolutely wonderful. Seriously, things haven’t been this good since the 1890’s and the 1920’s. Everyone they know–their families, their mistresses and toyboys, their friends–is doing well. Wall Street paid even larger bonuses for 2007, the year they ran the ship into the shore, than they did in 2006 when their bonuses equalled the raises of 80 million Americans. Multiple CEOs walked away from companies they had bankrupted with golden parachutes in excess of 50 million. And if you can find a Senator who isn’t a millionaire (except maybe Bernie Sanders) you let me know.
Life has been great. The fact that America is physically unhealthy, falling behind technologically, hemorrhaging good jobs and that ordinary Americans are in debt up to their eyebrows, haven’t seen a raise in 30 years and live in mortal fear of getting ill–because even if they have insurance it doesn’t cover the necessary care–means nothing to the decision making part of America because it hasn’t experienced it. America’s elites are doing fine, thanks. All they can taste, or remember is the caviar and champagne they swill to celebrate how wonderful they are and how much they deserve all the money federal policy has given them.
This is the second insanity of the US–that the decision making apparatus in the US is disconnected from the results of their decisions. They make sure they get paid, that they’re wealthy, and let the rest of society go to hell. In the end, of course, most of them will find that the money isn’t theirs, and that what they’ve stolen is worth very little if the US has a real financial crisis.
The third insanity is simpler: it’s the wealth effect. At the end of World War II the US had about half the world’s economy. Admittedly that’s because Europe had been bombed into oblivion, but even when Europe rebuilt the US was still far, far ahead. The US was insanely rich and powerful. See, when you’re rich you can do stupid and unproductive things for a long time. There are plenty of examples of this but the two most obvious ones are the US military and the War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US’s prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the war on terror is just the war on drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years does anyone seriously say “wait, this doesn’t work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons?” Of course not, if anything people compete to be “tough on crime.” What’s the definition of insanity, again? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results?
Then there’s the US military. It costs, oh, about as much as everyone else in the world’s military combined. It seems to be at best in a stalemate and probably losing two wars against a bunch of rabble whose total budgets probably wouldn’t equal a tenth of one percent of a US appropriations bill. And it is justified as “defending” America even though there is no nation in the entire world which could invade the US if the US had one tenth the military.
But the US could (not can, they are now unaffordable, but could) afford to have a big shiny military and lots of prisons, so it does. Lots of people get rich off of both of them, lots of rural whites get to lock up uban blacks and lots of communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise get to survive courtesy of the unneeded military bases and prisons which should never have been built.
Insane–believing things that aren’t true.
Insane–decision makers are cut off from the consequences of their decisions and in fact are getting reverse feedback, as things get worse for most Americans and as America gets weaker and poorer, they are the richest they’ve ever been.
Insane–so rich that no one will stop doing things that clearly don’t work and are harmful, because people are making money off the insanity.
All of this is what makes predicting the US so surreal. It’s not just about knowing what the facts are and then thinking “ok, how would people respond to that?” You have to know what the facts are, what the population thinks the facts are, what the elites think the facts are, who’s making money off of it, and then ask yourself if these facts are having any real effect on the elites and if that effect is enough to outweigh the money they’re making off of failure (how many of them have children serving in Iraq? Right, not urgent to fix.)
And then you have to go back to the facts and ask yourself “what effect will these have even if they’re being ignored.” Facts are ugly things, they tend not to go away.
All of which makes the US damn near impenetrable, often enough even to Americans.
But here’s what I do know–you can get away with being nuts as long as enough people are benefiting from you being insane. When the credit cards are all maxed out, when the relatives have stolen even the furniture, suddenly all the enablers go away and the kneebreakers or the men in white pay you a visit. At that point you can live in the real world, or you can go to the asylum.
I wonder which way the US will go?
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So, Ian, what do you think of Naomi Klein’s analysis? What I mean is this: you have described America as functionally if not clinically insane, but I haven’t quite heard that this is deliberately imposed upon us. It might not matter, of course. I mean being ‘insane’ or being specifically ‘paranoid’. Naomi goes to the trouble of providing a pretty clear villain and methodology to the villainy. Do you see villains, or some organic illness?
Ian, I think this an excellent article with critical insights into our (USA) national predicament. I see no easy way out especially with a population and leaders who are incapable of the same kind of critical thinking and self reflection. Everything and every attitude seems to be apre moi, le deluge…
“No social order is destroyed until all the productive forces for which it gives scope have been developed: new and higher production relations cannot appear until the material conditions for their existence has ripened with the womb of the old social order. Therefore mankind in general never sets itself problems it cannot solve: since, looked at more closely, we always find that the problem arises only when the material conditions for its solution exist, or at least, are already in process of formation.”
If you believe as I do that the objective conditions are way ahead of the subjective understand of these conditions, then the “insanity” that you described will persist.
Electronics.ca Publications, the electronics industry market research and knowledge network, announces the availability of a new report, “Robotics: Technologies and Global Markets.” According to the new report, the global market for robotics was worth $17.3 billion in 2008. The market is broken down into segments of industrial, domestic service, professional service, military, security and space applications. Of these, industrial applications currently have the largest market share, worth $11.5 billion in 2008.
If robotics technology is permanently replacing workers, then neither the capitalist nor the workers can continue their same relationship under these new conditions.
Jim, thanks for the reminder from the Great One. However, I don’t think the robotic factor will ever do away with the worker — only the worker’s work will become less meaningful, poorer paid. My first experience with robotics was a Horn and Hardardt cafeteria, sometime in the fifties, where the food came out of little windows. There were still plenty of unhappy workers around, mopping floors, emptying trash, unloading delivery trucks, and refilling the little windows.
The real problem Ian poses is why the subjective factor remains so far behind the objective conditions, and will it ever wake up?
I disagree with you to this extent, Ian – we’re still tough. We’ve weathered a lot, and we’ll weather a lot more. The problem here is that we’re so ignorant of the rest of the world that we don’t realize that people in other countries can be just as tough. You even see this in our thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We think, if I can summarize the attitude simply, that if the Israelis just get tough with the Palestinians they’ll learn their place. Of course, this completely ignores that this is what the Israelis have been doing for the past 40 years, and that no society is just going to lay down and die for the benefit of another. Our own history ought to have taught us that.
Toughness without the ability to think critically isn’t terribly useful. We’ve become as lazy intellectually as we have physically. If it were just a case of finally realizing the course we’re on and changing it, that would be one thing. I really wonder if we can even read the frickin compass.
Some sociological factors that tend to affect the decisions of the powerful:
1. As people become more powerful, rich, famous, or elite in some other way, they tend to get more conservative. This makes sense, because if you are good at winning a game, you probably aren’t going to want to play some other game that you might not be so good at.
2. Scarcity (actual or anticipated) lead to hoarding. If you work in an office where you need staples to do your job, and the company is very poor at providing staples in a timely manner; then every time there’s a new shipment, you will grab a pile of staples and lock them in your desk. Of course, everyone doing this in your office will make the supply chain even more unpredictable. This is a trivial example, but the rule scales up all the way. What if the rich and powerful have seen scarcity coming for some time, and have been maneuvering to hoard what they can? For example, a giant oil corporation would have a good analysis of whether Peak Oil is near or far (no matter what they tell us), and might want to manipulate US politics to get the military to make a Middle East land grab on their behalf. Financial institutions, realizing that US citizens can only borrow so much, might manipulate US politics to make bankruptcy harder for citizens. Rich people, knowing how much inequality is increasing, might anticipate a breaking point and start moving into walled communities with private security forces, and they might manipulate US politics to allow the US military to operate within US borders, in anticipation of civil unrest..
I don’t believe our elites are cut off from reality so much. They’ve seen where a number of trend lines are heading for some time, and have been acting to protect their power, wealth and status for some time. They have known for a while that their interests are diverging from those of the middle and lower classes, and realize on some level that the masses are an imminent danger to them.
The insane part is that their actions are what is making that true.
None of this involves any conspiracy theories. It is not a coordinated class war with secret meetings — it’s just the powerful rearranging the world around them to the extent that they can. All of us manipulate the world around us to make it work better for us. Some people just have more impact than those of us in the “reality-based community.”
Barry: yeah, they are cut off from reality. The majority of them didn’t see the financial crisis coming, for example, and the majority of them didn’t realize the Iraq war was going to be a mess. That’s not to say they’re completely cut off, but they are functionally cut off. It is true that they have different interests than normal people (to an extent) but it’s also true that because they have different interests and because they are cut off, they are going to crash the society.
Cujo: Tough but stupid –> dead. I’m also not sure that Americans are all that tough. I’ve lived in 3rd world countries and Americans look like big soft bullies to me, not tough guys.
Tashiro: What Naomi describes is going on, no question, but I think it’s only one part of the sequence. However it’s true that it’s in a lot of people’s best interest (or so they think) to make Americans effectively crazy.
While I suspect there are small conspiracies going on here and there, Barry, I think you’re right. There’s no grand conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be. Everyone working for his perceived best interests can explain much of what’s going on. Disinterest and lack of education by the populace can probably explain the rest. Nevertheless, to deliberately go down a path that will lead to your own society’s downfall is still insane, and the economic elite of this country have been doing that for some time.
“Nevertheless, to deliberately go down a path that will lead to your own society’s downfall is still insane, and the economic elite of this country have been doing that for some time.”
Cujo: I live in a town where the new condo buildings have only sold about 50% of their units. Yet, new condo complexes are being built every day. Is this not anarchy of production and the definition of a contradiction? Would you describe it as “insane” not to see causality or, rather, would you say they following the objective laws of this economic system? In other words, can we take the discussion out of the psychological (“insane”) and put the discussion back into the economic (objective laws of the economy?)
To use another example, the head of GM, trying to cut labor costs and compete with other auto companies, will continue to bring robotics into production. This is an objective fact. Workers will be laid off at the same time that production of the product (cars) will increase. As a result of this, the market for the increased bulk of products will have shrunk: the robots can’t buy cars, nor will they buy any of the other goods flooding the market from the other industries which have also increased production of goods thanks to robotics.
I am not sure “insanity” helps us understand the depth of the problem. If the problem is not set up correctly it can not be solved.
Jim, this time you convinced me (about robotics.) And I agree with your further comment, let’s switch from the psychological plane (insanity) to the objective one (economics.)
While it appears to be true that a lot of Harvard MBA’s ignored the irrationality of selling CDS (insurance) to people who didn’t own the underlying asset being insured (and thus acted in a demonstrably “insane” way), it’s also true that underlying laws of the marketplace gave them no choice. Some financial CEO, or ratings agency head, said virtually that: “we knew it was wrong, but we couldn’t afford not to when everyone else was.”
Capital, to Marxists as well as to bourgeois, is supremely “rational” — that’s how how it got where it is — but it is rational in a limited sense. As Richard Dreyfuss playing Cheney in “W” points out, a war for oil is imperative for continuing the American empire, but as it turns out, not going to war and changing our way of life was also a choice, probably a better one.
Klein is right, partly. Some sectors of the elite are learning to profit from the dissolution of the system ,from disasters both natural and man-made. Soros is an example. The majority though are just acting under age old laws of competition, fighting for the upper hand, whatever it costs.
[Ian wrote: The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US’s prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the war on terror is just the war on drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years does anyone seriously say “wait, this doesn’t work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons?” Of course not, if anything people compete to be “tough on crime.”]
The War on Drugs is a manifestation of America’s split personality and the efforts of each half to bamboozle the other. The Christian right views the use of narcotics as not only a wicked sin but a wilful rebellion against patriarchal authority, and it views the violent crime associated therewith as simply the wilful but mindless brutality of the reprobate and the demonic.
But no politician in a democracy can say that. Therefore, they speak of reducing drug abuse and protecting the innocent. Furthermore, the right wants to keep its guns and its freedom of speech, which means it is very reluctantly constrained to extend many of the same rights to its foes. Unfortunately for them, this means that drug lords can pay for American-style justice and only the poor can be vicariously punished.
Fundamentalist Christians accept that the war on drugs cannot be won. Indeed, they see it as a sign of the end of time. Some of them work and pray for a rechristianization of America, but even many of these see proselytization as a good work done for its own sake rather than a plan for success. Predestinarian Calvinism is regaining popularity among evangelicals, who see it as a good explanation for the social sodom of modern America.
All this is bound to be incomprehensible to the typical outside and rational observer.
I’m an American, but I’ve spent fairly large amounts of time living outside the country so hopefully my mixed perspective may offer some insights. Its actually worse than you think.
The American diet is uniquely horrible. Most of the food in American supermarkets are industrial concoctions of chemical additives, often using processes banned in other countries. Many people have realized that and have turned to “organic” foods (basically foods grown and marketed the way they were normally grown and marketed forty years ago) but the government is trying to corrupt this. Many Americans are physically sick because of the high fructose corn syrup and other additives. This includes some of the decision-makers.
Next you get the constant bombardment of electronic stimuli, not just television now but blackberries and cellphones. In the US you walk into stores and supermarkets and you are immediately bombarded with piped in music. This isn’t necessarily the case elsewhere. There are TVs in almost every bar and in many restaurants. New York City, where people think of themselves as somehow different than the rest of the country, is the worst case of this since the city put TV in cabs, bombards subway commuters with all sorts of messages, and every third person is constantly using a cellphone or blackberry.
Its also normal now to use all sorts of mind altering drugs given to you by doctors, but you can get in serious legal trouble if you try to go out and use drugs on your own, including the two legal drugs in some cases.
Other countries don’t have the corruption of the food supply, and in many places the aural and visual bombardment isn’t as bad. I think these two things may be changing the brain chemistry of individual Americans. I don’t know if it is a deliberate method of control since its seems the members of the elite are subjecting themselves to them as well.
This sort of sounds like the lead poisoning theory of the decline of the Roman empire, so I will add that it is fairly common for powerful states to decline, and often the period when they are sickest are the time where there is no outward sign that they are losing their power.
Ed,
I’m always shocked by the number of people on anti-depressants. And, much to my surprise, I recently found out that anti-depressants are actually more addictive, according to shrinks, than heroin or meth. Yet it seems like, in certain circles, almost everyone is on them. (In particular, this scourge seems to hit women more than men, though both use.)
Agreed on the food. It was something I hadn’t looked into really until these last few months (as I tried to fix my own health) and the extent to which the food chain is screwed up shocked me. Even just sticking to “the outside” of meat and vegetables isn’t entirely good, and now that I know how to read packages I’m shocked at how many amount to low grade poisoning.
I think there’s something to be said for sick and insane. The late Robert Heinlein predicted that at this point, the majority of Americans would literally be insane by other period’s standards. More and more I wonder if he was right.
Isolation is the only solution I’ve found to the problems you describe – at least the only one for folks that are stuck here.
Being American right now feels like the social equivalent of having Parkinsons. The mind may be clear, but the body/community is certain to respond in dysfunctional, self-destructive ways if any demands are made upon it.
The best advice any more for those of us trapped here physically but not intellectually is to be as invisible as possible. The less attention one draws from whacko fellow citizens or utterly deranged elites, the better.
I like Tallifer’s point — some parts of our society are consciously pursuing insanity (or irrationality.) Paul Goodman made a similar point decades ago, when he speculated that certain classes, beset by anxiety and alienation from which they couldn’t see any escape, seemed to have a fascination with “the bomb”, as if unconsciously welcoming annihilation.
And Ed — I’m forwarding your comment on to my SO, who is an avid collector of information on ways we’re being collectively poisoned. She just told me about an article on Huffington Post which talks about manufacturers adding ingredients to food specifically to make the food item addictive. The tobacco industry’s suppression of what they about nicotine’s addictive properties is the subject of the excellent movie “The Insider”.
Okay. Cue rueful laughter. Reading Ed reminds me that I had forgotten that even our food supplies are dangerous! Jeez Louise!
I was just thinking about everything else that doesn’t work. Don’t try to get credit because the banksters will swindle you with trick fees and rules. Don’t bother with education because student loans are predatory and the jobs will have been sent offshore by the time you graduate anyway. Don’t even think of going to the doctor because you can’t afford it. And for godsake don’t talk to your neighbors, work colleagues (if you have a job) or relatives because they all drink Fox Kool Aid.
And then Ed reminded me that the food is unsafe too! I’ve been familiar with the food issues for so long that shopping defensively is second nature. So much so that I forgot about it. But it strikes me as emblematic of the whole mess. America, where it is too dangerous to work, go to school, get sick, get old, be literate or even … eat!
And don’t even get me started on the irony of people supporting the most bloated war industrial complex in the history of ever while the nation it presumably protects has devolved to the point where it is unsafe to eat the food or walk the streets without earplugs.
Yesssss … time to go back to my hidey place now … shuffle shuffle.
We’ve reached a point of statistical implosion – too big not too fail.
Ian and Ed right on as movie fan in the Termenator when they’re at the gas station. We’re Not Going to Make are We, says it all and as much I want it to! We are (US) for sure it’s all about me and what have you done for me lately. I hope we all get out alive but that might not happen.
jo6pac
And if you can find a Senator who isn’t a millionaire (except maybe Bernie Sanders) you let me know.
Don’t forget Russ Feingold. I think he’s worth even less than Sanders is.