THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!

THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007

“REALITY: a real event, entity, or state of affairs; the totality of real things and events; something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.”

Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)

“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public service and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties, and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.

“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”

Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
New York Review, December 6, 2007

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Dr. Judt is not an alarmist, far from it. He sees where a half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent in our economic calculations, our political practices, and our international strategies, even our educational priorities that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risk and opportunities are without precedence; there is no point in looking back to see ahead.

Judt continues, “Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.” When people count only in terms of statistical validity, and profits carry the day over people, the “soul of the city” flaps like a rag in the wind.


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If over the last half-century, you have had an opportunity to work and live extensively across the globe, and have engaged in a study of human behavior and the workings of institutions, as I have had, it is difficult not to be moved by these words and this concern for the future.

We are programmed to be optimists; to believe whatever challenges lie ahead we will find the initiative and resources to meet them; to corral the science and develop the technology that forgive our lapses and absolve our indiscretions to allow us to sin another day.

We don’t like gadflies or pessimists that rain on our parade. We don’t like to look back and have little inclination to see ahead. We believe the future will take care of itself. Rearview window thinking dominates.

Against the absurdity of this reality, we have an army of apologists who occupy positions of power and influence, designations described as leadership positions, whose occupants are just as lost as we are. Like the Merry Pied Piper of literary myth, we march to their tune and toward the inevitable void.

It has happened throughout man’s history only the consequences today are light years more consequential. I take heart in that others are saying some of the same things I have been saying for decades, voices that are deeply entrenched in reality and dealing with its absurdity.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM TURNS INTO ALCHEMY

My generation of the Great Depression has ridden this golden tide for 50 years peaking in the 1970s. After WWII, now as a teenager, I would visit my uncle in Detroit who was a professor at the Jesuit University of Detroit, and play baseball with kids whose fathers and mothers worked in the automotive industry. They had fabulous homes and everyone over the age of sixteen had access to an automobile. My uncle was also a consultant with an office in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit. His secretary, a former UD student, I remember was flush enough to buy a new Cadillac every year.

Automotive working families in this era made as much as Detroit MD’s. They were firmly and stably situated in the economic working middle class. Not a single member of any of these families attended college. Many parents hadn’t finished high school. Nor were any of the boys I played baseball with planning to go to college. They expected to work in the automotive industry beside their parents as skilled or unskilled workers with full benefits and the assurance of retiring on a comfortable pension.

My uncle, who had two Ph.D.’s (psychology and economics), and was head of his department, lived more modestly with much less security. When I asked about the affluence of these autoworkers, he said this was so because the automotive industry was protected from foreign competition under the guise of the US being a “free market economy.”

Another reason for this working class golden age was the more equitable distribution of wealth. After WWII, the CEOs in the automotive industry made only about 30 times the pay and benefits paid to typical automotive workers. By 1968, CEOs were now making about 60 to 70 times as much as the typical worker. This was true across the nation as well as in Detroit.

After the 1970s, manufacturing became a hollow industry in the United States with more and more manufacturing being done abroad, especially in the Far East. At the same time, the “rising sun” of Japan, Inc. was taking a major chunk out of the US economy, especially in the manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, appliances and other quality intensive products.

Panic set in and mahogany row and senior management no longer played to win but not to lose, a strategy that always trumps the practitioner. If any situation defined a moment, it was this. South East Asia was coming into its own as an economic power, and concomitantly, the distribution of wealth in the US commenced its widening separation.

America lost control of its character and with it the US’s competitive advantage. For the next thirty years, the rich would become richer and the poor poorer, and the poor had done nothing wrong. Avner Offer writes in “The Challenge of Affluence” (2007):

“The spread of affluence not only corrupts character, but has caused all these disorders and discontents: family breakdown, stress, road and landscape congestion, obesity, poverty, denial of health care, mental disorder, violence, economic fraud, and insecurity.”

Author Offer cites surveys in which today’s Americans declare themselves unhappier than their parents were. Young people who earlier heeded their elders are now prone to “intoxicating short-term dissipation.” He argues that advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of this malaise. He continues, “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.”

Throughout history when a nation loses its perspective and confidence, it often goes to war to project its frustration and discontent to regain its momentum. The Vietnam War and its embarrassing conclusion indicate what happens when such plans go awry. It might have been a wake up call that something was wrong in paradise. Instead, it represented a shift from the common good to “personhood,” or from a sense of national and regional cooperation to everyone out for themselves while the getting was good.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the CEO and senior management level (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers: “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp 136 – 142). Massive wealth was created for a few that make the era of the Golden Age of the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century seem timid in comparison.

In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times the pay of his average employee. The Wal-Mart family that same year earned about $90 billion. That represents the equivalent of the earning of the bottom 40 percent of the US population; in other words, 120 million people.

The wealth gap now is the widest since the Great Depression of 1929 with 21.2 percent of the national income accruing to 1 percent of earners. The late management guru Peter Drucker was appalled with what he called “predatory corporate capitalism.” He was referring to the obscene salary and perks management bestowed upon itself without any regard to ethical performance criteria. Drucker judged such practices to be blatantly immoral and reminiscent of the robber baron mentality, and a major contributor to the loss of employee loyalty and allegiance (see Corporate Sin, p. 137).

Tony Judt sees this in a wider perspective as the incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of our society. The evidence? Congressional bills are written to private advantage; influential contributors determine the policies of presidential candidates; while individual voters have edged out of the public sphere. Overpaid executives and value obsessed shareholders have tilted the scales to short term growth and profit, obscuring and displacing the broader collective goals and common interests that once bound us together.

Robert Reich sees it differently. In his new book “Supercapitalism” (2007), the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration claims the superrich are not at fault, CEOs have not become greedy, corporate boards are still highly responsible, and investors are not docile. The question of the “common good” is not relevant on his scales. He argues it isn’t the job of business to be moral. Corporations just do what they do. Technology and self-interest, alone, are deterministic. There are no heroes, no villains, and no one to blame. There is only economic man.

Let’s face it, Reich is saying, we live in an economic age and survival of the fittest is in play. Reich, like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat 2006), is a technological determinist seeing an integrated system of global capitalism as our ineluctable destiny.

In this context, “growth is good” and “progress is good.” Social class has been rendered anachronistic with economic man filling the void in the worship of productivity. Global warming, pollution, and other expressions of self-indulgent man will be addressed and resolved by technology, have no fear.

The absurdity of this new faith in unimpeded wealth creation is not considered. On the contrary, these technology determinists are confident that more efficiency-induced productivity growth will deliver expanding opportunity, upward mobility, greater happiness and well being, as well as greater affluence and security. In other words, this is a new belief system, which seems quite similar to the old.

Yet, the absurdity of this reality is that the American working middle class has all but disappeared and it has done nothing wrong. Today in 2007, 94 percent of working class Americans earn less than $93,000 a year.

What we have produced in the last 50 years with increased growth is greater social resentment rather than alleviating it; greater fragmentation of society from the nuclear family to the school to the church to the community to the workplace and beyond. We have systematically destroyed what made America great and the envy of the world, a solid working middle class, and applied the wrecking ball of indefinite economic growth to the soul of society. No longer are we clear on what binds us together finding a strange parity in polarity where cooperation once resided.

We have drugs not only in drug cartels or guns on the battlefield, but in the homes and classrooms and playgrounds across the nation, as media report in bold headlines violent and sick behavior in everyday life: spouses killing their partners, parents killing offspring, siblings killing each other, students killing teachers and other students, teachers seducing students, and care givers abusing children. While higher purpose has been lost along the way, terror and murder rage in our cities unchecked and uncontrolled. Our commercial driven society has a hole in it.

What appears behind hard covers in a book (re: Supercapitalism) as sensible economic policy carries, as Tony Judt points out, implicit civic costs. If we have learned nothing from the fall of great societies of the past, we should at least note that neglect of the powerless inevitably sealed their fate. Here Reich tells us only people with jobs are full members of the community. Others are less so and a drain on the economy. There is little room for caring or lifting the lame up when self-interest is the exclusive mantra of civilized society.

Yet no society is healthy or cohesive that lacks a moral compass and moral center with room for everyone whatever their disposition or circumstances.

Tony Judt may not have read, “A Look Back To See Ahead,” but he captures the flavor of it in these remarks:

“But here (reference Reich’s economic policy), as with welfare reform, what purports to represent the future has actually begun to resemble the past, breaking up the public and collective agencies of the modern era into fragmented and privately held assets reminiscent of a much earlier age. With the advent of the modern state, transport, hospitals, schools, mails, armies, prisons, police forces, and affordable access to culture – all of them essential services not obviously well served by the workings of the profit motive – were taken under public regulation or control. They are now being handed back to private entrepreneurs . . . This is just old-fashioned subsidy under another name and a moral hazard, inviting irresponsibility and often corruption.”

Imagine the absurdity of this. Public services are not for profit and all the monies stipulated for a given purpose are meant to go into the design and delivery system. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are for profit operations and must cut cost in the design and delivery in order to accrue a profit. Since budgets for these necessary services at taxpayer expense are seldom adequate in the first place, where can the profit be excised, but at the expense of the function?

The “invisible hand” of the market place may be favorable to commercial operations but it cannot be reproduced with the same success in noncommercial institutions. Here relations and cohesion is the product of trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality and authority. This gives stability and functional security.

People who elect to serve in institutions in a democracy do not have the same sense of efficiency, growth or profit that exists in the private sector, as they are driven by continuity and consistency in the design and delivery of services. There is a clear spiritual dimension to public policy and service.

The English reformer John Stuart Mill was troubled to see a disproportionate of benefits of the private economy going to financial interests at the expense of the majority. He wrote, “I find it essentially repulsive. A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”

So that is the challenge, to recognize and deal with the absurdities of reality.

If you have any doubt, listen to those campaigning in this quadrennial madness of presidential politics. People are experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity: economic with the sub prime real estate fiasco and rising gasoline prices at the pump, and physical with crime in the streets. It finds people with a new appetite for political symbols and territorial imperatives.

There is a rising attraction of protectionism in American politics with the appeal for anti-immigration policies controlled with walls, barriers and tests, forgetting that the economy rides on the backs of many undocumented workers. This hypocrisy and many other conundrums have driven the United States into a Prozac nation.

THE SHRINKING OF AMERICA BACK INTO A PROZAC NATION

“A Look Back To See Ahead” was written to alert readers to the chronic myths that our culture perpetuates, myths we continue to swallow whole no matter how absurd. I stepped back thirty years to surface the drum roll that dominated a paranoid society then, which was perambulating to perdition. I asked readers in the present to make note of this, and to take control of their circumstances with due diligence.

How? By rediscovering that reliable governor from within. I made no attempt to write a definitive book on our consuming mania for drugstore therapy. I did indicate, however, that we were duped a generation ago into believing the 1970s was the “Age of Depression.” Today, soul engineers as advance representatives of pharmaceutical companies tell us this once again. What is bizarre about this is that we have been reduced to a psychological society in which common behavior has become a sickness.

To show you how this works, consider The Oprah Winfrey Show in the summer of 2002. She had Ricky Williams on her show, the Heisman Trophy holder, and an extraordinaire running back with the Miami Dolphins. He was on the show to confess his consuming anxiety, which was shyness. It so happens that the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo-SmithKline was paying Williams for his appearance, and was in fact pushing its drug Paxil CR as a remedy for this condition.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about this except that most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones with some drug a miraculous cure for them. Pharmaceutical companies know convictions obliterate perceived needs. So, they focus on our convictions and design products identified with them. This should come as no surprise as we manage our health care system with products that will match these convictions. Not convinced? Look at all the cold medicines, headache remedies, energy boosters, and so on. They emanate from and follow our convictions.

Nothing is left to chance. For what we believe ails us a plethora of drugstore products will appear. Major pharmaceutical corporations spend $25 billion worldwide on marketing, and employ an army of Washington lobbyists to see that legislation is passed that is drug company friendly. Drug makers’ power is so disproportionately huge that they even dictate how they are to be regulated. They also shape much of the medical research agenda, and spin the findings of such research in their favor. They conceal incriminating data, co-opt potential critics, and colonize both the minds of doctors and our own.

In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield cite that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of disability, behind heart disease.

Unfortunately, WHO fails to distinguish major depression from genuine sadness. This is largely due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies who are less interested in answering a need but in turbo charging a conviction, such as depression. It is the tactic of exaggerating the problem and implying medication will easily fix it. Drug makers find there is no place for sadness. If we are in tears at the loss of a loved one, we must be depressed when actually we are dealing naturally with our sadness.

During the past half-century, with such tranquilizers as Miltown and Valium, Americans became convinced that medication would neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt.

Christopher Lane In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (2007) shows how Madison Avenue promoted shyness as a social anxiety disorder and revved it up into a national emergency. With the right regiment of medication the individual yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed could find his way to drugstore Nirvana.

Valium, some readers may recall, was said not to be addictive, but such promises were dashed when serious neurotic and psychotic episodes became common with its misuse. It was meant to calm anxiety but often led to mental fogginess and dependency.

Meanwhile, Prozac and its cousins were very different. They enhanced alertness and made users feel as if a better self were surfacing. Peter Kramer named this phenomenon, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” in “Listening to Prozac” (1993). Here utopian convictions raced well ahead of drug companies’ most optimistic predictions. America fell in love with Prozac.

By the 1990s not all was well in the Prozac nation. Users were being warned of the possibility of experiencing uncontrollable tremors, diminished sexual capacity, and a growing tolerance that might lead to noxious higher doses, an inclination to suicide, or other self-destructive tendencies.

These warnings were largely ignored, as users were willing to take the risks against the prospects of becoming self-assured and gregarious. As critic Frederick Crews points out, “One thing is certain: the antidepressant makers have exploited our gullibility, obfuscated known risks, and treated the victims of their recklessness with contempt.”

David Healy in “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007) acknowledges the legitimacy of this concern. He is a distinguished researcher and practicing psychiatrist, and has found major pharmaceutical companies close ranks against perceived troublemakers when damaging side effects of prescribed drugs are pointed out. As a psychopharmacologist, he saw drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established. Healy sees this as no more reasonable than claiming headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.

There is so much myth about the brain and serotonin. The idea that our brain needs a certain amount of serotonin, and when we run out, it’s like running out of gas is nonsense. Contrary to propaganda, the brain possesses no known “depression center,” and about 95 percent of our serotonin is found elsewhere in the body. Prozac, Soloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa – serotonin-boosting pills – are promoted as drugs, which will surely do the trick. Thus millions who might need only counseling expose themselves to these drugs and take incredible risks including horrific withdrawal symptoms, dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation.

“Let Them Eat Prozac” profiles a disturbing development. When a user dies and the bereave file a suit of negligence against the pharmaceutical company, the drug maker’s lawyers parry the suit by explaining the drug-induced stabbing, shooting, or self-hanging by a formerly peaceable individual was actually a manifestation of the not-yet-subdued depressive state of the user.

When Healy attempted to punch holes in this doubletalk by insisting on an extensive double-blind randomized trial to determine causal link to destructive behavior, he was denied a professorship at the University of Toronto Research Institute. Pfizer, maker of Zoloft, is a major supporter of the institute.

Healy further notes that the FDA is timid, understaffed and under funded. Worse yet, drug companies have infiltrated the FDA with friends of the pharmaceutical industry. Even respected medical journals are careful not to offend drug companies as they advertise widely in these journals and fund professional conferences and trade fairs. Then too, leading professors accept huge honorariums in return for venal research, while many “research” papers are actually ghostwritten by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, major drug makers don’t bend the rules; they buy the rulebook.


THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY

Thirty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted in conferences on what was and wasn’t a mental disease. At the time, members voted that homosexuality was a mental illness. It has since been relegated to a lifestyle. That said the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) doesn’t give an automatic pass to drug makers.

So, can we rely on this guidebook for objective judgment, identification and treatment of mental illnesses?

Christopher Lane is not so sure. He notes that the DSM makes a case for such dubious pathognomonic symptoms of depression as “feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking.” This differs little with the original subjective criteria of thirty years ago. In fact, today mental disorders are presented in bingo style and affixed to a patient who fits five out of a possible nine listed symptoms of a specific disorder. Not surprising, drug maker advertisers often use these lists. They tie the DSM checklist to a drug they are promoting asking readers to discuss the use of the drug with their physician.

It is scary when you stop to think about it, but unfortunately, few of us ever stop to do so. We take authority figures at their word. Seldom do we question the motivation of the source of the authority no matter how silly the criteria of the argument.

Advertisers exploit this vulnerability and no place more effectively than in matters of health, happiness and security.

The American Psychiatric Association since the 1970s has not been pushing drugs, but doing everything to lend greater scientific respectability to the psychiatric field. It has attempted to do this by improving validity and reliability in the more accurate identification of mental disorders.

What has happened instead is the APA has made a faint gesture toward this goal through the false concreteness of checklists. Psychologists have done it as well but they don’t have the weapon of prescribing drugs. Only medical doctors, and psychiatrists are medical doctors, have such power.

The reality is that the APA and DSM have attempted to imply that mental disorders are as sharply recognized as diabetes and tuberculosis when they are not. Psychiatrists when they prescribe drugs are often playing Russian roulette with the patient, emphasizing the benefits of a drug while failing to stress the side effects as well.

Attention Deficit Hypertension Disorder (ADHD) is a case in point. There is a whole regiment of drugs prescribed for hyperactive children, the most famous being Ritalin. This is not the approach of the Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee (see “Making A Difference Quietly,” www.fisherofideas.com, October 25, 2007).

Dr. Blondel Senior has found that ADHD is often misdiagnosed; that environmentally prompted mood swings, those responding to stress or hardship or sudden loss, create dysfunctional states that are receptive to drug free treatment. How so?

The person is placed in a controlled and reinforcing environment. Boys at the Advent Home receive a large dose of reality in work details, rigorous academic programs, creative pursuits and recreational sports. This is a simple and direct rational health care formula compared to the cumbersome and profit driven system of the APA.

Time will tell if psychiatry can escape bureaucratized psychological treatment, settle on a discrete list of disorders, and become less enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and approach the success level of Dr. Senior’s Advent Home.

And finally, the reality is that economic man is not a replacement but the complement to social man. Why does it have to be either, or?

While pharmaceutical companies urge us to replace nature with drugs to cope with our shrinking world, their hired promoters would exonerate us from our self-indulgence and economic excess. These apologists would insist that technology and self-interest, not morality, drive postmodern man; that economics is not about ethics but about business. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishop.”

They don’t get it! These global capitalists, capricious pharmaceutical companies, and ambivalent psychiatrists, all in leadership positions, are wheeling a wrecking ball at reality, forgetting that there is a common thread that connects us to each other and the same history.

Profits cannot be more important than people nor competition more an expression of humanity than cooperation. The absence of leadership in every endeavor has placed us in this predicament and jeopardy, noting it will change nothing, but it is a beginning.

References: Tony Judt, “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 22-27; Robert Reich, “Supercapitalism” (2007); Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, “The Loss of Sadness” (2007); Christopher Lane, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007); David Healy, “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007); Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, “The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry” (`1992) and “Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders” (1997); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1995) and “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Making A Difference Quietly” (www.fisherofideas.com, 2007); Frederick Crews, “Talking Back To Prozac,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 10 – 14; Andrew Hacker, “They’d Much Rather Be Rich,” NYR, October 11, 2007; Avner Offer, “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950” (2007); Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, “Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years” (2007); Edward Findlay, “Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in Thought of Jan Patocka (2002); Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac” (1993); Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Flat” (1993).