CHAINS OF ILLUSION!

CHAINS OF ILLUSION!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 15, 2009

“Every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deceit and robbery. Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money in order to take possession of the hostile being. The power of money diminishes directly with the growth of the quantity of production, i.e., his need increases with the increasing power of money. The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.”

Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), German-born American psychoanalyst and social philosopher

“The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), German social, political, and economic theorist

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Time magazine (February 23, 2009) has an article titled, “25 People to Blame” for the current Recession and economic meltdown. One of the twenty-five identified is the “American consumer,” personified as a young lady holding several shopping bags. Presidents Bush and Clinton, along with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as well as Bernie Madoff are profiled as members of this motley crew. They are lined up like a rogue’s gallery with height charts in the background, a number over each member’s head, and below their respective names a capsule summary of their high crimes and misdemeanors.

Yet, it makes no sense when you think about it to designate 25 individuals as being the culprits when in the wider view the question must be asked: who put them there? Of course, we did.

We did not so much by commission but by omission of our responsibility to control our lives and to live them within our means, and not venture into the surreal world these nefarious “leaders” painted for us.

In the film “International,” released just this past Friday to audiences across the United States, we have a spy thriller about a corrupt bank. The film, I might add, is terribly overrated and boring beyond measure. I claim this despite its pyrotechnics, shoot outs, and chase scenes against a panoramic background of some of the most picturesque places on this planet.

The film has one character explaining the function of his international bank. He admits quite candidly that it is not designed to accrue assets but to accumulate debtors. He explains that those who have truly cornered the international marketplace control the debt, which translates into controlling the actions of debtors, and therein lays their power. “That way,” he concluded, “we can dictate terms and pick and choose what we prefer and the direction of everything.”

It’s only a film, but it so happens we are a debtor nation owing $trillions to such nations as China and Japan. We are in a situation now, which we have created for ourselves, and which the economic world community is likewise so inextricably connected. Those holding our notes cannot allow us to fail because they would in turn fail. With all the histrionics, all the rhetoric, all the flag waving and saber rattling, we have increasingly placed ourselves in the position of a paper tiger.

The irony and paradox is that so dependent on the American economy was the world after WWII that it bought into the idea of limitless growth, which are now the chains of illusion that are wrapped around the global economy today.

The real estate and stock market may have collapsed with loses in the $trillions, but that indebtedness went somewhere, and where it went created debt advantage that was illustrated so bluntly in this film.

One wonders why this electronic video game of finance has been reported to Americans in such a condescending fashion, Time being no exception.

Now we have nearly a $trillion stimulus package approved by Congress and to be signed by the President that has as much chance of succeeding as hell freezing over. How soon we forget the failure of the $700 billion bailout.

As Erich Fromm puts it, “The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only important quality. Just as it reduces every entity to its abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity.” Excess becomes its true standard and the illusion of the solution.

This is not new to us. We throw money at any problem we encounter. It is easier than correcting the behavior that caused the problem. This is no different. If progress continues to be our most important product, if the drive is to create a new need in order to force people to a new sacrifice, to place them in a new form of dependence through indebtedness, if the marketing scheme of our capitalistic society is to forever entice people to never ending new kinds of pleasure, ruin will not be escaped but only postponed. You don’t have to be an economist to see that

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Before the film, “International,” played on the screen, there was a half hour of “coming attractions.” They were all about gratuitous violence, devoid of a story line much less a plot. The dialogue in these film clips had a naked resemblance to that of cartoon characters in the comic strips of the daily newspaper, which irony of ironies one film clip deals with a new film with Batman, Wonder Woman, et al. Graphic novels have become electronic and are now being transferred to the screen. The last time graphic novels were so popular was during the Great Depression.

When did we lose interest in stories about real people in real situations? Where is George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens when you need them?

I watched people leave the film theater. They left quietly as if in a trance resigned to the satisfaction they had escaped boredom if only briefly when they had dropped deeper into it. This film is indicative of how our culture has uncoupled thinking from doing no less dramatically than the uncoupling of the real economy from finance.

Do I exaggerate? Check out the electronic games youngsters as young as seven or eight are playing and collecting. They are already addicted to these games by that age, and tell me that is not so or of little concern.

Man has in each period of his history formed himself in terms of the prevailing practices in life, which in turn dictated the nature of his reality.

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