Does Capitalism Make Us Crazy?
It’s not just in your head
I recently started listening to an excellent new podcast which I can highly recommend called ‘It’s Not Just In Your Head’
The creators of the show describe it like this:
Two mental health professionals explore how our capitalist economic system impacts our emotional lives.
From precarious housing and employment, to unaffordable healthcare, to endless debt — it’s not just in your head!
Does Capitalism Make Us Crazy?
I went on a long walk two days ago and listened to the episode called ‘Does Capitalism Make us Crazy’. You can listen to it below.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2PWB7ES40oidSvLuayQ5rz?si=i4Ehpm86QSCEniYQ2tA2-A
This blog post is a translated version of the thoughts I had whilst listening to this episode. I found it massively provoking, enriching, and angering.
The profit prerogative
The guest speaker Susan Rosenthal opens by stating unequivocally what many of us know to be true; the profit driven system of the world is crushing the life out of people both literally and figuratively.
In our society, nothing can be done unless it generate profits and nothing can be done that undermines the established flow of profits.
Given this fundamental truth, Rosenthal argues, of course we cannot have safe schools, rehabilitative prisons, holistic health care, or housing or food for all people.
Deliberate deprivation
Rosenthal’s position is difficult to contest since it has been demonstrated unequivocally time and time again that there is more than enough resource on the earth to feed and clothe and house all people.
There are more than 500,000 empty homes in Britain, with *only* 100,000 families currently living in sheltered or temporary accommodation. All of those families could be housed today and the fact that they are not is deliberate.
Similarly, the fact that in the time it takes you to read this post, 86 people will have starved to death is a deliberate feature of our economic and political system.
Politics = people* making choices
I prefer to shy away from using words like ‘economic system’ and ‘political system’ where possible, because this phrasing alienates those people who have not been brought up to feel comfortable with corporate professional speak; the language systems of the professionals and managerial classes who talk about things like forecasting and market corrections and surplus, etc.
Those 86 people have been starved to death by the decisions of other people who are not starving to death.
That’s what economic and political systems are made of; people making decisions and acting according to a set of values.
It’s an oddity of our legal systems and our ways of generally understanding things that a parent who starves a child to death has committed a criminal offence and can be sentenced, but groups of people who collectively starve to death other groups of people don’t tend to considered as criminals.
It seems to be especially not illegal when the groups of people enforcing the starving wear suits.
*Who calls the shots?
It is worth noting that the ‘people’ making the kinds of decisions we are talking about around who gets to eat and have somewhere to live are not a representative cross section of the public.
In England as of 2019 they looked like this:
- 66% male
- Average age: 50
- 90% white
- On average 27% of them attended a private school. For our current Conservative government is it almost half.
This pattern is repeated in most of the political systems in the global North.
The rich old white men
It seems almost a trope now to despair about the rich old white men who are killing us and destroying the planet.
I feel almost embarrassed to point it out, again. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is predominantly rich old white men who benefit from business-as-usual and who will powerfully resist any changes to a system which benefits them so greatly.
They also have a lot of power to wield in resisting systems change.
Something I found so comforting about the podcast was that central message which their title sums up so perfectly; it really isn’t just in my head.
I am not a conspiracy theorist for noticing that capitalism only benefits a very tiny amount of people, and actively tortures and kills pretty much everyone else.
It’s not crazy to think that humanity might be doomed
Bit bleak, I know. Sorry.
In a recent 10 country survey of 10,000 young people asking what they think about climate change:
- 60% were extremely worried
- More than 50% felt sad, guilty, angry, powerless, helpless, and anxious
- 77% saw the future as frightening
- More than half think that humanity is doomed
Very bleak.
But not altogether misguided given the evidence that these 10,000 young people have to go on.
They can see that profit continues to be the only true motive, and real progress towards saving the planet and our species is not even being attempted.
When asked about how governments are responding to climate change:
- 65% of respondents agreed with the statement that governments are failing young people
- 64% agreed that governments are lying about the impact of actions taken
- 60% agreed they were dismissing people’s distress.
It is convenient to call these people crazy
Rosenthal and the hosts of the podcast go on to discuss these stats and the cultural responses to them in the West.
They note how it is interesting that the cultural response to the legitimate concerns and experiences of fear and anger towards a genuine survival level threat is to pathologize.
We see this all the time when people do not exhibit the ideal traits of a consumer-citizen.
Instead of their terror at living through climate breakdown and extinction being seen as normal, these young people are described as being dramatic, or hypersensitive, or as snowflakes.
Their collective rage and dismay is framed as a pandemic of mental illness, the treatment for which is individual therapy and individual drugs.
The treatment is always individual and is never related to the structural conditions that cause the rage and dismay.
Crucially, Western psychoanalytical models diagnosis the experiences of powerlessness, anxiousness and guilt as separate from the conditions that create the experience.
Rosenthal points out the illogicality of this position: “Its irrational to expect people to quietly submit when their lives and their world are being torn apart.”
What we do to crazy people
We see the same practise of individualising, shaming, and pathologizing the rage and dismay expressed by housing protestors, women’s rights advocates, and those active in anti-racists spaces.
It is an ancient and highly effective tactic to cast counter cultural activists as ‘mad bad or sad’ and then use the power of state and the psychological and pharmaceutical professionals to legitimize silencing, drugging, and detaining of these people.
Because, again, it is not profitable to create affordable housing, to halt the use of fossil fuels, to pay women for their domestic and reproductive labour etc.
Profit trumps all
During the pandemic, the wealth of the 9 richest US capitalists increased by more than 360 billion dollars.
The people for whom the system is designed are being enriched and everyone else is being impoverished. This creates suffering.
Here is Rosenthal again:
“The problem is that in our society suffering is individualised, depoliticised and medicalised so that everybody thinks its just them.”
Your anger and anxiety are cast as something you quietly go to your doctor or your therapist about.
You are taught to discuss with these professionals how to get better so that you can maximise your ability to be normal i.e. to consume, work, buy, spend, etc at a rate which supports the channeling of wealth into the capitalist class.
It’s really not all in your head
It is a strange and harmful habit to ignore the social causes of social suffering.
When I say social suffering, I mean that huge groups of people are suffering in the same way, for example, suffering with homelessness. As we have covered, homelessness is socially caused — i.e. caused by groups of people making specific decisions in order to ensure homelessness continues. In this way it is clear that homelessness is a social issue with a social cause.
If you are angry or sad or anxious or depressed about this, it is with good reason. It is not just all in your head.