Culture » March 29, 2005

Fever Dreams

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Call it the curse of class unconsciousness. Against all evidence to the contrary, most Americans imagine they could and should be rich, that any day now their ship will dock in the port of great fortune.

And it has always been thus. Writing in the mid-1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the loony “courage” of Americans, who repeatedly gambled their all on financial gain, “almost insensible to loss” and instantly prompted to fresh exertions.

Born Losers, Scott A. Sandage’s splendid history of the “misfits of capitalism” explores how 19th century America dealt with its own culture of irrational exuberance by locating the reasons for failure “in the man,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted, rather than in the wild careening of a winner-take-all, laissez-faire economy.

This despite ubiquitous evidence of rack and ruin. Every couple of decades brought a new panic, five in one century. “The land stinks of suicide,” Emerson confided to his journal during the Panic of 1837, expressing relief that, having given up the ministry, he would not have the hopeless task of consoling the broke and broken multitudes. Hard cash was so scarce that people minted their own copper “hard times tokens.” International opinion condemned the young Yankee nation, from the president on down, as “a fraudulent bankrupt.”

In “Life Without Principle,” Henry David Thoreau’s sardonically-titled essay, Emerson’s refractory friend described how contemporary mores pushed people into deluded pursuit of profit: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.” Still, when Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson eulogized him as a failure, albeit beloved: “He seemed born for greatness … and I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.” Far from being a captain of industry, Thoreau had sought merely to become “captain of a huckleberry-party.”

Like present-day neocons, Jacksonian pundits envisioned every white man a free agent, the engineer of his own financial fate. Jurist Lemuel Shaw, the father of contract law, claimed that nobody failed who ought not to fail. Shaw’s son-in-law Herman Melville parodied this faith in free agency in Bartleby the Scrivener: When Bartleby, a lowly law clerk, credulously asserts independence, repeatedly declining assignments with a polite “I would prefer not to,” the office is thrown into chaos and it’s clear that poor Bartleby is both crazed and doomed.

Hucksters reigned supreme within this realm of free enterprise. Showman and con artist P.T. Barnum, the Donald Trump of his day, rebounded from bankruptcy to lecture on “The Art of Money-Getting, or Success in Life.” Success demonstrated inherent superiority just as failure exposed infirmity. Preaching the “Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie praised unbridled competition as “best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest.”

Character was newly conflated with creditworthiness. The Mercantile Agency, the direct ancestor of Dun & Bradstreet, operated a vast secret surveillance network that sought to report on everyone in business, tracking entrepreneurs as they traversed the country in search of fresh starts and new opportunities. And as business increasingly involved commerce among strangers, 19th century Americans eagerly adopted scientific strategies to fix the identity and character of the unknown other. The new technologies of daguerreotypy and phrenology promised that character could be immediately captured and decoded through photos revealing the shape of one’s head.

Today, we too have our false prophets of junk science. In American Mania, psychiatrist Peter C. Whybrow, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, professes to have discovered a biological basis for the excesses of U.S. capitalism. Whybrow says that America is a country of migrants, that migrants are genetically predisposed to take risks, and that the high produced by deal-making creates addictive behavior and mania. Mutant genes, or alleles, dictate our body chemistry turning us all into “stress junkies” and suckers for get-rich-quick schemes. Collectively, we’re a nation of easily hijacked dopamine reward receptors, he says. The dopamine makes us do it.

One need not dismiss genetics to recognize Whybrow’s thesis as elaborate hokum. His footnotes tacitly acknowledge that his “science” extrapolates from small, speculative and inconsistent studies. There’s no readily replicable link between his beloved D4 dopamine receptors and impulsivity, let alone the complex behaviors of ordinary workaholics, Internet investors or the Kenneth Lays and Sam Waltons of the world. And common sense contradicts his bizarre biology-based brand of American exceptionalism, his claim that we are uniquely bred for invention and enterprise. If migration thus explained national character, Canadians would be reckless adventurers.

Yet the good doctor’s book has met with significant acclaim from a new age semi-progressive crowd, who welcome his prescription for a more touchy-feely kind of capitalism, one moderated by the knowledge that too much deal-making might make you sick. Whybrow presents us with the saga of Tom, who spent the ’80s as a “turnaround artist” employed by big banks to fix the supposedly ailing companies whose takeovers they financed. Tom had led a 24/7 adrenalin-fed existence, estranged from family and addicted to deals that gave him the same rush as sex. Whybrow bemoans poor Tom’s past unhealthy condition, gracefully sidestepping any concern for the multitudes he must have fired.

Instead, he celebrates the new and improved Tom, who now hawks rehabilitation centers for stressed-out executives. Whybrow quotes with approval Tom’s sales shtick, characterizing the seductive power of America’s laissez-faire mass markets as “the greatest pleasure-generating machine the world [has] ever seen,” though unfortunately one with “no published instructions for optimum use.” Tom’s mission: To protect frazzled high-power execs from burnout by teaching them “how to play the casino without getting hooked.” Proudly, Tom promotes an in-the-moment philosophy of “mindfulness”—allegedly rehabilitated, he’s now an entrepreneur who turns his cell phone off at night.

Alas, the nostrums of American Mania serve to obscure real ills. Whybrow implicitly conflates everyone who’s overworked and out-of-touch with the movers-and-shakers of corporate America, presenting us all as hapless victims of our genes, flattering those at the bottom while absolving those on top of moral responsibility for their actions.

There is indeed an “American mania” and it is a deluded conviction of individual agency, oblivious to the constraints of class and structural inequality. Sandage’s thoughtful history places our disorder in context while Whybrow’s insidiously bad book feeds the fever.

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• Reader Comments

  This is especially true! I’m so glad I have a forum for expression!

  Posted by poopooface on Mar 29, 2005 at 4:33 PM

  One wonders: is success in the US even a good thing or is it a sign of being tainted somehow? Further, is success related to hard work and “good” values and intelligence, or is it all just class status at birth, mixed together with race and luck?

  Insomuch as hard work is correlated with success, can we further correlate it with morality in any way? Or have we come to believe that hard work is in no significant way associated with success and furthermore failure is in no significant way associated with laziness? (Similarly for morality, such as engaging or abstaining from promiscuous sex and thus reaping or avoiding possible negative consequences, etc.)

  At root is whether we believe we are in charge of our fates or not (or more precisely, what fraction of our fate are we as individuals are able to affect). Some think they are masters of their fate, others believe they are merely passive floaters on the river of fate.

  Posted by Monica on Mar 29, 2005 at 4:36 PM

  “Against all evidence to the contrary, most Americans imagine they could and should be rich, that any day now their ship will dock in the port of great fortune.”

  This preposition really substantiates what was racing through my mind prior to the Nov. “election”. In my area, the majority of lower economic class Hispanics were going for Bush.  It boggled my mind until I realized that life for them IS so much better here than in their homelands.  They believe that Bush will continue to cause our nation to prosper and they will, one day, also be rich.  Not to mention that half of their families had members in Iraq or Afghanistan plus, of course, Bush must really love the Hispanics and want to provide every safety net for them, since his brother is married to a Latina.

  I wonder how long it will take America’s Hispanic community to realize that Bush has set them up to be a continuous source of cheap labor and war fodder.  I hope not too long, because it breaks my heart to see such hard working, family-loving people used in such a heinous manner.

  Posted by MARGARET on Mar 29, 2005 at 5:31 PM

  Hello Monica,

  Thanks for the thoughtful post, I’ve given a great deal of consideration to this question of whether initiative or circumstance carries the day in shaping a person’s quality of life; I’ve debated and argued with friends about it numerous times. I’m reflecting that if class- or race-based obstacles to success could be removed, utterly negated, those people who believe that they have no real directive influence over their lives will be far less likely to do what it takes to make those lives better. Whether it’s pursuing more money (which, I confess, I don’t see as being inherently downfallen or morally suspect, even if wealth by itself can’t guarantee personal fulfillment), or it might mean some other non-money pursuit that could help bring about a more fulfilling life; the more fatalistic ones will be more likely to wait for “good luck” and to let new opportunities go by, disbelieving that their own efforts will bear fruit. And those who have the other view, that it is their own energy and willingness to get busy that shapes their lives most, seem less likely to feel as though circumstances beyond their control can hold them back, and so they will remain active.

  In response to the author, I suggest that “the delusion of individual agency”, for all its limitations, is more conducive to improvement of one’s life than focus upon “the constraints of class and structural inequality”; though such constraints may be real. I would certainly say that when social and economic conditions truly are in hand that systematically prevent a person’s hard work and renewed efforts from paying off, that is the real tragedy.

  Perhaps it could be agreed that, in the absence of hard work and the desire to go for “something better”, no one can have a fine life unless they’re already born to advantage…? That’s how it appears to me.

  Anyway, to the extent that those barriers really exist, my hard work and ambition (as provocative as some people find those concepts) take me nowhere and I may well abandon them in favor of looking to “society” or whatever to pony up and ensure that my life is satisfactory regardless of what I do toward that end myself. Honestly, that way of thinking would stall one.

  There’s the central debate; whether in America those barriers are completely imaginary or, in fact, objectively measureable. “Completely imaginary” seems farfetched, but as for mindset, I’d prefer that more people go with initiative over circumstance. Seems more energizing.

  Posted by Kuya on Mar 30, 2005 at 1:56 AM

  How’s that old saying go?

  If yer so smart, why ain’t you rich yet?

  or

  It ain’t a sin to be poor…but it might as well be.

  
  When I was a kid I used to get shocked when I heard about the “dark ages” when serfs could never rise above their rank.  They were born poor, they toiled, and then died poor. I was happy that I lived in a better time.

  Then I grew up and realized that not much has changed, only that now you’re promised gold at the end of the rainbow if you work hard enough. And if you don’t get rich it’s cause you’re a lazy good-for-nuthin.

  Thanks alot Adam Smith…you prick.

  Posted by lefty canuck on Mar 30, 2005 at 6:16 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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