"Capitalism drives people mad"

Humanities and Social Science
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Testing the water of the new format and receptivity, an opened-ended question in response to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ crudely put claim that “I think that capitalism drives people mad” expressed in an interview concerning the popularist “crisis” question, imo, articulates succinctly, the sign of the times:

EW: Do you think the current levels of suffering and unhappiness are the signs of a crisis that is entirely new, or do you think these are problems that have been around in one way or another for some time?

AP: I think that there’s a crisis in the sense of people finding it more and more difficult to live. So there’s a crisis in health, so to speak, and obviously we live in a very polluted environment as well. But the scale of envy and competition in this culture is too much for them to bear.

To put this as crudely as possible: I think that capitalism drives people mad. Once you live in a world in which competition trumps collaboration, it’s as though there’s no shared project; we’re all competing with one another for limited resources. So I think it’s good that it’s become a matter of concern in the public realm that people are really suffering. I think it’s also important that there are many descriptions of what they’re suffering from, because the risk is of thinking that what we need are solutions to mental health problems, whereas actually we need political solutions, and the mental health problems are symptoms of a political catastrophe that is occurring.

EW: Then it’s not as though the pandemic (Covid) has suddenly caused this mental health epidemic?

AP: No. We’ve got to differentiate between symptoms and causes here. People express their distress in symptoms, in unhappiness, and, at one level you can think that there’s a certain amount of unhappiness that everyone has to bear by virtue of being a person, but then there are culturally sanctioned unhappinesses. There’s a reason why there’s a huge mental health / drug industry––partly because a lot of people are suffering and partly because a lot of people are being exploited by it.

(Phillips, A and Williams, E. (2022). Psychoanalysis is one more way of taking people seriously’: Adam Phillips in conversation with Emma Williams’ in Journal of Philosophy of Education Special Policy Issue: Philosophy, Mental Health and Education (56:1) )

Does this description fit with your experience? Or obvious pop psychology? Tell us your opinions, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

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Totally. A lot of it has to do with the incessant promotion of needs, wants, products and services, which might make an enormous profit (looking at you, Mr Zuckerberg) whilst having hugely detrimental side-effects on the health and well-being of its consumers. It is hardly a new idea, but then, looking at the amount of media generated by mental health and the inadequacy of the political response to the crises it engenders, it is obviously ongoing. It’s a mad world.

Furthermore the fragmented nature of what passes for ethics and ethical discourse in a hyper-fragmented culture also creates huge tensions and identity problems, especially for the young. The rate of change is massive, there seem no certainties or verities any more.

So - yes. And, welcome. :waving_hand:

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As opposed to any other world we have ever lived in?

On account of this sentence alone the author may as well be theorizing about life on other planets.

Mankind has never in recorded history meaningfully deviated from a competition-driven system; it’s been war and conflict from start to finish.

The author is right in one thing, though; a political catastrophe is occurring - the collapse of the American empire.

If you want to find explanations for western society’s modern woes, that’s where you look. Not in exhausted, communist critiques of ‘capitalism’.

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Please try to engage with the claim in the OP. If you disagree with it, address why the argument about competition, capitalism, and mental illness is mistaken, ideally with reasons or evidence.

This helps to ensure the discussion is substantive and on topic.

General and rhetorical dismissals don’t advance the discussion. Please take some time to expand on your thinking so that others can engage with it.

I do think that the conversation in the OP is lacking in depth and substance, but the right reaction is to deepen the conversation, not just collapse it.

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I engaged with the claim, by showing the faulty reasoning with the use of the term ‘capitalism’ defined as a system under which competition trumps collaboration.

Given the rather simplistic nature of the OP(/'s argument), I think my reply was perfectly suitable.

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You didn’t show anything. You made a counter-claim with just as little evidence as the original claim. I think that’s what @Jamal means by not deepening the discussion.

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Talking about ‘evidence’ in a discussion such as this one is a bit misguided.

The best one can hope for is a reasoned argument that adheres to logic and can stand basic scrutiny. Applying basic scrutiny is what I’m doing.

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@Tzeentch @Pseudonym

Please focus on developing your arguments with respect to capitalism, competition, and mental distress. Any more meta-discussion about posting standards should stop here; please continue with the topic.

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Central to the argument is the notion that capitilaism creates a feeling of ‘constant competition’, that’s not just an unavoidable fact of human existence (ie, we might plausibly expect otherwise).

As I’ve mentioned in my other thread, however, we are not equipped to adjudicate on rival claims in this regard. People like Stephen Pinker and his oft cited Christopher Boehmb or Napoleon Chagnon, would say that competition has been endemic, but others like Richard Lee, Marshall Sahlins, Mark Dyble would say the opposite.

Since we are neither anthropologists, nor historians (or if we are, we are no more so than the people cited) we cannot adjudicate on these competing theses. We can only rationally discuss reasons for believing either other than the strength of their evidence, which we’re not qualified to judge.

I think this decision comes down to the advantages of assuming there’s a better way to arrange society than this one, versus the disadvantages of potentially being unrealistic in those plans. Personally, I prefer optimism to resignation.

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Is there evidence that there is a crisis in mental health? That people are finding it more and more difficult to live? Where? Only the US? The interview is pretty fact-free.

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I thought @Tzeentch ‘s argument was responsive. As I understand it, he’s commenting on the fact that the OP does not establish the facts of the case as presented—that somehow things are different now than they were in the past. I made a similar comment in my previous response. That type of comment seems appropriate to me.

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As a socialist, I certainly won’t rise to the defense of capitalism. However, it’s important to attack capitalism properly. Here, that means you need to identify what features of capitalism are malignant, and differentiate the effects these malignant features have on individuals and society. For instance, the CEOs of Apple, Burlington Northern, or Nvidia et al are probably not being driven crazy. They might well be heartless bastards, but I would guess that their mental health is excellent.

On the other hand, low-paid workers doing highly repetitive labor under pressure for high levels of production might be going mad. But it may not be their capitalist employer who is wholly responsible. It might be the conditions of life in the town: dilapidated housing; a high rate of drug use (meth, particularly); gangs; inaccessible services like supermarkets, poor schools, etc. Capitalism might be responsible for this slum, but one can find slums in non-capitalist economies, too.

@Woof said, ”I think that there’s a crisis in the sense of people finding it more and more difficult to live.”

People free of mental illness can find it difficult to live. Poverty, for instance, enforced marginal status in society, or the absence of minimum education can make life difficult. In many ways, life just IS difficult.

Since the early 1970s, when the post-WWII economic boom finally ended, there has been a gradual diminution in the quality of working-class life (most people in the US are working class, whether they identify that way or not). Wages and benefits have lagged behind inflation. Where 60 years ago, a single working person could support a family, increasingly 2 workers in a family were required. Rising expectations resulted in higher expenses, of course, but staying even on a budget since the 1970s has become more difficult. Shifting methods and locations of production have been a blessing to some, a curse to others. Jobs involving low skill level tended to get shipped abroad, leaving the workers SOL.

As for capitalism and mental health, there are statistics which may or may not support your thesis. According to the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), 23% of the population are suffering from “all mental illnesses (AMI)”. AMI includes everything from a fear of spiders to psychosis. AMI includes a lot of conditions which wouldn’t really qualify as “crazy”.

NIMH stats say that 6% of the population as a whole suffers from “Serious Mental Illness” (SMI). SMI includes bi-polaar disease, psychosis, schizophrenia, severe depression, severe OCD, and so on. Well, 6% is less than 1 in 10, and many sub-groups in society have a lower incidence of SMI. People aged 18-25 have a SMI rate of 11.6%, while people over 50 have a rate of 3% SMI. I’m not saying this, but one could say that the longer one lives under capitalism, the saner one is.

Personally, I try to avoid utopian thinking. As Freud said, “The intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’.”

Like I said, I’m a socialist. Would a splendidly managed socialist economy and well organized society eliminate mental illness? No. But we can do better than we are doing under the present arrangement.

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It’s true that competition and conflict have always existed. Still, I think there is something to the theses of “performative economics,” that capitalism/liberalism actively work to make their abstractions into a reality. It can be true that man might have always reflected Homo oecononimicus in some ways, and also true that under the auspices of liberalism and capitalism he comes to be more and more the “atomized, self-interested utility maximizer.”

Two data points are interesting here. One, it’s a well replicated observation that taking economics courses increases selfish behavior. Researchers even think they have isolated an “indoctrination” effect here. This isn’t surprising. I teach economics. Despite creating a firewall between soft, squishy, normative economics, and objective positive economics, the “objective” side is full of value-laden descriptions such as “rational” (here, rationality is reduced to means-ends instrumentality of course).

Interestingly, ethics has no such positive effect on students. Being taught ethics doesn’t make people act more ethically. Yet perhaps this is hardly surprising, given how economics is taught, more as a menu of abstract theories than anything like a “call to a way of life.” Ironically, our economics is more value-laden than than our “normative” areas of study (the result of a “neutrality” that ensures a functionally anti-realist default).

Second, attempts to justify the universality of Homo oecononimicus in non-Western contexts have often run into trouble (often with the conclusion that these people aren’t acting “rationally”). But of course, Homo oecononimicus cannot really be falsified. It’s more of an interpretive lens through which data is analyzed than an empirical finding. It is definitionally true, just as psychological egoism can be defined so as to be coextensive with intentional action (and so trivial). Utility can be defined so that any behavior at all can be reduced to self-interest. Plenty in the field acknowledge this, although not how problematic it can be.

But given how dominant economics is in liberal politics, it seems pretty problematic to me. Politics was the architectonic science of the good for Aristotle. For liberalism, it often seems to be economics (despite its reduction of man to an appetite machine, or maybe because of this).

And it’s a bit ironic, since the field received this image of man through the Calvinist tradition from the outset, a big no-no from the perspective of liberal neutrality.

Now competition can be good. It can be fun. It can motivate us. It motivates heroism even. But it can also become corrosive. Perhaps the issue with capitalism is more the ever fracturing civilization is is running in top of. In this environment, competition becomes just about who can sate there appetites. This is perhaps most obvious in the way the language of economic competition has come to dominate relationship advice (e.g., “sexual market value curves”) or even more chillingly, parent-child relationships (e.g., focusing on “return on investment” in the basics of family life).

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No it doesn’t fit my experience. The unhappiness with capitalism is more an ambient effect of rapid technology that most people would not have to worry about because the vast majority are merely worker-users that have no decision-making responsibility as to the cost, implementation, and effectiveness of said technology. If you want to know where the most disturbances occur due to AI, go to the stock market, not the workplace, not the households, and certainly not in the social relationships of one another.

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This skips past my original objection, namely that for this critique to make any sense one would have to be able to point to a historical period during which things were meaningfully and consistently better, and society wasn’t ‘competition-driven’ (depending on one’s definition of “capitalism”).

However many flaws our present situation may have, I don’t think you can. Society was always competition-driven, all the way back to its natural origins where puppies compete over mother’s milk to decide who lives and who dies.

And of course the killing of weak or disabled babies used to be a normalcy in the not-so distant past - a striking example of human selfishness? Or a necessity borne of extremely harsh conditions that mankind has only recently started to free itself from - a process which has conspicuously coincided with the advent of so-called “capitalism”?

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for this critique to make any sense one would have to be able to point to a historical period during which things were meaningfully and consistently better

But it’s trivially easy to do this. Several authors would hold there were times in human history when things were ‘better’ in terms of competition vs co-operation. I’ve listed several in my response above.

Several authors would disagree. I’ve listed them too.

So where does pointing to them get us? We’re not equipped to adjudicate. We can’t claim the authors pointing to periods of relative co-operation are talking nonsense (that’s begging the question), so what good would it do to point to them (other than to verify the claim is at least a plausible one).

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No idea. Since you’re doing the pointing, why don’t you tell us?

If you believe we can’t judge the findings of the so-called “experts” then there’s not much for us to talk about is there?

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If you believe we can’t judge the findings of the so-called “experts” then there’s not much for us to talk about is there?

Of course there is. Evaluation of empirical evidence isn’t the only means of distinguishing and comparing competing theories. Which theory carries least risk if we’re wrong? Which theory coheres best with other theories we hold? … Which theory has the nicest font? Which theory has the fewest words?.. Not entirely serious about the last two, you get the point. The weight of evidence is just one aspect of a theory among others. Most theories that are ‘live’ in the academic field have already met that burden, they already qualify as ‘has enough evidence to be taken seriously’, and we, as laymen, cannot add or detract from that qualification. So we’re left with the rest.

In this instance. I think assuming we’re all inveterate cutthroats, and being wrong about that is far more dangerous to society than assuming we are cooperative (or at least balanced), and being wrong.

The risk of the former is that we never move beyond a dog-eat-dog race to power because we never try to develop systems that avoid it.

The risk of the latter is that our attempts will fail. Which only leaves us where we are (minus whatever effort it took to try).

Hence, assuming we’re better than this is the better theory (on that metric).

Or you could look at how well it coheres with other theories you hold.

Do you treat others in your day-to-day life as if they’d slit your throat for a tenner, or do you believe that your friends and family have your back and will risk harm to themselves to help you?

If the former, then the dog-eat-dog theory might be for you (and my deepest sympathies for your misfortune).

If the latter, then join the club. But the theory that human nature is brutal and selfish doesn’t cohere well with a contrary theory you clearly hold about the humans you actually know.

Alternatively, we could look at internal consistency.

Do you believe that people in positions of power tend to become more corrupt, selfish and power-hungry? Certainly something I’ve felt clearly over the last few decades.

If so, then you have a theory that material circumstances affect human behaviour.

As such, there’s an inconsistency in also holding the view that it is implausible that capitalism could affect human behaviour.

We can’t (without further reason) both hold the view that it’s implausible for the material circumstances of capitalism to affect human behaviour and hold the view that the material circumstances of power affects human behaviour.

…

Basically, there are dozens of ways of comparing theories that aren’t an attempt to adjudicate on the evidence.

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Yes but:

-Competition has always existed.

Does not entail the conclusion:

-Therefore there can be no meaningful changes in the degree to which societies are organized around, or focused on competition across different epochs and cultures.

Note that cooperation has also existed throughout human history, and is arguably far more the axis around which civilization turns.

Ancient and medieval political philosophy and anthropology put far less emphasis on competition, and this shows up in art and literature as well. For instance, in the Purgatorio Dante puts forth the claim that it is only an inappropriate attachment to finite goods, which “diminish when shared,” and which do not themselves lead to happiness, that creates a corrosive dialectic of competition between men.

The anthropology of Homo oecononimicus and psychological egoism is simply a state of vice from the perspective of the Roman ethicists, Buddhism, or even for the Epicureans, etc. To be sure, psychological egoism can be defined so broadly that the set of “selfish” actions is coextensive with the set of all intentional actions done for any aim deemed choice-worthy at all, but this renders the thesis trivial. And I think any thesis that tries to say that all societies are, by definition, primarily organized around “competition” rather the cooperation will face the same difficulty. The key term will have to be stretched to the point that it becomes trivial, and then it will be a fallacy of equivocation to switch back to using the term in its normal sense.

Prima facie, the idea that a Russian mir, or the sort of social structure centered around rice terraces (e.g., Honghe Hani), let alone an ancient monastery, etc., all center around competition in the same way as modern culture is a bit absurd. Surely there is a real difference between the Amish and Cistercians down the road from me and Silicon Valley or Wall Street where I once lived.

As an aside, prohibitions on abortion and infanticide largely spread through Christianity and Islam. If anything, they have been significantly loosened since the Enlightenment. Much of Eastern Europe had periods where over half of all conceptions ended in elective termination for instance.

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That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t deal with my objection.

When did mankind make this turn for the worse, meaningfully changing the degree to which our societies were focused on competition and ending up in this dreadful situation we are in today - with things like the UN, international law, the abolition of slavery, socialism, etc.

Ironically, if I tried to make this argument work and really want to look at why societies may have appeared more cooperative in the past, I probably wouldn’t get past the fact that the standard of living was so atrociously low that not cooperating meant death within days.

I think it would be a reasonable thing to argue that great increases in the standard of living have made people less dependent on each other and thus, arguably, less cooperative. So that then (ironically) becomes an argument against wealth.

But I wonder who’s willing to bite that bullet.