Books : American Mania : Excerpts
PREFACE TO THE SOFT COVER EDITION
In the manic pursuit that passes for modern-day life America is ahead of the game.
In American Mania; When More is not Enough, I call into question this consumer-driven frenzy and offer a cautionary tale for those who strive to live an intelligent and happy life. This seems to have precipitated a sense of moral indignation in a small minority of American readers and the accusation that as an English born immigrant, only thirty years off the boat, I have yet to appreciate the value of markets and of the American way of life. Indeed it is true that in no society is the market so deeply embedded in everyday existence as it is in the United States. But as a physician and a student of human behavior that is exactly what has worried me.
In American culture, the market is worshiped increasingly as an ideology rather than being seen for what it is — a natural product of human social evolution and a set of valuable tools through which we may shape an healthful and equitable society. It is under the spell of this ideology — this new religion — that we have fallen into complacency. Personal profit is no longer the means to an end but has become the end in itself. America’s traditional immigrant values of resourcefulness, thrift, prudence and an abiding concern for family and community have been hijacked by a commercially driven, all-consuming self-interest that is rapidly making us sick.
With globalization, and at a time of America’s commercial dominance, this hijacking is now emerging as an issue of worldwide concern. For example, demand-driven mass-market economies are growing in Europe and working hours are lengthening, particularly in the United Kingdom where social trends are beginning to follow the American pattern. The British now work on average 8.7 hours a day, compared to 7.9 hours in France and 7.7 hours in Italy. Similarly the British are moving closer to the American norm in taking shorter vacations. For this extra effort Britons have a slightly higher disposable income than do the Germans or the French, but they are also saving less. Again similar to the American pattern, obesity has quadrupled in England in the last 25 years. The average household now spends the same on fast foods as it does on fresh fruit and vegetables, with the major growth being in food-to-go and snacks for children’s lunch boxes. This cultural shift is symptomatic of the same time-starved addictive mania that plagues the United States.
And Europe is not alone. Since the book’s publication correspondence with readers from many continents, from South America, Australia and even from China and India, confirms that the malaise is spreading. Across the globe technology has dramatically changed the checks and balances that regulate the market place. The tethers of community that once bound together self-interest and social concern, and which gave us Adam Smith’s enduring metaphor of the “invisible hand”, have fallen foul of an information-saturated, turbo-charged mercantilism that never sleeps. In this Fast New World the invisible hand is losing its grip. It is a plain fact in America that as our core individual identity has shifted from concerned local citizen to that of international consumer, the market has become less effective in directing economic activity to the nation’s common good.
Today we look to advancing technology to support the myth of social progress. But technology is a two edged sword. While it extends human power on this planet, it also magnifies our instinctual craving. Our species has a long lineage, but in that evolution the social intelligence and mindful planning that makes us human arrived only recently, almost as an afterthought. By instinct we are geared for individual survival — curious, reward driven and self-absorbed — and technology is now in cahoots with that craving, having removed the natural constraints upon human behavior of distance, sea and mountain.
Human beings are poorly equipped to cope with abundance, as is evident from the US experience. Seduced by the enticements of a global market, the American consumer has in recent decades fallen victim to an orgy of self-indulgence. Thus while America’s productivity per person hour is comparable to that of most European nations, our material consumption per person is now greater by one third. And there are consequences to the profligate spending. The evidence is growing that unless we Americans can impose intelligent constraint we will soon run ourselves into the ground, depleting not only vital physical resources but also eroding the economic strength, the personal health and that social capital that is essential to sustaining a vibrant culture.
Fortunately, as this reality begins to hit home, the tide is turning against such blind consumption. Thus I am pleased that American Mania’s cautionary tale has found resonance with many voices from across the world. In Britain an interesting, indeed radical, group of young people — known provocatively as the New Puritans — are championing a personal code of conduct that eschews profligate spending in favor of a life-style that emphasizes personal health and social interdependence. Similarly, a growing number of Americans are reawakening to the importance of investing in community and the “common wealth”: that if an ownership society is to work then part of that ownership must be held in collective responsibility. A series of natural disasters and the skyrocketing price of oil have helped focus this reawakening and created a new awareness that it is not technology that will deliver personal happiness, or achieve social progress, but its wise and intelligent application. But, as in any vibrant society, such wisdom can grow only from an honest reckoning of human need and how the mechanisms of the market can best serve those needs. It is toward that goal of reflective self-examination that this paperback edition of American Mania is dedicated.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
The Manic Society
Americans have an astonishing appetite for life. As the nation of bold ideas, big cars, fast food, sky-thrusting cities and unparalleled military power, America is a monument to the ambition and industry of its people. In the brief span of a few generations the citizens of the United States have created a culture of unprecedented affluence. The Pharaohs were wealthy, as were many citizens of Rome, but neither empire achieved the broad distribution of riches and the seductive prosperity that exist in America today. In fact, the material wealth and the abundant choice available in contemporary US society are unique in human experience. Never before in the history of our species have so many enjoyed so much.
This extraordinary accomplishment has brought America to the leading edge of an unusual human experiment. Building upon a philosophical foundation of unbridled self-interest and commercial freedom, and supercharged now by a revolution in information technology, we have built a dynamic society of seductive appeal. But the resulting mix of technology, affluence and competitive social challenge that we have created for ourselves is radically different from the natural world in which our species rose to dominance some two hundred thousand years ago. That radical difference in social habitat has fostered a craving and an acquisitive behavior in America that is now testing the limits of our ancestral biology — in mind and in body — and eroding the foundations of our community. In short, in our compulsive drive for more we are making ourselves sick. How through knowledge of the brain sciences we may better understand our acquisitive craving and its impact upon the health and happiness of individual citizens, why such an addictive environment should have emerged first in America, and why in seeking a balanced civil society we must revisit the economic principles that now shape the material focus of our yearning, is the subject of this book.
To want more is a basic human instinct, one that has been essential to our survival. It was our hunger for better things, and the intelligence to imagine them, which gave us mastery over the dangerous and depriving environment in which we evolved, and it was that same hunger that first propelled us forward in the search for a Promised Land. Having achieved something akin to that Eldorado in contemporary American society, however, we now find ourselves in the confusing position of falling victim to our own acquisitive ambition.
This confusion became painfully obvious during the economic boom of the late 1990s, when our appetite for riches and for material comfort triggered a competitive frenzy of greed and shortsighted speculation. In the words of George Carlin, the comedian and satirist, America became a land of puzzling contradictions, a nation of “bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences but less time; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; taller buildings but shorter tempers; more knowledge but less judgment.” In our relentless search for material wealth, Carlin suggests, Americans have embraced a culture where steep profits and shallow relationships have multiplied our possessions but reduced our social values.
It is in my nature to dismiss such polemical ramblings, but Carlin’s caricature of contemporary American life contains some disturbing truths. For the majority of Americans the nation’s dramatic increase in material wealth has not been translated into a subjective sense of enhanced well-being. The evidence for such disenchantment I find pervasive and readily available. From the character of the struggles that my patients report; from the subject matter of newspaper and magazine articles; from talk-shows and the concerns expressed during chance conversation with strangers; and from discussions with colleagues, friends and family it is clear to me that many Americans are experiencing a discomfort for which they have little explanation. For a year or so after 9/11 the threat of random terror gave cruel focus to America’s troubled state of mind, but alone those events and the military actions that followed offer no lasting explanation for our deepening discomfort. Indeed it is evident that our uneasiness as a nation was already percolating when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck. A variety of surveys conducted during the 1980s and 1990s recorded a declining life satisfaction in America. Why, for example, does nearly one third of the US population now struggle with the complications of obesity? And why, amidst our drive for wealth and self-improvement, are the largest selling drugs on the American market those prescribed for the stress related diseases of ulcer, depression, and high blood pressure? In our demand-driven, debt-saturated culture many families find themselves too pressured to enjoy, even to notice, their affluence. Time is chronically in short supply and the “free moments” that once balanced a busy life have all but disappeared. The demands of securing and maintaining material wealth in a rapidly shifting economic climate¾particularly for those Americans who shoulder considerable debt¾have created an accelerated, competitive life style that steals away sleep and kindles anxiety, threatening those intimate social webs that sustain family and community. For many Americans the hallowed search for happiness has been hijacked by a discomforting and frenzied activity.
As a practicing psychiatrist I find much in this frenetic chase that is reminiscent of mania, a dysfunctional state of mind that begins with a joyous sense of excitement and high productivity but escalates into reckless pursuit, irritability and confusion, before cycling down into depression. In the continuum of human emotion mania is the close cousin and polar opposite of depression. Whereas in profound depression energy and positive thinking shrink and contract, in mania they accelerate and expand, magnifying and caricaturing the normal experience of happiness through a distorting aggrandizement of the self. Thus, in psychiatric parlance, mania is that dysphoric state of activity¾from the Greek dusphoria meaning discomfort¾that begins with happiness but lies beyond it in a tumult of anxiety, competition and social disruption. By analogy, it being with nations as it is with individuals, one may look upon America’s increasing frenzy as evidence of a nation stumbling into something akin to this dysphoric state. Unwittingly, in our relentless pursuit of happiness we have overshot the target and spawned a manic society with an insatiable appetite for more. America’s dream of a Utopian social order¾fueled from the beginning by the twin beliefs that material success equates with personal satisfaction (a notion that is embellished now by a commercially contrived illusion of infinite opportunity) and that technical advance is the key to social progress¾has become mired in a confusing mix of manic desire and depressive discomfort.
There are those who will quickly dismiss my analogy to the illness of manic depression, of course, protesting that I misinterpret in my examination of America’s malaise the aggressive pursuit required to further the nation’s commercial self-interest. After all, as the world’s leading trader — at a time when globalization is proceeding apace — is it not appropriate that America is in the vanguard of the race for market domination? And is it not inevitable that when locked in such vital international competition there will be winners and losers at home? The frenzied discomfort that many Americans are now experiencing merely reflects a time-limited period of adjustment, the predictable response to an evolving economic challenge. As the market forces of globalization play out America will find a new social balance, the dysphoria will subside and all will be well.
Unfortunately, while appealing in its simplicity, I have found that such an analysis falls short when it comes to helping individual Americans understand what is happening to them. As I shall describe (and about which many books have already been written), globalization and changing economic conditions are an essential part of the conundrum that is America’s mania. But the economy alone is not a sufficient explanation for the sea change that many Americans are now forced to navigate, or for the obesity, the growing anxiety and the corporate greed — each a topic about which there is also a growing literature¾that increasingly plague the conduct of everyday life in our nation. No, what you will discover in subsequent chapters — as I explore the lives of individual Americans through their personal stories and reference them back to what we know about human behavior and how the brain works¾is that these seemingly distinct manifestations of ill health are parts of a larger sickness. From the vantage point of neurobiology, given the daring temperament of the American people and the conditions in which we now find ourselves, the damaging frenzy that now engulfs our nation was predictable, and is treatable.
AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE . . .
Adam Smith’s American Dream: Of Desire and Debt
An old moon retreats before a December dawn. My taxi lurches forward, across the eight lanes of Wilshire Boulevard, and heads west. We pass the picture windows of LA Fitness and the rows of glistening bodies that run in place, preparing for the mental treadmill of the day ahead. The taxi driver, my instant friend from Odessa, lapses into animated Russian as his dispatcher calls. Cradling the phone at his ear, he speeds through two amber lights. Swiftly we are up the ramp and onto the freeway, nosing south into the glare of the rising sun. Ahead is a changing river of blinking color, as vehicles brake and weave. Without a moment’s hesitation we join the flow. The traffic is heavy, even in this pre-dawn, which comes as no surprise. America is the global nation and night and day Los Angeles is on the move. The flatness of the passing city is broken as a billboard looms into view and a smiling Santa offers an invitation. "Visit Disneyland, the happiest place on earth.” Today that’s not for me. This taxi to the airport, plus an early morning flight to New York, will be my only rides.
My 'plane east is delayed in its arrival from Tokyo. It’s just days before Christmas and the wave of seasonal travel is cresting. After running the gauntlet of security, I take refuge in the executive lounge and dose fitfully amidst the jingle and buzz of cell phones. Men and women in little cubicles are bent over the luminous screens of laptops. Coffee is in great demand. Through the lounge window I can see the bustle of the runway, choreographed in deceptive silence. It’s 6:30 a.m. and the sky has been repainted Californian blue.
Across from me sits an executive who has put aside her business chores for the moment and is speaking on a cell-phone with her young daughter. It’s a wake-up call. I’m struck, not for the first time, with how at ease we have become in airing private thoughts in public places. With technology running ahead of public decorum I’m now a confidant to the intimate details of this stranger’s family life. The daughter is unhappy. She doesn’t want to go to school. The mother’s voice is firm and reassuring, although from my privileged seat the furrowed brow and trembling lip that signal her discomfort are readily apparent. It is the promise of special gifts and a magical holiday that finally proves convincing and, finishing the call, the mother sighs to herself and turns to reading. Presumably to better scrutinize some detail she holds up her magazine to the sunlight that is now flooding through the window. An advertisement on the back cover catches my attention. It's for a luxury car and the photographs highlight the vehicle’s interior, a rich brown leather interior. "Think of it as chocolate, as another sweet spot in your life," is the drift of the spin-doctor's advice. Another sweet spot? I'm still only half-awake. Which magazine is this that blends appetites so freely? Intrigued, I shift my position to better decipher the lettering above the elegant Yuletide wreath that adorns the title page. It is a magazine of the good life — Martha Stewart Living — a special edition to bring delight at the holiday season. I’m prompted to ponder my neighbor’s life beyond the business suit; her dreams, her personal passions, the waiting family, and how she fits them all together in the world of turbo-capitalism. How does she balance the competing priorities, I wonder. But my musing is interrupted as a flight is called and the magazine disappears, along with the phone and the laptop, into a black attaché case. For the moment the executive is back, as a harried mother heads home to bestow seasonal joy.
In America the central message is that each of us is free to write our own story. A polyglot nation of prodigious energy, we are held together by dreams of material progress. Seventy-eight percent of Americans still believe that anybody in America can become rich and live the good life. All it takes is desire, hard work, a little luck, and the right timing. The fable of wealth for the 1990s was telecommunication and the “new economy” of the Internet. But throughout the nation’s history there have been similar stories of riches won and lost — in the westward migration of the nineteenth century; in the excesses of the Gilded Age that closed it; in the champagne bubble of the 1920s before the Great Depression, and during the deficit spending spree of the 1980s — stories that reflect the hopeful striving of a daring people. It is because of this bounding optimism that America is an amazing and seductive place to live, something that continues to be affirmed each day by the battalions of migrants that scramble ashore in the risky pursuit of happiness. Thus the dream endures.
But now, for millions of Americans, the magic of the dream is tarnished. Something is not right and an alien sense of discomfort grips the dreamer. Despite the excitement and promise that heralded globalization, American business seems frenzied and fickle. Many Fortune 500 companies, once considered havens of lifetime employment, have transformed themselves into profit-driven workaholic cults. The scramble for “the dream” demands a lengthened workday, diminished sleep, continuous learning, unusual energy, and a high tolerance for financial insecurity. To be “successful” is to be a multi-tasking dynamo. We rise early and we burn the lights late. We exercise to CNN at breakfast and telephone while driving, for there’s not a moment to lose. At dinner we graze on snacks and fast food, but with a laptop computer as the preferred companion. In the culture of global commerce, which is etched most visibly on the face of America but increasingly apparent in Europe and other industrialized nations, the quest for economic prosperity has become a competitive high-speed game. For some the pursuit is seductive — as when I rise at dawn in Los Angeles to dine at dusk in New York — and it offers a mask of accomplishment and purpose. But for those snarled in traffic jams and crowded airport lounges, and for the lonely children who do not understand, America’s accelerated life-style is increasingly a source of anxiety and frustration.
Thus the young executive-mother whom I encountered at the LA Airport is not alone. From general conversation with colleagues and patients, and with relatives and friends, I know her discomfort to be mirrored in the lives of many Americans, and in their families, for in the lexicon of America’s Fast New World the word technology has replaced that of tranquility. For some it is an experience that they must struggle to define: a vague but pervasive sense of unease, despite affluence and opportunity. For others it is an uncomfortable irritability, and a ready anger when juggling the daily demands of family and workplace. But for the majority it is the distinct awareness of a declining satisfaction with life, of being perpetually off balance with too many demands to meet and with too little time in which to meet them. Indeed, it is my experience that even those most upbeat and successful acknowledge that life is moving too fast, as do I in those moments when honesty prevails. Despite our nation’s extraordinary achievements and our technological wizardry — at the Millennium the average hour of American effort was approximately twenty-five times more productive than it had been in 1850 — numerous surveys make it clear that Americans are working longer hours, giving less time to their families, and plowing ever deeper into debt.
So what went wrong?