Rattus Economicus

There may come a time when the old stories don’t make sense anymore. As if a veil is lifted, or a drug wears off, we see the world afresh, and what appeared as solid fact is shown to be illusion.

It happens to Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial[1]; to Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four[2]; and to Neo in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix[3]. And something similar happens to real people every day.

A woman discovers her apparently submissive partner has gambled away their nest egg. A man sees his reputation ruined by public disclosure of a personal indiscretion. The conventions we placed our trust in, like authority or privacy, may lose their remit. Uncertainty, once aroused, may extend to factors like wealth or status which, with similarly unverified confidence, we had assumed were instrumental to our goals. Those goals may themselves come into question, less relevant perhaps to our own true needs than to the expectations of others. And if we keep probing, peeling away the layers of uninspected belief, eventually we may uncover a fundamental logic, a kind of scaffolding on which the apparition we mistook for reality was assembled, and which no longer appears entirely credible. And at that point we may ask: who is this serving?

In my case, disillusionment came gradually over many years. Experiences which challenged expectations gathered in my awareness until I could no longer squeeze past them to get to my comfort zone. My subscription to the dominant paradigm lapsed and I didn't renew it. I can’t identify a turning point; but some events did more than others to raise doubts about the Emperor's new clothes and the so-called ‘Global Financial Crisis’ was one of those.

When the banking system melted down in 2008, it erased part of my savings and the high-paid position I’d accepted only a year before. It was hard to be philosophical about it. The unconventional methods for which I was headhunted had been vindicated by our impressive revenues, profits, and customer satisfaction. And there was still a mountain of work to be delivered, GFC or not, by the technicians I had recruited and trained. Regardless, in the bovine nervous system of the global marketplace, the scent of danger had triggered a stampede for safety. Panic called for ritual sacrifice. Workforces everywhere had to be culled, and I was included.

Market fundamentalists like Peter Schiff told us this was necessary. Business closures, job losses, mortgage defaults, even bank collapses were capitalism purging itself of inefficiencies; not a system failure so much as a design feature. And the ‘fittest’ who survived would enjoy the bigger surpluses produced by leaner, meaner enterprises.

Part of me wanted to believe this. But an earlier encounter with ‘natural selection’ in ‘the economy’ had made a sceptic of me. My previous job had ended when my employer had acquired another business for its intellectual property, sweetening the deal by replacing our management team with theirs, despite our stellar performance. In my experience, capitalist purges had little to do with fitness or efficiency.

An entrepreneur friend likened my situation to an elite military commander forfeited in battle to achieve a victory elsewhere. I thought: “Is that what I’ve been doing? Fighting in a war?” The punishing routine and uncompromising demands of the business world suddenly made better sense. How else would it be in wartime?

Dismay turned to anger as we watched bankers and speculators whose greed and recklessness had precipitated the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression carry riches from the wreckage courtesy of our elected governments[4]. If it was indeed a war, even a metaphorical one, the frontline fighters seemed to have been sold out by traitors and deserters who were walking free. The meagre confidence I had left in our supposed meritocratic order was largely erased.

If these events had never occurred, I doubt I would have enquired very deeply into the integrity of the ‘civilisation’ which sponsored them. But once I did, more revelations surfaced. I learned there was nothing unusual about the abrupt loss of my corporate career; what was less usual was that I had one to lose.

Viva la Revolución!

Revolutions, including technological ones, turn the world upside down. Practical results and the people who can achieve them are momentarily as important as public relations and old boys’ networks. It may be then we notice this isn’t how the world is customarily organised.

During events like the Third Industrial Revolution, in which I was a participant, innovations such as microprocessors and the internet are so empowering to early adopters, they quickly become essential for everyone. Facilitators like me can find ourselves in the company of heavyweights who ordinarily wouldn’t bother stopping at our pedestrian crossing. Our corporate passes may be temporary and conditional; but they afford an opportunity to eavesdrop on the machinations of power; and then a discontinuity becomes apparent between the methods businesses employ and the stories they tell the public.

Innovation and competition make good marketing copy, but they aren’t sought after by the people who run businesses. Such forces are annoying and inconvenient to incumbents who will therefore use what leverage they have to contain them. This is easier at scale. A company which can muster financial clout, commercial pressure, brand prestige and proprietary technology may destroy or acquire its competitors, dictate to its supply chains, confound its regulators, and direct the course of technological transformation to its advantage until it has monopolised a niche, if not an entire sector, and is effectively beyond interference. Microsoft became a global behemoth not because its software was better but because it managed to get it pre-installed on a majority of new computers.

Once an organisation has achieved sectoral dominance, the culture inside it will change. Quality, value and service are only marginally important in a private monopoly of an essential need. Alertness and responsiveness are only necessary when there’s further disruption, so monopolists will try to preclude it by controlling research and development. The achievement culture of the engineers yields to the rigid, deferential hierarchy preferred by the managerial class. The ‘better world’ which beckoned becomes instead a new bureaucracy, ruled from a new leather chair in the ivory tower. Subservience eclipses competence in the advancement of careers. At the next purge, nonconformity is sifted out.

The demanding virtues for which capitalism is celebrated can once again be safely quarantined in the company’s PR releases. But it can take a while for people like me to grasp that the revolution is over.

In 2009, after years of 70-hour work weeks, frequent travel, and constant performance pressure, I was exhausted. I didn’t know that experiences like mine can trigger the symptoms of unresolved trauma. I didn’t know that’s what I had. Fatigue seemed only natural after overwhelm. I saw my heavy drinking as a pastime rather than a problem. And my grief at the sudden loss of identity, meaning and purpose explained itself in the learned language of my early life: I wasn’t good enough. It was only after years of study I arrived at a different more magnanimous explanation.

The Legacy of the New Deal

It turns out the choices available to me had been largely predetermined by the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement and the path it laid for development in the postwar era.

According to Yanis Varoufakis[5], capitalism suffered a near-death experience in the great stock market crash of 1929. Its golem, which had been rampaging through the world since the legalistic sorcery of incorporation had summoned it centuries before, had finally poisoned itself with its own excesses. FDR’s New Deal put it on life support. But revival didn’t really occur until WWII returned it to the laboratory. The war served as America’s Dr Frankenstein, shocking it back to life.

During the war, the US ran the kind of command economy which would have made a soviet proud, with production, resource allocation and prices determined by technocrats like the young J. K. Galbraith. Despite the forebodings of free market advocates, central planning raised from the doldrums of the Great Depression a peerless industrial powerhouse and the world’s creditor nation.

Bretton Woods extended these capabilities to the rebuilding of war-torn western Europe and Japan in America’s image. Kickstarted by American investment in infrastructure repair, and strengthened by fixed exchange rates with gold backing, an expanded market opened up for American products within a multinational currency union built around the US Dollar. America’s problem of surplus capacity was solved by redeploying its fearsome war machine for peaceful purposes.

The New Dealers who retained the upper hand in these arrangements envisaged that the widespread chaos and misery which had fostered totalitarianism in Eurasia might thus be prevented. Historical adversaries would become partners, and a ‘rising tide’ of prosperity would ‘lift all boats’.

It wasn’t a new idea. John Maynard Keynes had long argued for free trade within a regulated international monetary system to reduce conflict between countries, and for government spending to smooth the capitalist roller coaster ride which episodically destabilised them from within[6]. Looking further back, one might have found precedence in the “bread and circuses” of Pax Romana, or in the cultural syncretism of Alexander III of Macedon.

Nevertheless, for as long as money had existed, private discretionary spending had been the preserve of a relatively select few. Now people of modest means were going to join the club. Expectations of a ‘normal’ life were reconfigured around material abundance. The rich would still get richer, but so, in their own small way, would the poor who helped them do it; and to varying degrees this methodology became a template for the Western world.

Sadly, the spectres of war could not be pacified so easily. Unwelcome but unredeemed, they frequented the postwar peace in civilian attire.

Needs, Wants and Must-haves

Troubled communities exhibit telltale signs; substance misuse is a common one; and among the most commonly misused substances is alcohol.

Each year, human beings consume around 450 billion litres of alcoholic beverages. If alcohol was only associated with revelry and merriment, we wouldn’t need to ask why. But since alcohol is also linked to violence, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy, family breakdown, car accident, injury, hospital admission, suicide, degenerative illness and millions of premature deaths, the question remains[7].

For a long time, our understanding of this duality drew on a diagnosis which was part chemical and part personal. This supposed that the pleasurable effects of substances like alcohol make them potentially addictive; but harm and dependency are compounded by loose morals, poor judgement, weakness of character, and, in the case of ‘hard’ drugs, falling prey to ‘pushers’.

Johann Hari’s profiles of key figures in the history of drug policy show that religion and politics were mixed up with the science from the beginning.[8] When we sift them out again a different story emerges. Among his interviews with addicts, law enforcers, scientists and clinicians was Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander who showed in the 1970s that earlier experiments with rats, on which our understanding of addiction had been built, were fundamentally flawed.

When Alexander built Rat Park, in which, instead of the usual miserable solitary confinement, his subjects had everything a rat could ask for, they lost interest in drugs. The influence of social and environmental factors was clear.

Gabor Mate observed that people resort to unhealthy behaviours for good reasons[9]. When adverse provocations are reduced, or better solutions become accessible, health indicators tend to improve naturally over time. Drugs, prescribed or otherwise, offer results which are more immediate. Sometimes they are helpful; but improvements are often limited and temporary.

The Trap of Addiction

In 2009, with my big career on hold, my distance from my problems could be measured in martinis. The first was like a soothing bath. The second was like a night on the town. By the third I was making my award acceptance speech. I might have been at home; perhaps I was alone; but once I had that slender glass stem in my hand, I was the life of a party all my own. The trick was to hold onto the feeling. When the chemical music stopped, I became just another gate crasher ejected by the bouncers of low self-esteem; so over time the drinking started earlier and lasted longer.

The trap of addiction is that our problems remain right where we left them. I had additional ways of forgetting mine, but I depended on alcohol daily and so contributed to a global market soon approaching 2 trillion US Dollars annually[10]. And beyond its own economic value, each of its effects, desirable or not, calls for services of some kind[11] which also contribute to GDP, our hallowed measure of success.

Therein lies the paradox of Bretton Woods. With our more recent understanding of trauma, what people needed most in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict in history, beyond peace, stability, and reconstruction, wasn’t an avalanche of consumer goods, but rather optimal conditions in which to heal. Barely anyone had not been touched by hardship, privation and the loss of loved ones. Many had been wounded, tortured, starved, raped or imprisoned. Some had been agents of these harms.

For the architects of the new order, however, healing wasn’t a prime directive, nor even much of a concern. The job of governments was to make sure there was plenty of paid work and plenty to buy with the proceeds. If people were able to fulfil enough acquisitive desires, peace, stability, and wellbeing would surely follow. Revolutionary energy would be dissipated, the mistakes of the past would be avoided, and over time their horrors forgotten.

These assumptions were tragically flawed. Once misfortune has been encoded in the bodies of survivors, either through direct experience, or epigenetically via traumatised carers, healing is far from automatic. A regimen of work, shopping and recreation will not suffice. Trauma’s shadowy compulsions will reverberate through communities, occluding hopeful expectations. To make matters worse, a culture of survivors which promotes consumption as the answer to human need will see an increase of destructive dependencies. And that effect was already evident in previous chapters of history.

Addiction in History

Rum was palliative medicine for the harsh conditions in the Eighteenth-Century British Navy. In far flung New South Wales, it became an indispensable commodity, serving as currency in commerce, emboldening bloody acts against Aboriginal people, and promoting a culture of quotidian drunkenness which persisted for centuries, afflicting even the highest offices in the land[12].

Like conquest and colonisation, addiction can’t be properly understood without following the money trail. Among the thieves, prostitutes and other displaced people buying cheap solace from London’s distilleries[13], were those destined to provide unpaid labour for the agricultural colony where the ‘rum corps’ plied its trade. Meanwhile British East India Company contractors smuggled opium into China, harvesting profits from misery among the Chinese while rectifying the trade imbalance caused by heavy demand from more affluent Britons for Chinese tea.

The conditions established by Bretton Woods helped to spread some of the benefits of mechanised production among workers and their families. Living standards rose. But so did the prevalence of so-called ‘diseases of affluence’[14] – diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, depression and cancer; and so too the burden of addiction and its effects on health and crime.

We now know this pattern is linked to trauma. A statistical correlation has long been apparent, and our understanding of the biopsychosocial mechanisms which explain it continues to improve. Trauma responses among combatants, refugees and other survivors, if left unhealed, can develop into mental and physical illness, harming families and communities, even in subsequent generations. In effect, a new kind of casualty had replaced those of the battlefield.

In fact, the war had never ended; it had simply moved to another theatre of operations.

The Cold War

Capital and labour had long been at odds in the West. But the existence of a large, modern state where capital held no sway at all gave this opposition a global, even existential dimension.

In the exponentially more dangerous nuclear age which had begun, the West’s new battle with its former ally the Soviet Union needed to be won primarily in hearts and minds, so it was mostly propagandists who waged overt war this time. Unfortunately, this did nothing to foster an informed polity and spilled into paranoid affectations like McCarthyism in which the West self-harmed.

These competing systems had much more in common than either preferred to admit. Material abundance had been achieved in the same way in both, by exploiting cheap energy and resources with developing technology. What distinguished the West was the degree to which this productivity depended less on the dread hand of the state than on the reciprocating demands of its two powerful rival classes.

While better wages and conditions for workers had eaten into industry’s profits, they had also increased demand for its products. And this provided capital with a method to accommodate the intractable terms of organised labour while still capturing more surplus. That method was to create more, coupling increased production with increased consumption, expanding profits by encouraging more people to work longer and harder and reward themselves for doing so.

Observant entrepreneurs noticed that any human impulse beyond mere survival might be diverted from its natural fulfilment in contemplation, conviviality or creativity and matched instead with a marketable product. As more of life was monetised, new vistas of potential profit opened up. Each human evolutionary predisposition provided another green field where private enterprise could erect premises. And thanks to Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the psychological motivations unacknowledged by contemporary economic theory were well understood by marketers.

The Winning Formula

The task for Madison Avenue dream merchants like the fictional Don Draper[15] was to stimulate heroic new levels of consumption. As workers picked up peacetime pay checks, production lines revived. The cars, appliances and toys flaunted in newspapers and magazines were soon shining in new suburban allotments. Freeways and shopping centres proliferated; boulevards lit up with neon; sportsgrounds, golf courses, bowling alleys, boutiques, beauty parlours, nightclubs and fun parks prospered; motels and caravan parks dotted routes to entertainment precincts and natural wonders attracting families on vacation. And this effect was amplified by other changes.

The war had given many women a taste of economic independence. Similarly, racial minorities were less accepting of limited opportunities in the countries they had fought for. The extent and persistence of social transformation initiated by the ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘civil rights’ movements can be debated, but one certain beneficiary was capitalism. Workforce participation, private spending and consequently corporate profits increased steadily. And soon a new generation emerged out of the prewar legacy of conformism with self-fulfilment as its rationale.

Where cash was constrained, credit stepped in. If it’s true in any sense that capitalism ‘lifted millions out of poverty’, it was personal debt which provided the leverage. In the expansion of the ‘middle class’, the price of admission was loyalty to the establishment until the trappings were paid for. Conformity in the postwar West was reinforced less by secret police than by mortgages and hire purchase contracts.

Not only did the ‘mad men’ need to sell products; they needed to sell the system which produced them. Businesses, economists and policymakers stopped referring to us as people or citizens. Now we were ‘consumers’, a new kind of soldier in the new kind of war, with little more status in the machinations of the powerful than the cannon fodder of previous conflicts, or Bruce K. Alexander’s laboratory rats.

As Don Draper famously says: “What you call love was invented by guys like me…to sell nylons”. And he could have made the same point about almost every facet of postwar American life.

As with the addictiveness of drugs, it’s a mistake to think of consumerism’s ascendency as ‘natural’, or even the result of human susceptibility. Rather it required an unprecedented deployment of ‘weapons of mass distraction’ – programming and advertising via radio, TV, cinema, and in public spaces, schools and universities.

And it was marvellously effective. For those with means, it turned the world into an amusement park. For those with less, it provided motivation to try harder. Even for those stuck at the bottom, it was a goad to give their kids a better start than theirs. And for those across the Berlin Wall, it unfurled a dream of freedom in a land of opportunity that spelled the inevitable end of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Before long, the West had won. Following the resurrection of the vanquished Axis states, and the abdication of the ideological competition in the USSR, the whole world seemed to want to emulate it. Francis Fukuyama announced ‘the end of history’. But this turned out to be in many ways a pyrrhic victory.

Aftermath

On my business trips to the US, I would sometimes lie on a hotel bed and channel surf to soothe my jetlag. Across a hundred or more stations, a parade of cheerful vignettes depicted a glamourised America where dreams come true when you wish upon a card. There hardly seemed to be any desire which couldn’t be satisfied by shopping; even deeply felt needs like finding a life partner were addressed with the logic of the marketplace. And yet, America’s other collective self-portrait – the one in the nightly news – was often tragic.

Homeless encampments spread on city streets; families of children shot and killed by classmates were offered ‘thoughts and prayers’; people died for want of everyday needs; and disasters like Hurricane Katrina left whole communities abandoned. The shrugs and platitudes of reporters and senators implied nothing more could be done. But thankfully, carefree fun could still be had with soda, lipstick, diet pills and incontinence pads.

It was different in my own country only by degree. But in the US the incongruities were starker. No amount of model families frolicking in fields of butterflies could dispel the images of creeping poverty, ill health and violent death which characterised a powerful nation’s mysterious inability to tackle practical problems. High-fiving analysts cheering on the market’s inexorable rise and the river of money flowing into foreign military campaigns only made it seem more absurd.

What could have ruined the golden age?

The Chemistry of Dependency

Personal survival depends on motivation and reward for behaviours which assist it. We don’t satisfy need or avoid harm because it’s logical to do so, but because chemical signals direct us.

The two chemicals with the most immediate and constant effect on how we feel and what we do are dopamine and cortisol[16]. Their interactions are complex, but in our everyday experience, dopamine is associated with pleasure, and cortisol with stress.

Dopamine feels good, and when it’s low we look for ways to top it up, like food or sex. Cortisol feels uncomfortable, but when it’s high we are better equipped to rectify the adversity which triggered it.

It would be simplistic to say these chemicals cause human behaviour; rather they are integral to it. They are components of biopsychosocial patterning formed over millions of years. When we live as we evolved to live, in supportive groups, in a healthy environment, we naturally experience pleasure and avoid harm, without ever concerning ourselves with the chemistry of it.

But if our circumstances become systemically adverse, making it difficult to restore the optimal balance of these chemicals, our health deteriorates. When nutrition, safety, shelter, care, companionship or bodily autonomy is persistently denied or threatened, the cortisol which was released to fortify us while we remove ourselves from danger begins to damage us, impairing attention, memory, and decision-making. This can occur when the actual threat is remote; even when it’s historical[17], and in the most dramatic examples, cultural rather than personal. Arousal of past trauma produces symptoms like those from present danger. And if they aren’t relieved, we may suffer lasting injury and premature death.

Activities which deliver a dopamine ‘hit’ can bring temporary relief. But they may also debilitate us, as resort to fleeting pleasure is reinforced. Inability to answer our true needs causes more stress, triggering more cortisol. With motivation sapped and resistance weakened, we may give in to hopelessness and dependency.

This was my predicament after the GFC. I felt I’d lost everything – career, position, staff, colleagues, income, status – and with them the future I had imagined. A resurgence of trauma-induced self-loathing, unwittingly passed down to me by the survivors who raised me, now kept me at home, with elevated cortisol, seeking dopamine from a bottle.

As I was to learn, this syndrome is worryingly common. But not everyone wants to cure it. For some, it’s a business model.

The Dopamine Hack

Nicotine is a potent dopamine trigger[18]. Nicotine dependency is therefore easy to create. The challenge for Big Tobacco was to get it into more hands.

Stressed people are motivated to seek respite. Severe deprivation, displacement and war, hallmarks of the era leading up to Bretton Woods, are desperate motivators. But mundane stressors like boredom and loneliness can also eat away at us. In the absence of lasting solutions, sufferers can be led to temporary alternatives.

This is where Bernays’ techniques of subliminal persuasion come into play. If we frequently observe people we like, admire or envy doing something, the action becomes associated with other elusive and more consequential factors we desire. Rich, famous, attractive or apparently carefree people make compelling role models. And while wealth and fame might be out of reach, cigarettes are available at the corner store, just as they can stand in for sufficiency and safety in the ghetto or on the battlefield.

As we emulate the behaviour, dopamine reinforces it. Soon tobacco has attached itself to the cycle of activities in our day. It may not solve our problems, but it gives us a program of micro holidays from care and responsibility. And when imbibed with others, it provides a social lubricant, recapturing the frequent small gestures of sharing which evolution prescribed for healthy social interaction. In this way, a product, even a deadly one, can be woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Using this technique, Bernays made cigarettes fashionable for women in the prewar era, sending tobacco profits skyward. The extra illness and disability which resulted was undoubtedly a tragedy for sufferers and their loved ones but was also a goldmine for the ‘medical’ industry. And such effects are precisely why Simon Kuznets, who helped define measures of economic growth, cautioned against using them as a proxy for collective wellbeing. To make that mistake is to include wickedness and misadventure among our achievements while ignoring what Robert Kennedy later expressed as “that which makes life worthwhile”.

This devilry eventually backfired on Big Tobacco, and they were banished from the marketing playground. But the hack works nearly as well for other handy dopamine dispensers, including alcohol[19], fast food[20], gambling[21] and pornography[22], the purveyors of which remain at large. With the right skills, it can be applied to almost anything. Once a powerful, persistent motivator has been activated, such as a chronic feeling of inadequacy or insecurity, the ancient chemistry of survival can be marshalled to reward us for cosmetic surgery, expensive ‘personal growth’ programs, private health insurance or a burdensome mortgage.

It isn’t hard to see, then, how the exploitability of this mechanism is amplified by underlying stressors.

From Wellbeing to Survivalism

While dopamine and cortisol are foundational for our survival, two other chemicals are strongly linked to “that which makes life worthwhile”; they are serotonin and oxytocin.

Serotonin is associated with mood, digestion, sleep, and resilience[23]. Oxytocin correlates with maternal bonding, group cohesion and prosocial behaviour[24]. Again, these are factors among many in a very complex system; but it’s reasonable to say that a life well-lived in a flourishing community, to which our evolution predisposed us, will reinforce success with healthy levels of these chemicals; and they are often measurably lacking among the persecuted, marginalised, or otherwise traumatised.

In that sense, they make a better litmus test of a society’s functioning than GDP and employment. The illness, excess, dangerous workplaces and toxic bosses obscured by our usual metrics leave a trail of destruction in the chemistry of wellness.

If the conditions which support this positive chemistry break down, our orientation shifts from wellbeing to survival, where we are again at the beck and call of dopamine and cortisol. In a fundamentally healthy setting this is normal and helpful. In order to protect what is most valuable we must first remain alive. But if we get stuck in survival mode, leaving others to their fate, unable to restore a life-affirming social setting, disturbance will spread and eventually become normalised. Survival then usurps all other cultural narratives.

In rich countries, deprivation and harm are seldom caused by a general lack of resources. But people in survival mode don’t know this. The urgent chemistry of stress and reward has put the left brain hemisphere in charge, fixated with what Ian McGilchrist describes as “grabbing and getting”[25]. The wholistic right brain hemisphere which orients us to quality of life has had its corporate pass revoked. Regardless of how many resources are at our disposal, we feel deprived. Even with more than we could ever use, unless wellbeing chemistry is restored, we are compelled to seek for more, and our ability to help others and protect the Earth is limited.

Ordinarily, this would be where leadership steps in. In an ancient or traditional culture, responsible adults, guided by experienced elders, would quickly reinstate the conditions needed for a full and lasting recovery. But that is not the kind of person directing activities in the modern West.

Wealth and power don’t make a person wise. Responsible adults aren’t simply produced by the aging process. Survivors in the upper echelons won’t know any better than ordinary survivors how to return a population to health when it’s been disrupted and traumatised. Driven by their own survival imperatives they may not see real deprivation for what it is. The ocean of distress rising around them feels like a threat to the islands of wealth and privilege they’ve secured for themselves, an unsustainable material profusion which is paradoxically never enough. If they’ve also gained influence over our institutions, these will be to some degree embodiments of this same psychology. We may become locked into a pattern which can never satisfy our real needs, even as we destroy ourselves in the attempt.

The Monster Breaks Free

Mary Shelley, who gave us Frankenstein[26], said she found monsters interesting because they are not born but made, “shaped…by the wounds of the world around them”. Her observation anticipated the emergence of trauma medicine by nearly two centuries. Like the French Revolution which overshadowed her novel’s genesis, the engorgement of the West’s ‘creature’ after it escaped its wartime laboratory demonstrates her point.

It wasn’t simply that a few vulnerable people succumbed to dependencies. Trauma was by then endemic to communities across the globe, instilled by centuries of war, famine, disease, displacement, slavery and colonial oppression. But instead of an occasion for healing, Western planners blithely turned it into fuel for capitalism.

The West’s most advertised virtue was ‘progress’. But if you can detect much of that today you probably live in China. In Australia, what is truly striking is how little of importance has changed. By the end of the war, after a century of transformation, the pattern of modern life had already been laid down. Australians live the same way today, except with more stuff, more debt, more distractions, and a bigger environmental footprint.

It isn’t only flying cars and space holidays which didn’t materialise. The new modes of production which Keynes expected would make work largely obsolete didn’t appear either. In fact, recent changes have been mostly for the worse. Work is generally less secure and less remunerated, a deficit aggravated by scarce housing, failing health, and exorbitant living costs.

Postwar productivity gains were huge. And they might just as readily have forfeited growth and given workers back their time. But that was never really up for consideration. The primary goal, though it was whispered behind closed doors rather than proclaimed in public, was, as it had always been, to increase passive income for the ruling class. And this was just as true for the New Dealers.

Unlike the worker’s hard-earned wages, the wealthy lived on investor returns, economic rents, capital gains and interest on lending. More of anything was ‘good’, as long as these resulted.

Consequently, much of the science and technology which might have enhanced our wellbeing chemistry was committed instead to exploiting our survival chemistry. Overconsumption, addiction and degenerative illness weren’t inadvertent side-effects; they were inevitable products of our economic priorities.

The early rat experiments had done more than distort our understanding of mammalian psychology. They had presaged a form of human social engineering where millions of subjects, sequestrated from ancestral forms of companionship, support and care, but largely blind to their captivity, could be induced to push one profit-making lever after another in an endless cycle by a beam of photons blasted into their atomised lives.

The hopeful humanist in me wanted to attribute this to misadventure. But as I delved into the history of our collective dysfunction, it became clear that while perhaps it wasn’t planned explicitly, it wasn’t merely circumstantial either. But that investigation requires another essay.

In the end, the way out of my own predicament was to address the legacy of trauma. I had to learn to become responsible for my body chemistry. In lieu of wise elders in a supportive community, I resorted to expensive professional help.

The Tarnished Citadel

On a business trip to the US just before the GFC, I took a ride from the conference facility in Long Beach out to Anaheim. My purpose was to experience Disneyland the way its founder had envisaged it in the 1950s.

In the age of immersive cinema, virtual reality and the high adrenaline ride experience, it was a charming anachronism; more reminiscent of the ghost train, the tunnel of love or the travelling circus than a modern amusement park; where people from anywhere could experience a fond simulacrum of small town America, already disappearing when Walt conceived this “source of joy and inspiration to all the world”; before heading for Tomorrowland, where futuristic reimaginings of that same sedate conservatism were quickly fossilised by developments no one saw coming; and on to share a nostalgic adventure conjured by largely mechanical contrivance with fantasy figures like Indiana Jones and Captain Jack Sparrow; all of which helped to remedy the drive through endless stressed neighbourhoods and dilapidated strip malls to get there. And that made it also a living metaphor for the wounded idealism of the Western postwar peace.

[1] Kafka, F. (1925) Der Prozess, DE, Verlag Die Schmiede.

[2] Orwell, G. (1949) 1984, UK, Secker & Warburg.

[3] The Wachowskis (Directors). (1999). The Matrix [Film]. Warner Bros.

[4] Story, L. & Dash, E. (2009), “Bankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts”, The New York Times, Jul 30.

[5] Varoufakis, Y. (2023), Technofeudalism, UK, Bodley Head.

[6] Keynes, J. M. (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, UK, Palgrave Macmillan.

[7] Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016, Griswold, Max G et al., The Lancet, Volume 392, Issue 10152, 1015 – 1035.

[8] Hari, J. (2015), Chasing the Scream, UK, Bloomsbury.

[9] Mate, G. (2022), The Myth of Normal, US, Avery.

[10] Conway, J. (2024), Alcoholic beverages industry worldwide - Statistics & Facts, Statista, Nov 8.

[11] Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2022) - “Alcohol Consumption” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption' [Online Resource].

[12] Murphy, M. (2021), Rum; A Distilled History of Colonial Australia, AU, HarperCollins.

[13] famously depicted in Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

[14] Hamilton, C. (2004), “Diseases of affluence and other paradoxes”, The Australian Financial Review, Oct 15.

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