On the surface, Wall Street’s wild ride is the outcome of purely economic factors. Yet at a deeper level, the core problem of market weakness and volatility is not fiscal, but human.
As Americans, we are what we buy. This basic message — received by everyone, again and again, day after day — has created a fragile economy based on hyperconsumption. Such an economy, like the society from which it springs, is ultimately built upon sand.
This is not what we hear from the experts, of course, who fill the airwaves with details of the housing slump and the credit crunch. It is not their task to go beyond hard economics into soft psychology.
But if we look more closely, it becomes clear that we may have as much to learn about market crises from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as we do from Adam Smith and Karl Marx. So long as we Americans accept a negative savings rate as the price of appearing successful to others, government “stimulus” checks will be beside the point.
Soon we must get a handle on the unceasing public need for more and more things, for tangible goods that can seemingly validate us as individuals. Wall Street’s wild ride will not slow down with the arrival of more money to spread around in stores or online. Even if we could actually fix market problems by expanding consumption, what sort of society would we encourage?
Ralph Waldo Emerson once spoke of “self-reliance.” He understood that a foolish “reliance upon property” was the result of “a want of self-reliance.”
Today, living amid a humiliating barrage of advertising jingles, delirious collectivism and relentless imitation, the individual American sorely wants to project a “correct” image.
The demeaning consumer message of our American mass society is everywhere, even in the universities. Here, for the most part, mimicry and repetition define “excellence.”
Today, almost all higher education is plainly vocational. We generally graduate newly minted PhDs, MDs, JDs and MBAs who know almost nothing but how to progress in their own fields. They may turn out to be perfectly good teachers, doctors, lawyers and accountants, but they are nonetheless trained, not educated.
Do we want a genuinely robust economy and a stable stock market? Then we must first reorient our society from its corrupted ambience of mass taste to a more cultivated environment of thought and feeling. There is great beauty in the world, but it is best not to search for it at the bank, the video store or the shopping mall.
Even in that very large segment of Main Street that knows little of Wall Street, there is deepening anxiety and tangible unhappiness. Taught that respect and success lie in high salaries and corollary patterns of consumption, the American public dutifully worships the commonplace.
Wall Street remains a product of mass society. Such a mutually destructive dependence can never succeed. We must soon create conditions whereby each of us can feel important and alive without surrendering to manufactured images of power and status.
Without such conditions, millions of Americans will continue to seek comfort in mind-numbing music, mountains of drugs and oceans of alcohol.
Despite all the noise, we are now a largely joyless society that finds little or no authentic meaning within ourselves. This plainly human problem of a socially crushed individualism must be understood before we can fix what is wrong with Wall Street.
It will seem nice to receive our “stimulus package” checks from Uncle Sam, but the benefits will be illusory.
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Louis Rene Beres is a professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of “Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe In World Politics.”
