This past week, a co-worker and I were discussing the sorry state of world affairs. He had mentioned to me the fact that members of wealthy school districts in our town were attempting to forbid inter-district transfers of students, thus limiting the ability of poorer students to attend better-funded schools. That got me talking about clinical narcissism as a useful lens by which to examine the behavior of the wealthy in the United States – especially regarding the tendency of the wealthy elites, to project their own pathology onto the poor, and especially people of color among the poor.
His responses were agreeable for the most part, but one thing caught my notice, namely, the names he mentioned when he began to name who he thought these elites were. Names like the Bilderbergs and the Rothschilds were mentioned. As I listened to him, I thought (but did not say), “Why don't you also mention the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission?” As I thought about the names he mentioned, I thought about the tendency which is common among many Americans to blame their increasing miseries on some extremely secret cabal of anonymous elites who want to establish some sort of anti-capitalist, anti-free market, anti-“Christian”, anti-American “New World Order.”
A few days later, I found some studies published in 2014 by Oxfam (here and here) which describe the ongoing, drastic, and unrestrained concentration of the world's wealth into a rapidly shrinking number of hands. One of the most striking conclusions of these statements is that the world's 85 richest people now own the wealth of half of the world's population. And according to a 2014 Guardian article (, “the wealth of the 1% richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion, or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world...” Indeed, the world's richest 1 percent will own more than all the rest of the world by next year, 2016. The Oxfam studies also state that “Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy...”
What does “ownership” mean in this context? I believe it means possession of control of most of the economic flows of the global economy – possession which is backed up by a combination of private and government power. As an example, if you need software to enable a computer to perform certain tasks, and if that software can be had from only one vendor, and if that vendor allows you access to the software only under the terms of a legally enforceable rental agreement which prevents you from owning the software outright, then that vendor's claim on you counts as an element of the vendor's “wealth.” To put it another way, if the only way you can have food is by growing the food on land that is enforceably claimed by another, and if in order to grow your food, you must pay rent or become a slave to this other, then the claim this other person has on you counts as an element of his “wealth.” Now let's say that this “other” wants to own all the land on Earth, and you can get some idea of the predicament that the “non-owners” find themselves facing. Of course, you can decide that you are too poor to enjoy the luxury of computing, in which case the software vendor “loses money.” But it's kind of hard to voluntarily decide that you're too poor to eat.
Now, these uber-“owners” – are they some secret, secretive, anonymous, unidentifiable cabal? Not hardly. The researchers who produced the Oxfam studies I have cited used data from the Forbes Magazine's annual list of the world's richest 500 people. Here is the 2014 list, if anyone is interested. Do you want to know who benefited from (and most likely paid for) the Citizens United verdict handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court? Do you want to know who bought and paid for the current crop of U.S. representatives and senators, along with state governors and legislators, judges (both Federal, State, county and municipal), news outlets and other media, school boards, and other instruments of power? Do you want to know who is responsible for the hard turn toward fascism now occurring in the United States and its English-speaking vassals, and in Europe? Or who is now pushing the governments of the U.S. and Europe to ratify the TTIP? According to Oxfam and Forbes Magazine, you don't have to look for secret handshakes, occult signs or mumbled passwords. The responsible parties are hiding in plain sight.
Why then can't most of us see them? Why do we go looking for secret cabals instead? As far as those of us in the English-speaking world, I think the answer is twofold. First, most of us are taught from birth to admire these people. Second, we are taught to emulate them. The teaching is oft subtle, oft blatant, and ever-present. And it has a definite effect. I am thinking just now of the book Every Man's Battle by Stephen Arterburn, et al., in which the authors spoke of how much American media are saturated by sexual content (because sex $ell$!), and how constant exposure to sexually saturated media destabilizes American morality. Arterburn is an author who writes for the American evangelical market. But Arterburn and company probably haven't thought too much about how much more American media are saturated with appeals to our lust for money and material possessions, nor has he thought about how much money-lust has penetrated the mainstream American evangelical church. Consider charlatans like Dave Ramsey and his “Financial Peace University” (“Live like nobody else now, so you can live like nobody else later!”), or the Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson, whose book is a case of one of the few times the American evangelical church started a fad that went secular instead of becoming swept up in fads that started secular and went religious.
But it gets even better, as we look beyond American evangelicalism to see how secular America teaches us to want to get rich. Think of the impact of game shows on the American psyche. Those who are old enough to remember will probably say that Let's Make A Deal was one of the finest examples of selling greed to hapless children parked in front of a TV screen. Consider all the rags-to-riches stories to which we are exposed in this country. Consider all the gossip magazines next to the checkout stands of most supermarkets. Consider the pervasiveness of state lotteries. The lotteries are especially interesting, in that they are the most blatant example of a zero-sum game (namely, if one person wins, everybody else loses). And the large numbers of people who buy lottery tickets show that many of us are not much better than drowning rats in a laboratory psychology experiment, who, when we see one rat being rescued out of a vat full of thousands of rats, will each struggle to make sure that we are the next rat to be rescued by the experimenters, rather than making other arrangements for our own rescue to the extent that we can.
In short, we are taught to be greedy, and to look at the world's richest people, not as the rotten people they actually are, but as people who have “made it” – people who inhabit a place we'd like to arrive at some day. They become for us the embodiment of the “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love” which have been instilled in us. Rather than being revolted by these people or their methods, we have become like them – in kind, though not in degree. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I'll begin this post with yet another metaphor.
The behavior of nearly all physical systems can be modeled by systems of differential equations. Solving these equations as a function of some independent system variable allows for prediction of how the physical system responds to variations in a particular system input. One problem with differential equations is that all but the simplest of them are quite hard to solve. Therefore a system modeler is always on the lookout for tricks and tools to simplify the solution of differential equations.
One such tool is the Laplace transform, by which linear differential equations can be turned into algebraic equations. These algebraic equations can be easily manipulated to determine those functions which are solutions of the original differential equations describing the physical system in question. These algebraic equations can, in fact, be combined into a transfer function which describes the behavior of the physical system. This transfer function is usually written as a factored polynomial expression with a polynomial numerator and a polynomial denominator, like this:
The numbers z1, z2, etc. are called the zeros of the transfer function, and the numbers p1, p2, etc. are called the poles of the transfer function. The poles and zeros are complex numbers of the form a+jb, where j equals the square root of -1. For any pole or zero, the number b can be equal to zero, in which the pole or zero is entirely real. If the number a equals zero, then the pole or zero has no real part, and the physical system is marginally stable. If the number a is positive, the system is unstable – that is, in response to a finite change in a system input, the system output grows without bound until the system destroys itself. When any of the poles of the system transfer function have a positive real part, we say that these poles are on the right half of the control plane, signifying that the system is unstable. One way to make an unstable system stable is to add a negative feedback loop which counteracts the tendency of the system output to grow without bound.
Many social systems behave in the same way as physical systems modeled by differential equations, in that there is some element of instability for which we must compensate by adding a feedback loop to prevent the system from destroying itself. From whence the instability? From the people who make up the social system – “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied; and a man's eyes are never satisfied.” (Proverbs 27:20) The cravings of each of us require checks and balances, lest by the unrestrained exercise of those cravings we destroy both ourselves and the social systems of which we are a part.
This realization has guided the formation of enduring social structures, including societies, communities and cultures that last over the long run. The members of such social units realize that the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the collective are linked, and that they must be balanced in a healthy way. Therefore, the members of such communities recognize that there must be necessary curbs on the pursuit of individual happiness. A good summary term to describe this connectedness is the Bantu word ubuntu, the meaning of which has been summarized as follows: “I am because we are.”
Looking at social systems in this way enables us to see that the United States was an unstable social experiment from the very start. The American revolution, financed and led by wealthy and wealth-loving upper-class colonists, was an affirmation of “...inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...” The underpinnings of this affirmation were, among other things, the writings of John Locke, who believed that the role of the government should be limited solely to protection of private “property”, defined as a person's “life, liberty and estate.” To put it another way, “...all are entitled to lead a free life in the pursuit of happiness, but how they get there is up to them. The pursuit is that of an individual, not of a larger force.” (Cogan, Clio's Psyche, June 2011).
Wealthy people – especially those with a Western mindset – can be quite selfish; thus the emphasis on an individual pursuit in the society created by the wealthy former colonists, a society which was dominated by what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “crass individualism” and narrow self-interest: “...[I see] an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.” (de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840).
That quote is from a portion of de Tocqueville's work where he describes how democracy might slide into despotism. I think there were some things which de Tocqueville might not have anticipated (such as how such a society might slide into narcissism); yet I submit that his quote describes the logical outgrowth of a society built on the individual pursuit of happiness without regard for how each person's pursuit might affect the larger collective. In the United States, therefore, the necessary feedback loop of being forced to consider the consequences of one's individual pursuits on the health and welfare of others was greatly weakened from the start.
This has led to a society which, after only a few generations, produced a number of holders of great concentrations of economic power, people whose actions therefore had a strongly disproportionate and frequently negative effect on the health of the entire community. On multiple occasions, the holders of such wealth and power successfully fought off the efforts of the community to rein in that power by appealing to “the free market ideal,” and the rights granted to men by “natural law,” the chief right being the “inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the unrestrained actions of these people led to frequent system crashes and painful reboots where the ability of individuals to amass large concentrations of economic power was temporarily curtailed. The social system called the U.S.A. was able to recover after each crash because this country still had a large economically exploitable base of natural resources.
Now we are facing what may possibly be the mother of all crashes, and instead of rediscovering our connectedness to each other, many in the U.S. are addicted to right-wing demagogues who want to remove all community restraints on the exercise of individual “rights.” Some of these people are favorites of some members of the “peak oil/collapse” scene. I am thinking of those who agree that our government has become a corrupt oligarchy, those who decry the capture of the government by big business, and who put forward people like Pat Buchanan and Ron and Rand Paul as potential saviors. They even quote Ron Paul publicly wringing his hands over the power big business has at all levels of government. What these people are not sharp enough to realize is that the solution proposed by Buchanan and the Pauls and people like them is to remove all government restraint over the individual pursuit of whatever makes each of us happy.
Such a removal is sold as a means to guarantee that each of us has a crack at becoming a self-made Horatio Alger story millionaire or billionaire. Yet the truth is that the world's dwindling store of remaining wealth has been concentrated in so few hands that in the aftermath of the removal of all government restraint, the free-for-all competition for what's left will be a zero-sum game in which those who were already the fattest predators win and most of the rest of us get gobbled up. Afterward, we will find ourselves being ruled solely by naked corporate power. (Imagine, for instance, your children daily pledging allegiance to the flag of Microsoft.) And then the system will crash, because its owners did not recognize the limits to growth, the consequences of ruining the environment, or the outcome of devouring their own fellow human beings.
So to return to my original metaphor, I feel like a hostage passenger on a bus careening down a mountain dirt road. Someone has drained all the damping fluid out of the shock absorbers, thus removing all the negative feedback which would keep the bus from bouncing off the road as it hits bumps and ruts at a rate which coincides diabolically with the resonant frequency of the bus-shock absorber-tire system. Some of us are about to get car-sick (or is it bus-sick?), some of us are saying our prayers, and too many of us are trying to help the bus to crash by dancing in the aisle. And the bus driver has his pedal to the metal, and whoever gets to drive the bus after 2016 isn't likely to be any better.
After I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that I had completely neglected three men who comprise what is quite possibly the strongest example in recent memory of provoking national narcissistic rage. I am thinking of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. These three men were responsible for leaking (Manning and Snowden) and publishing (Assange) national secrets of the United States and Great Britain related to the efforts of those nations to rule the world. Manning blew the whistle on American war crimes committed in the name of the “War On Terror.” Assange had the temerity to publish the documents leaked by Manning. Snowden revealed the existence of the “Five Eyes” spy program by which the United States, in conjunction with the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, conducted electronic espionage and cyber-sabotage against almost every non-English-speaking government on earth.
These men did nothing worse than tell the truth about the aims, motives, and policies of the people in power in the United States and its “allies.” Yet the truth they told, combined with the response from those in power, reveals much about the pathology of those in power. In the aftermath of their revelations, these men became the targets of the sort of rage that narcissists express when they've been exposed, after their carefully constructed image of perfection and sainthood has been punctured. In this case, ad hominem attacks (“These men are traitors! Enemies of freedom! Sympathizers with terrorists!”) were combined with ad baculum attacks: “And as soon as we get our hands on these men, we will throw them IN JAIL!!! FOREVER!!!”
The truth they told also reveals the way the rest of the world is viewed by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States and its English-speaking allies. It appears that in the eyes of the “Five Eyes,” there is a “hierarchy of whiteness and privilege.” It is thus not surprising that the “Five Eyes” should watch China, Latin America (where, for instance, the NSA spied on the Brazilian oil firm Petrobras), and the Arab nations. But the “Five Eyes” were also gazing on the citizens and governments of Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Germany. What was their motivation? I believe it was to gather intelligence in order to guide U.S. attempts to open the economies of these countries (and of the European Union as a whole) to capture by American and British-owned multinational corporations in the name of free-market neoliberalism. From a business standpoint, such a goal makes sense. But what kind of pathology makes a person want to own and control all the economies of the world? The revelations of NSA spying showed the non-English European nations in yet one more way that they were not the “golden children” of the pathological family headed by the United States. The white privilege promulgated by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States is therefore not even for all white nations. Rather, the holders of that privilege want the rest of us to regard it as the sole possession of the English-speaking white nations.
And within the United States, the masters of white privilege are unwilling to share it even with all of the white citizens of the United States.
When one considers the expressions of the “white privilege” being pushed in this country, one can see clearly why that privilege is not intended even for all white people in this country. Consider the “patriarchy” movement now being pushed by many conservative, Republican-leaning, white male evangelical leaders. Or consider the violent underpinnings of the “men's rights movement.” Or consider the “manosphere” which harbors such movements, and which provided inspiration to Eliot Rodger's shooting spree in 2014. (See this and this.) The manosphere is also the source of death threats against women who have publicly objected to the portrayal of violence against women in online video games. Consider also the effect of Republican support for gun rights on domestic violence in this country , or Republican obstructionism in drafting domestic violence legislation for the military, or the conservative talking heads and politicians who want to repeal female suffrage. I could go on and on.
In other words, it has become quite clear that the holders of white privilege in this country intend that the chief holders of that privilege be white, English-speaking men. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are very frightened and angry now at the emergence of a multipolar world in which one person or group will not be able to lord themselves over another, but in which people will have to rely on politeness in order to get on with their fellow human beings - even within their own homes. One recent expression of that anger is the Tea Party, “a reflection of enormous anger, primarily of white conservative men. They are older, better educated, and economically better off than most Americans...” Many of the outbursts of violent or threatening rage among white Americans are a reflection of “whites' fears that this country and the world are on the verge of losing its Anglo-Saxon domination.” (Clio's Psyche, June 2011)
The formal expressions of that rage and fear come from the wealthy and the politically connected, whereas the trashiest expressions come from people like the man whose picture adorns this week's post. Either way, the voices of that rage and fear are not only white, but overwhelmingly male. They long for the "return" of a world which never quite existed, a world in which they imagine they could act like kings without regard to the effect of that kingship on others. Those who subscribe to the brand of white privilege I have described want the heavy costs of that privilege to be borne, not just by non-white people, or non-English speakers, but by their own women and children. This is hardly the way to construct an enduring society. It is, however, a good way to construct a society that self-destructs.
