What are the economics of trauma, healing and enoughness?

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What are the economics of trauma, healing and enoughness?

My Australian friend Tirrania Suhood recently referred me to an excellent article on economic dynamics that are driving personal, community, national and global degradation through the systemic generation of trauma and addiction.  

I’ve been familiar with many of these dynamics for years, but haven’t seen them presented as clearly and briefly as they are here in “Rattus Economicus” by Mike Dowson. I decided to share it with you here for two reasons beyond its communicative capacity: (1) it covers a lot of ground covered by Vanessa Andreotti’s work on “coloniality/modernity” (which I’ve been exploring deeply for most of the last half-year) and (2) it clarifies some of the reasons I need to pay more attention to trauma and addiction in my co-intelligence and wise democracy work.  Trauma and addiction are sadly neglected and I’m seeing them emerging all around me as topics of focus by many colleagues.

An Economic Turning Point

Early in his article, Dowson highlights how, in the mid-20th century, post-World War Two global economic and governance systems were reconfigured in ways that established the US’s global dominance while seeking to shift international competition from war into economic rivalries and partnerships.  Global social engineers believed that in the new arrangements, “historical adversaries would become partners, and a ‘rising tide’ of prosperity would ‘lift all boats.’ …. 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”, along with a new, more inclusive middle class.

But this system had – and has – deep harms embedded in it.  Here, Dowson’s analysis strongly complements the work of Andreotti (on “hospicing modernity”) and Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef (on needs-based economic development and addictive economics).  

Close examination by these scholars reveals that our much-lauded modernist material abundance had – and has – a shallowness and hollowness to it, as well as a profoundly harmful dark side.  Millions of people who produce and distribute our modern abundance become physically, mentally and spiritually unwell – which ironically leads them to seek relief through consuming more of its goods, services, and privileges.  Unfortunately for them – and for most of us and the natural world – most of this consumption consists in what Max-Neef calls “pseudosatisfiers”. 

Pseudosatisfiers are designed to give us hits of certain potent hormones – dopamine, cortisol, serotonin and oxytocin, all of which are clearly analyzed by both Dowson and Andreotti – while leaving us feeling empty and hungry for more.  We see in this the driving dynamics of addiction.  In other words, the consumer culture fosters addictions of all kinds – to drugs, money, experience, consumption, novelty, status, sex, ideology, and SO much more.  Furthermore, the capacity to generate addictive responses is increasingly and intentionally DESIGNED INTO modern products and services and into their marketing and use (e.g., here and here).  We can see this going on in everything from clickbait, social media and entertainment to junk food, fashion and tech innovation.  We always want more. 

Of course, the incentives for magnifying this potent feedback loop are obvious: they cause us – the vast majority of us, at all levels of society – to buy more and more.  That, in turn, enriches companies and investors to accumulate more and more wealth with which they can protect their addictive economic racket and to gain more status and power (to which they are addicted) to make that racket even more potent.  

Dowson, like Andreotti, notes that people and natural systems colonized for extraction get degraded in this process – even while being manipulated to need greater access to its seeming gifts. Both privileged and exploited people are negatively impacted by this dynamic, albeit in different ways.  I find both Dowson and Andreotti convincingly tying modern culture and social systems – especially economic systems – to the mass generation of human addiction and trauma alongside ecosystemic degradation.

Real Needs

Continuing his analysis of the post-WW2 transformation of the West and all those who aspire to its material affluence, Dowson notes that “what people needed most in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict in history, beyond peace, stability, and reconstruction, was not 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.”  [Note how this is still going on…]

“For the architects of the new order, however, healing wasn’t a prime directive, nor even a recognised need….The best possible world [in their view] would be the simple sum of individual purchase decisions [i.e., the ongoing growth of GDP]. If people were able to fulfill acquisitive desires legally and unhindered, peace, stability, and wellbeing would surely follow. Revolutionary energy [e.g., the global Communist movement] would be dissipated, the mistakes of the past would be avoided, and over time their horrors [would be] forgotten.  [Unfortunately,] these assumptions were tragically flawed….”  

Dowson concludes that the majority of our “ills are strongly linked to [economically caused] trauma. In effect, a new kind of casualty had replaced those of the battlefield.”

At this point he notes how real human needs beyond mere survival can be deeply satisfied by the many healthy varieties of “contemplation, conviviality and creativity”. (Other views of fundamental needs can be found at “Grounding in Fundamental Needs”) He then describes how marketers became adept – with the help of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays – at getting people to associate acquiring profitable products with the fulfillment of such natural needs.  But this illusory association stimulates people’s addictive and thus ultimately unsatisfying purchasing impulses. And, as the postwar economy evolved, this dynamic was increasingly enabled by making credit more accessible. This seemingly beneficial development provided us “consumers” (as we became increasingly known) with more ways to go into debt at our expense, to the ultimate benefit of banks and corporations.  (Furthermore, as a planetary side effect, every new debt added to civilization’s need to expand its economic activities in order to pay back the growing interest, thus incentivizing the need for “endless growth” that’s driving us all towards systemic collapse by exceeding the ability of the planet to support it.)

“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….”

“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….”

Beyond Solutionizing

Dowson does not offer any direct solutions, merely economic enlightenment.  The economy he describes is, after all, operating broadly in the “complex adaptive system” that is the civilization we all live in.  The disasters and disruptions we are living through are natural responses of that system to regain some form of balance, albeit at the expense of so many of its participants.  This imbalanced effort at balance seems rooted in our profound misunderstanding – and thus distortion – of the role of basic needs in such a complex system.

Realizing this (with the help of Dowson, Andreotti and others), our transformational efforts might better reach beyond “solving the problem” to acknowledging how much trauma and addiction constitute that very system, and how much we participate in those dynamics both as generators and as victims (i.e., co-creators), just by going about our daily lives in it, with all its incentives and requirements. (I want to note here, in passing, both Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “systemic drivers of collapse” and Andreotti’s highlighting of externalized costs and invisibilized harms.)  As we recognize that (among our other similar entanglements in the metacrisis it is part of), we can begin to sense together what needs to be changed and/or co-created in, among and around us at sufficient depth to actually meet the reality of what is happening.

Appropriate responses will not come from mainstream leaders who are likewise embedded in this system without even realizing it.  Dowson writes, “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, a dizzying 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.”

Appropriate responses will necessarily arise from deeper understanding of our real needs in the context of the real needs of the Earth and, empowered by that perspective, staying grounded in what could actually satisfy those needs in deep, ongoing ways outside of our toxic cultural addiction to never-enoughness.

Another way of saying that is this: To reduce human impact, total global material extraction, processing, distribution, consumption and waste – especially of energy – will all need to shrink profoundly to meet planetary limits.  As part of that, both global GDP and global population will need to shrink substantially (ref William Catton’s OVERSHOOT).  If the trends described above continue, “developed” countries will seek to maintain their exorbitant material standards of living, while the quality and quantity of life in the “global south” and in marginalized communities everywhere will inevitably be sacrificed at tremendous cost to the whole system.  

So a key shift, as far as I can see, will necessarily feature those of us in developed countries – as the most exorbitant consumers – innovating and re-learning far-lower-impact livelihoods and lifestyles that dramatically improve life experience WHILE significantly reducing the culture’s over-developed consumption of materials and energy.  This would include individual and collective healing as well as becoming part of healthy living systems of all kinds.  (I call this “life-enhancing enoughnesss” and will explore it further in upcoming posts.)

I wonder if it’s time to wonder together:  What would be involved in making life-enhancing enoughness a central principle of ALL change efforts, increasing quality of life (of all sorts) in ways that minimize unnecessary harmful impacts on life (of all sorts, at all times)?

Coheartedly,
Tom

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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