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 Is This a Culture We Can Afford to be Complacent About?
Lawrence S. Kubie
"A piece by Lawrence Kubie, a psychoanalyst. He wrote it in 1961 as an indictment of a culture that wants to sell you cars that go faster, cars that are bigger than you can use, and chromium and all of that nonsense, and its dangerous. But it's what gets marketed to us and what we get to worship. And he goes on to say, look I'm not saying that the communists can do it better, or the socialists can do it better. What I am saying is that we have to do something different because this culture is getting dangerous and we should do some thinking about that before we are driven to hell by the people who can market stuff so well."
Is this a culture that breads health?"
...Finally, we must consider our economy, increasingly gambling its success or failure on consumption by the instalment plan. Has anyone since Veblen asked what would happen to such an economy if the masked neurotic ingredients in human nature were by sudden magic to be eliminated? What would happen to the fashion cults, the beauty cults, the food and drink and tobacco cults with their exploitation of orality, the excretory cult, the cleanliness cults, the size cults, the height cults, the strip-tease cults? Consider the exploitation of hypochondriasis through the drug houses and even our more elite publishing houses. Take also the endless whetting of consumer craving, the exploitation of the "gimmes" of childhood by transmuting them into the "gimmes" of adult life. Consider the ministering to neurotic needs through size and power: the knight of old replaced by Casper Milquetoast in General Motors armour, complete with chromium, unneeded size, unused seating capacity, and a pointless illegal, and unusable capacity for speed. Or consider the search for happiness anywhere else than where one is, whether it is an adolescent with his hot-rod, or the travel industry selling vacations on the instalment plan.
To repeat, what would happen to our economy if we were to get well? And what does the exploitation of neurosis by so many forces in our culture do to the neurotic process itself? Is this a culture that breads health? Is this a culture that we can afford to be complacent about? Or have we allowed the enormous creative potential of private enterprise to be enslaved to neurotic processes in industry, exactly as the creative process in art, literature, music, even science, has become the slave of neurosis?
Lest we think that I am singling out our culture, our economy for attack, I repeat that I do not believe that human ingenuity has yet devised any political or economic system that does not exploit, intensify, and reward much that is neurotic (potentially even psychotic) in human nature. If the profit-driven economies exploit subtle manifestations of neurotic self-indulgence and short-term needs, so do totalitarian systems, whether Fascist or Communist, exploit power needs and power fantasies in an even more primitive fashion, rewarding the sadistic lusts and the paranoid components of human nature...
Excerpted with permission from an article entitled, The Eagle and The Ostrich, by Lawrence S. Kubie, MD, which appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 5, No. 2. August 1961. At the time of writing, Dr. Kubie was on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus), Yale.
"The economic freedom that makes an American electric kitchen does not lead to any greater happiness or wisdom; all it does is to allow more comfort , and this soon becomes accepted automatically and loses its emotional value.
The economic solution alone will never free the world from its hate and misery, its crime and scandal, its neuroses and diseases."
A.S. Neil
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