The Fallacy of Faith in a Future of More

The myth of the frontier is alive and well in the American psyche, thanks to which our paradigmatic president remains Calvin Coolidge with his timeless words, “the chief business of the American people is business.” To Americans as a collective, leisure is time wasted, rental is ownership deferred, limitation is technological lag, and death is a residual inconvenience waiting to be neutralized by scientific progress.

A future that is fundamentally about having more—more income, more objects, more years—cannot at any level integrate the idea of the finite. Failure becomes viewed as temporary setback, even as grounds for new opportunity. Anyone foolish enough to even wonder whether tomorrow promises the certainty of a better day is to be pitied and ignored. Who can doubt that there is wealth to be garnered and abundance waiting to be claimed?

These attitudinal proclivities function as psychological dominants at all levels of economic decision-making. They have particular bearing on how credit is viewed, independent of the bearer being a Wall Street behemoth packaging an investment offering or a recently arrived immigrant putting together a $10,000 deposit towards obtaining financing for a house. The fundamental principle underlying the idea of credit has to do with optimism about the future: indebtedness taken on today can be paid off tomorrow, either by growing prosperity or by additional debt.

Governed by the fantasy that increased wealth is inevitable, institutions and individuals lack the resources to manage declines. Here I am speaking less about insufficient

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assets than about the ability to rein in, pull back, and reduce exposure. Just as a large firm is endangered when there is no one interested in buying what it sells (regardless whether the object is a product or financial instrument), so a person assuming that there will always be someone ready to buy his land or car has no backup plan for what has become unexpectedly valueless in the marketplace.

Suddenly, with no more credit available, an implosion occurs. Psychologically, the way this shift manifests is in the retreat from manic expansiveness to frozen fear. The fear carries the awareness, however dimly perceived, that the stability of the system, resting as it does on a faith about continuity, is no sturdier than a house of cards. The immobility of depression applies its stranglehold on the individual psyche.

At this juncture, a revelation takes place, which is too visible to be dismissed. The active energy of the societal—particularly governmental—institutions turn to injecting life-blood (bailout funds) into failed companies that are deemed too large to go under. Never mind how mismanaged they have been, how irresponsible as caretakers of the monies they hold, they are treated like sacred cathedrals towards the maintenance of which the government offers high percentage tithes of taxpayer funds.

This orientation in the direction of institutional preservation comes at the expense of any real concern for the fate of private individuals. The typical employed person who made budgetary decisions founded on no more radical a basis than the continuity of employment, which had been assumed in the generation of his parents and who, when he loses his livelihood, is treated as though he had bet on the wrong horse or squandered his income on games of chance.

Any illusion about a social contract based on certain givens is shattered; size alone is shown to be the determiner of value. As the realization sets in for the individual who

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witnesses how little he matters in the economic scheme of things, the inward-turned anger of depression becomes partly externalized as anger about unfairness. The energy of seeking revenge comes forward, cohering as outrage against bonuses paid to executives of bankrupt organizations. Scapegoating energy takes hold as an outlet for rage, feckless and beside the point. Howls of protest and a scalp or two put neither food on the table nor medicine in the cabinet.

Easily lost in the dialogue concerning stabilization of the credit markets is the dark side of what transpires when credit will again become available to businesses and consumers. There will undoubtedly be new regulatory structures in place to control excess and fresh attempts to make the issuance of credit more responsible. Yet, one of the fundamental truths taught us by depth psychology is that ego-based structures remain penetrable to the influence of unconscious elements from the moment that the ego boundaries appear to have rigidified and gotten in the way of nascent greed. The next credit crisis may be mediated by different parameters, but the urge to make huge profits at no matter what human cost will surely reassert itself. These are battles which the rational mind can never win for long, since the creativity of new trickeries cannot indefinitely defer to order.

Finally, it is vital to remember that mythic patterns are enacted in the realm of collective life. Psychoanalytic theory is uniquely qualified to delineate their broad strokes. The stability of social systems—even when they serve the interests of a tiny minority—is founded on keeping those who have little in the perpetual fear that they will lose everything. It is simultaneously a version of the child’s fear of the all-powerful parent and of the patriarch devouring his children before they can overthrow him. In a moment of economic catastrophe that one might imagine would give rise to at least the occasional outburst of revolutionary fervor, business as usual remains the only dominant. Why revolt, after

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all, when there is always the lottery?

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