American Mania: When More Is Not Enough

Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough”, W.W.Norton, 2005, 263 pp plus 64pp notes

Author, Peter C. Whybrow, is the director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA.  His book draws on scientific case studies which describe the American cultural transition from a socioeconomic order built on the comfort of a personal relationship with people such as the butcher and the banker to an impersonal commercial world driven by automated credit card transactions and the ATM machine.  Young American two-worker couples (especially those with young children) are exhibiting epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency which they accept as part of everyday existence. American’s are genetically predisposed to be risk takers because of our self-selection as migrants (other than Indians, none of our ancestors have been here more than 300 years).  In any population, about 2% are curious enough, restless enough, and adventurous enough to migrate.  America’s population is predominantly composed of this risk-taking migrant group.  This predisposition has served us well until it has finally led to manic symptoms.

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  To want more is a basic human instinct, one that has been essential tour survival.  It was our hunger for better things, and the intelligence to imagine them, that gave us mastery over the dangerous and depriving environment in which we evolved, and it was that same hunger that first propelled us forward in the search for a promised land.  Having achieved something akin to El Dorado in contemporary American society, however, we now find ourselves in the confusing position of falling victim to our own acquisitive ambition.

Pg. 7:  Adam Smith’s economic philosophy was predicated on a dynamic balance between commercial liberty and a set of social structures that are rapidly eroding in America.  Smith worried that human envy and our tendency toward compulsive craving, if left unchecked, would destroy the empathic feeling and neighborly concerns that are essential to his economic model and a free market’s successful operation.  But Smith took comfort in the fellowship and social constraint that he considered inherent in the tightly knit communities characteristic of the eighteenth century.  Experience has confirmed that small markets do produce their own constraint and rational order, founded as they are on an interlocking system of self-interested exchange.

Pg. 9:  Whereas much of the cultural cohesion of Europe is drawn from a communal sense of place and history, America’s national identity is held together by dreams of individual freedom, property, and material betterment.  Successive immigrant waves have infused America with new energy and fresh ideas, and with this commercial advantage the nation is now undisputed as the world’s economic leader.

Pg. 14:  The compelling attraction of laissez-faire commerce is that it harnesses the competitive human instincts for self-preservation, particularly curiosity and self-reward, and promotes through a division of labor those who are innovative and mobile in their adaptation to market forces.  This is the truth that Adam Smith recognized in his economic philosophy a century before Darwin published his theory of evolution, founded on similar ideas about competition and survival. 

Pg. 24:  Despite our nation’s extraordinary achievements and our technological wizardry—at the millennium the average hour of American effort was approximately twenty-five times more productive than it had been in 1850—numerous surveys make it clear that Americans are working longer hours, giving less time to their families, and plowing ever deeper into debt.

Pg. 29:  Adam Smith’s theory of economics is firmly grounded in the biology of human behavior.  He was the first to rationalize human instinctual desire within the practical economic framework of the market place (at least in the marketplace prevalent in the 18^th century).

Pg. 44:  Between 2001 and 2003 approximately 3 million jobs were lost from the American economy, many from manufacturing.

Pg. 58:  In 1831 Tocqueville observed American behavior and noted that “In Europe we habitually regard a restless spirit, a moderate desire for wealth, and an extreme love of independence as great social dangers, but precisely these things assure a long and peaceful future in the American republics.” 

Pg. 106:  Seduced by the novelty and the opportunities afforded by our wealth, we have passed beyond need and fallen into an addictive striving for more: for more money, more speed, more house, more car, more food, more choice and more power … here lies the nightmarish paradox of the American dream: in our striving for more, we are discovering a miss-match between the wealth of goods and the technology-rich environment we have created and the biological limits of who we are as evolved creatures of our planet.

Pg. 108:  For most of human history the speed of innovation was slow and the social impact was gradual.  Take, for example, the plowshare.  The evolution of this simple tool occurred over several hundred years.  Agricultural practice adjusted slowly to the changes, each innovative step was measured in human generations.  Then, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the pace picked up.  Technological innovation began to drive social trends and to synchronize national economies.  In America canals and steam power initiated the first economic boom, while railroads, steel manufacturing and the telegraph triggered the second.  So it was with the automobile and the widespread use of electricity during the 1920s, before air travel and microelectronics emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.  Progressively the cycle of technical innovation has shortened from generations, to years, and now—with the coming of telecommunication satellites and chip technology—to a matter of months. 

Pg. 127:  In Adam Smith’s vision of a market society, greed is held in check by social pressure and, if all else fails, by regulatory policies such as those that have been slowly dismantled in America since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism. 

Pg. 152:  The human animal is ideally equipped for sustained physical activity and survival under frugal circumstances.  Our body metabolism is finely tuned to precisely control blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and numerous other physiological parameters within lower limits of tolerance, but few bodily systems are devoted to the upper limits of tolerance and to the control of excess.  Humans are confused by excess in all its forms, including food.  Diligently we eat what is placed before us, and if the plate gets bigger, we eat more. 

Pg. 187:  The evidence is now clear.  An overindulgence in self and celebrity seeds greed and social mania, that a reduction in exercise and a high-calorie diet seeds obesity, and that time-hunger and demand-driven environments seed anxiety—confirm a growing mismatch in American life between who we are as evolved creatures and the social environment that we have built for ourselves.  As a nation driven by the workaholic migrant temperament, we have discovered first what those who live in other industrialized nations are just beginning to learn: when it comes to technical innovation, human ingenuity is capable of building environments that are so addictive to our ancient instinct for self-reward that we can make ourselves sick—pushing the physiology of mind and body to the limits of its tolerance, and beyond. This is the American paradox—the paradox of prosperity.

Pg. 204:  The powerful corporate voices that dominate the global marketplace are now concentrated within the boardrooms of a few hundred companies, about 40 percent of which are American.  We have entered a new age of mercantilism.  This domination of today’s international commerce by the megacorporation in many respects is the latest phase in the continued evolution of the mercantile trading that Adam Smith so abhorred in the eighteenth century.  For better than two hundred years, from the sixteenth century until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the feuding nation states of Europe and their merchant adventurers fought to establish trading empires and to dominate and expanding world market.  Their methods differed, but the goals were similar to those of the megacorporation’s of today: to exploit the world’s markets, natural resources, and labor pool to the advantage of their own dominion. 

Pg. 239:  The average citizen is now relentlessly besieged with information that does little to inform beyond its commercial content; everything, it seems, has a commercial attached and inserted that you cannot get around unless you turn it off or leave.