Never Enough

By Laura Barcella, AlterNet. Posted August 26, 2005.

In American Mania: When More is Not Enough, renowned psychiatrist Dr. Peter C. Whybrow skillfully and sensitively critiques the mess America has made of its consumer culture.

What have we become? According to Whybrow’s scientific and philosophical analyses, we’ve devolved into a nation of overindulging, overstimulated flakes addicted to easy access and instant gratification.

Dr. Whybrow argues that our seemingly interminable quest for more -- more money, more power, more toys, more cars -- has in fact become a form of clinical mania marked by symptoms such as anxiety, depression and obesity.

To avoid suffering a collective mental breakdown, Whybrow implores us to stop focusing on things and instead turn our attention to people -- family, friends and community. It's a familiar refrain, but one that clearly needs repeating: If we are to be happy, Americans must stop superficially striving, and learn to prioritize people over products.

Dr. Whybrow spoke with AlterNet from his office in Los Angeles.

AlterNet: In your book, you write that America's "migrant spirit" plays a key role in the development of our culture's mania. Can you explain that idea for those who haven't read the book?

b>The idea of American mania is that we are drawn into frenzied activity largely by instinctual strivings. This is very natural, and keeps us alive. But the migrant has this striving to an even greater degree than the average person -- if you think about what it is that drives most of us, it's curiosity, it's self-preservation, and also social ambition. These are the three fundamental aspects of what drives individuals and what drives all market societies.

In America, one of the reasons we find the market so compelling and why we're so good at it is that most of us came from somewhere else. Only 2 percent of the world's population actually moves hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they were born; most people die within 50 miles of where they were born, believe it or not.

We're a collection of survivalists; we're a collection of people who are very curious, very assertive, able to figure out what to do with little, to make the best of things, and so on and so forth.

We've built ourselves this wonderful culture -- this wonderful material pleasure palace -- and we're not quite sure how to stop. We've discovered an aberration of the human spirit a little earlier than most other countries -- but everybody's catching up, slowly.

What do you think is the scariest symptom of America's collective frenzy for more, more, more?

I think the scariest part is that we have not started to question it as a nation. Lots of individuals have started to question it, and that's partly why the book has become so popular. But we have to think through what it is that we're doing to ourselves.

Take food, for example -- instinctually we love to eat ... salt; we love fat. And much of the food that we have available to us contains those things; we just overeat and do very bad things to ourselves.

The same is true in terms of our curiosity for information. We can inundate ourselves 24 hours a day now with electronic systems, and all of these things tend to actually push us to the edge of our sociological tolerance.

People are not supposed to eat all day and take no exercise. It's very bad for the human body, and you eventually end up developing Type II diabetes. And if you don't know how to control your time and the technology in your life, you can rapidly become anxious because you worry that you're missing something.

The other thing which is very evident, though some people don't even see it as a behavioral problem, and which you read about everyday in the newspapers, is that people become essentially seduced into engaging in practices which are not good for them.

I just got an email the other day from a person that'd been caught up in the whole dot-com craziness, and [he had] done some "creative accounting" in one of the companies. He realized later -- when he was caught, and with terrible remorse -- that he'd destroyed his life.

But the idea that one needs more -- which is driven in part by social ambition -- makes many people forget the reality of the world, which is, of course, that happiness doesn't come from just material acquisition, whether that means more food, or more information, or more money. It comes from a totally different source: the way in which you spend your life with other people.

What would be the worst possible outcome if Americans continued down the path we're on right now?

Well, on the individual level, which is the way the book is pitched, we will find a rising level of these sorts of disorders that I was just talking about. But I think the greed that we see will become much more individualistic, and much less socially involved. That will begin to slowly destroy the next generation of people, because the way we learn how to live in a society is from others. And if everybody is totally individualistic, we're not going to learn.

But perhaps even more importantly, [we] will find that the economy will begin to collapse, because the signs are already out there. We are consuming too much; we're going well beyond our ability to finance it. We're the biggest debtor in the world now, and a lot of the world economy is based on American consumerism.

Laura Barcella is AlterNet's front page editor.

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