What's happening at the moment in America is borderline panic and madness. Some money experts in Wall Street have apparently succeeded in skimming enough money out of the system to ensure themselves and their families maharaja dynasties for at least several generations. They accomplished this by searching out vulnerabilities in our over-glorified "free-market" system and then feeding on lucre ultimately sucked out of the savings accounts of the middle class.
The deed was made possible by deliberate deregulation of the financial system. Question: Would you like to see the income sheets of the people who did the deliberate deregulation? Do you think they've lost money or made money?
I will agree that a free-market economy, otherwise called capitalism, is so far the best economic system anyone has devised, at least for innovation and material growth. But if it's not carefully regulated, such a system has a strong tendency to be exploited by parasites, free-riders, financial snake-oil hawkers, and anyone else who believes that fooling other people to get their money is an honorable way of life.
Running a free-market economy unregulated in a culture that sustains corporate and Wall Street free-riders, money-suckers, and other parasites is not just ridiculous academic economic theory, it's plain crazy.
Americans have allowed themselves to be brain-washed into craziness -- our American group madness.
The most important question is why does it happen?
The idea of group madness suggests a "group mind". Does such a thing exist? It's an old idea advanced by the 19th century French sociologist Gustav Le Bon, an idea more or less abandoned during the 20th century as individual psychology became the central focus of the social sciences. Is the idea of group mind a useful concept?
To discuss this, we need to get serious. Individuals in a cohesive group are linked by visual and verbal cues that effectively connect their brains, and these connections are an overlay on top of the subcortical (evolutionary old brain) universal structures that are less prone to variation by individual experience than are neocortical (evolutionary new brain) structures.
So the idea of group mind is not completely a fallacious reification of metaphor--it's a way of looking at a cohesive group.
All humans are already linked by old-brain universals, and in a cohesive group, the linkage is even stronger and more pervasive.
So what is a "cohesive group"? It's any collection of individuals that are communicating with each other by any means. Three strangers on a subway platform who are ignoring each other do not constitute a cohesive group. But if these strangers are looking at each other, staring at each other, assessing each other, there begins to be cohesiveness as a consequence of nonverbal communication linking these individuals by stimuli and brain activity. How much cohesiveness depends on the differences between them: social class, education, ethnicity, and so on.
Given old-brain evolutionary similarities, and new-brain functional similarities produced by communication and common experience, a group can behave almost as a unit.
All of this reduces to a simple idea: There is indeed such a thing as collective behavior, and if you get a handle on how it works you can manipulate large groups of people to suit your own ends. Did more than 900 people in Jonestown commit suicide as individuals or as a group? Do you want a list of people and tyrants and movements and religions that have succeeded at manipulating large groups of people into collective behavior?
Put Wall Street and free-market hacks on the list. Think about buzzwords that are used to manipulate minds: socialism, free-enterprise, free market, bleeding heart liberals, socialized medicine, lefties, commies, Marlboro men, shining city on the hill--the buzzwords are endless, each one a manipulating screw twisted into the American mind.
Which brings us back to the current economic crisis. How did it happen? It happened because as a society we sit on the edge of group madness and all the vulnerabilities that madness implies. Americans are vulnerable to manipulative "messages" via television, movies, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and mere rumor. Americans are herded, driven like cattle from birth to death, cattle driven by cowboys.
It seems the cowboys have brainwashed the cattle into thinking that they too are cowboys -- what psychiatrists call a delusion.
Our group madness is delusional. The glory of an unregulated free-market is a delusion. The idea that all the boys and girls in Wall Street are both honest and smart is a delusion. The idea that for ordinary Americans buying stocks is "investing" rather than gambling is a delusion. The idea that in a country of 300 million people it's possible to run health care as a profit-making enterprise is a delusion. Our delusions form an endless list.
Is it another delusion to think we can easily escape the hole we're in? We will find out if printing new money (lots of it) to solve this crisis will fix the system or turn America into Argentina.