CHAPTER 6

Heart failure

We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men.

—T. S. ELIOT

CINCINNATI—The blank, oppressive void facing the American consumer populace remains unfilled despite the recent launch of the revolutionary Swiffer dust-elimination system, sources reported Monday. The lightweight, easy-to-use Swiffer is the 275,894,973rd amazing new product to fail to fill the void—a vast, soul-crushing spiritual vacuum Americans of all ages face on a daily basis, with nowhere to turn and no way to escape.… Despite high hopes, the Swiffer has failed to imbue a sense of meaning and purpose in the lives of its users.

—FROM THE HUMOR NEWSPAPER THE ONION

The road switchbacks up, down, and around precipitous canyons, crosses raging streams, and winds by glassy lakes offering mirror images of an immense snow-covered volcano, the main attraction in Washington State’s Mount Rainier National Park. Each year, two million people drive the road. More than a few stop to admire the beautiful stone masonry, so perfectly in harmony with the natural setting, that forms the guardrails for the road or the graceful arches of its many bridges. This is quality work, built to last, built for beauty as well as utility. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, hundreds of young men came to Mount Rainier—ordinary, unemployed working men, mostly from cities back east. Living in tent camps or barracks, they built many of the marvelous facilities that visitors to the park now take for granted. At a time when the dominant notion is that the government never does anything well, the work of the CCC at Mount Rainier and many other national parks provides something of a corrective.

The men’s work was laborious, performed in snow, sleet, or blazing sun, and their wages barely provided subsistence. Their accommodations were anything but plush, and they had little to entertain them except storytelling and card games. Most could carry all the possessions they owned in a single suitcase. Yet when the author Harry Boyte interviewed veterans of the CCC, he found that many looked back on those days as the best of their lives.

They’d forgotten the dirt, the strained muscles, the mosquito bites. But they remembered with deep fondness the camaraderie and the feeling they had that they were “building America,” creating work of true and lasting value that would be enjoyed by generations yet unborn. The sense of pride in their CCC accomplishments was still palpable sixty years later.¹

What the men of the CCC, and the countless other people who give to their communities have in common is the understanding that meaningful activity matters more than money and that, indeed, it is better to give than receive. They’ve learned that fulfillment comes from such efforts. But in our consumer society they are becoming an exception.

The more Americans fill their lives with things, the more they tell psychiatrists, pastors, friends, and family members that they feel empty inside. The more toys our kids have to play with, the more they complain of boredom. Two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ predicted they would feel that way. “You cannot serve both God and mammon [money],” Christ warned. What profit would it bring a person, he asked his followers (Matthew 16:26), were that person to gain the whole world but lose his soul? In the Age of Affluenza, that question is seldom asked, at least not publicly. It should be.

POVERTY OF THE SOUL

When Mother Teresa came to the United States to receive an honorary degree, she said, “This is the poorest place I’ve ever been in my life,” recounts Robert Seiple, the former director of World Vision, a Christian charity organization. “She wasn’t talking about economics, mutual funds, Wall Street, the ability to consume,” he adds. “She was talking about poverty of the soul.”²

Shortly before he died of a brain tumor, the Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater made a confession. “The ’80s,” he said, “were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty.” He warned that there was “a spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, a tumor of the soul.”³

Ironically, many contemporary “conservatives,” some of whom loudly profess their religious values, are devotees of the philosophy of an atheist, the Russian-born philosopher Ayn Rand, who in contrast to Mother Teresa (and Atwater at the end of his life), preached a doctrine of economic survival of the fittest, idolizing the self-made entrepreneur who crushes his rivals but from whom all blessings for workers ultimately flow. Rand, a near-deity for many Tea Party followers and for public figures as influential as Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan, proclaimed “the virtue of selfishness” and argued that government supports of any kind lead to sloth and weakness—and ultimately, the loss of freedom.

By contrast, Francis, the new Roman Catholic pope, finds such a philosophy of self-centeredness abhorrent. According to the pope, unfettered greed and consumerism of the type advocated by Rand has led people to believe that money is more important than anything else. “Unbridled capitalism has taught the logic of profit at any cost, of giving in order to receive, of exploitation without looking at the person,” said Francis. “The results of such attitudes can be seen in the crisis we are now living through.”⁴ The Dalai Lama recently expressed similar feelings.

Indeed, in all our great religious traditions, human beings are seen as having a purpose in life. Stripped to its essentials, it is to serve God by caring for God’s creations and our fellow human beings. Happy is the man or woman whose work and life energies serve that end, who finds a “calling” or “right livelihood” that allows his or her talents to serve the common good. In none of those traditions is purpose to be found in simply accumulating things, or power, or pleasure—or in “looking out for number one.”

One seldom hears work described as a calling anymore. Work may be “interesting” and “creative” or dull and boring. It may bring status or indifference—and not in any sense in relation to its real value. Our lives are disrupted far more severely when garbage collectors stop working than when ballplayers do. Work may bring great monetary rewards or bare subsistence. But we almost never ask what it means and what it serves. For most, though certainly not all, of us, if it makes money, that’s reason enough. Why do it? Simple. It pays.

UNDER THE SMILE BUTTONS

But millions of Americans do hunger for meaning. That’s what Michael Lerner, a rabbi and writer, found when he worked in a “stress clinic” for working families in Oakland, California. Along with his coworkers, Lerner originally “imagined that most Americans are motivated primarily by material self-interest. So we were surprised that these middle-class Americans often experience more stress from feeling that they are wasting their lives doing meaningless work than from feeling that they are not making enough money.”⁵

Lerner and his colleagues brought groups of working people from various occupations together to talk with each other about their lives. “At first, most of the people we talked to wanted to reassure us, as they assured their coworkers and friends, that everything was fine, that they were handling things well, that they never let stress get to them, and that their lives were good.” It was, he says, the kind of response that pollsters usually get when they ask people superficial questions about life satisfaction. But in time, as participants in the groups felt more comfortable being honest about their emotions, a different pattern of responses emerged.

“We found middle-income people deeply unhappy because they hunger to serve the common good and to contribute something with their talents and energies, yet find that their actual work gives them little opportunity to do so,” Lerner writes. “They often turn to demands for more money as a compensation for a life that otherwise feels frustrating and empty.”

“It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality, of much that is called work today,” wrote Studs Terkel in his best-seller Working. Perhaps it’s feelings such as those described by Lerner and Terkel that have led to one of the most disturbing of contemporary American statistics: The rate of clinical depression in the United States today is ten times what it was before 1945.⁶ Over any given year, nearly half of American adults suffer from clinical depression, anxiety disorders, or other mental illnesses. As Americans increasingly fall victim to affluenza, feelings of depression, anxiety, and lowered self-esteem are likely to become even more prevalent. Such a prediction finds scientific support in a series of recent studies carried out by two professors of psychology, Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. They compared individuals whose primary aspirations were financial with others who were oriented toward lives of community service and strong relationships with other people.⁷

Their conclusions were unequivocal: Those individuals for whom accumulating wealth was a primary aspiration “were associated with less self-actualization, less vitality, more depression and more anxiety.” Their studies, they wrote, “demonstrated the deleterious consequences of having money as an important guiding principle in life.”

CHANGING STUDENT VALUES

Kasser and Ryan’s studies confirm the wisdom of religious traditions that warn about the dangers of preoccupation with wealth. But such wisdom has been falling on deaf ears for quite some time now. In 1962, when Tom Hayden penned the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), he declared, “The main and transcending concern of the university must be the unfolding and refinement of the moral, aesthetic and logical capacities” to help students find “a moral meaning in life.”⁸

“Loneliness, estrangement and isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,” Hayden wrote. “These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.” During the ’60s, calls such as Hayden’s for a meaningful life of service to the world—responding in part to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask, rather, what you can do for your country”—inspired tens of thousands of students.

WHEN LEFT AND RIGHT AGREED

As with affluenza’s impact on families and children, critics of the psychic emptiness of the consumer lifestyle come most often from the political Left these days. But that wasn’t always so. Before Reagan, many conservatives hadn’t yet hitched their star completely to Ayn Rand–style free-market worship. Prominent conservative philosophers and economists were often as critical of consumerism as were leftists like Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that it leads to lives without meaning.

Wilhelm Röpke was one of the giants of traditional conservative economic thought. “Homo sapiens consumens loses sight of everything that goes to make up human happiness apart from money income and its transformation into goods,” Röpke wrote in 1957. Those who fall into the “keeping up with the Joneses” lifestyle, he argued, “lack the genuine and essentially nonmaterial conditions of simple human happiness. Their existence is empty, and they try to fill this emptiness somehow.”⁹

Long before Enron, WorldCom, and other scandals involving corporate greed, Röpke posed powerful questions about the moral direction of consumer society:

Are we not living in an economic world, or as R. H. Tawney says, in an “acquisitive society” which unleashes naked greed, fosters Machiavellian business methods and, indeed allows them to become the rule, drowns all higher motives in the “icy water of egotistical calculation” (to borrow from the Communist Manifesto), and lets people gain the world but lose their souls? Is there any more certain way of dessicating the soul of man than the habit of constantly thinking about money and what it can buy? Is there a more potent poison than our economic system’s all-pervasive commercialism?¹⁰

Can you imagine a conservative writing something like that today?

In his book A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Röpke pointed out (following Adam Smith) that in a capitalist society—which, as a conservative, he strongly supported—it is all the more important for each individual to ask questions about the moral value of his or her activities and not merely be carried along by market currents. Without such vigilance, he suggested, life would become hollow. “Life is not worth living,” he wrote, “if we exercise our profession only for the sake of material success and do not find in our calling an inner necessity and a meaning that transcends the mere earning of money, a meaning which gives our life dignity and strength.”¹¹

STANDARDIZED PEOPLE

Perhaps the best explanation of how the overblown pursuit of material aims leads to meaningless, perpetually bored lives was provided by another conservative, the philosopher Ernest van den Haag. First, he pointed out, mass production, which makes the universal consumer lifestyle possible, drives large numbers of people out of more varied occupations as artisans and small farmers and instead agglomerates them in factories, where the division of labor reduces the scope of their activities to a few repetitive motions. Their work offers neither variety nor control.

In time, their output is sufficient enough, and their organized demands effective enough, that they begin to share in the material fruits of their labor. But to provide the quantity of goods that makes that possible, they must accept mass-produced, and therefore standardized, products. “The benefits of mass production,” van den Haag wrote, “are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption.” Therefore, he argued, “failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end, the production of standardized things by persons also demands the production of standardized persons” [emphasis ours].¹²

De-individualization, the result of material progress itself, cannot help but strip life of both meaning and inherent interest. The worker-consumer is vaguely dissatisfied, restless, and bored, and these feelings are reinforced and enhanced by advertising, which deliberately attempts to exploit them by offering new products as a way out. Consumer products and the mass media—itself made possible only by ads for consumer products—”drown the shriek of unused capacities, of repressed individuality,” leaving us either “listless or perpetually restless,” declared van den Haag. The products and the media distract us from the soul’s cry for truly meaningful activities.

The individual who finds no opportunity for self-chosen, meaningful expression of inner resources and personality suffers, said van den Haag, “an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external world is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. The popular demand for ‘inside’ stories, for vicarious sharing of the private lives of ‘personalities’ rests on the craving for private life—even someone else’s—of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or at least no life that holds their interest.”¹³

What the bored person really craves is a meaningful, authentic life. The ads suggest that such a life comes in products or packaged commercial experiences. But religion and the science of psychology say it’s more likely to be found in such things as service to others, relationships with friends and family, connection with nature, and work of intrinsic moral value.

AFTER AFFLUENZA

Our technologically advanced culture offers opportunities for much more meaningful and creative lives than most of us lead. Our amazingly productive technologies could allow all of us to spend less time doing repetitive, standardized work, or work whose products bring us little pride, by allowing us to trade higher wages for reduced working hours.

Such choices would allow more time for freely chosen, voluntary, often unpaid work that enhances our relationships and communities and/or allows us to express more fully our talents and creativity. And such choices would allow us more time to find meaning and joy in the beauty and wonders of nature, in the delightful play of children, or in the restoration of our damaged environment. They would give us time to think about what really matters to us, and how we really want to use the remaining years of our lives.