Skip to main content

Clay Burell's Library tagged travel →  View Popular

15 Feb 09

Joe Bageant: A Commodity Called Misery

I'm so loving Bageant's Belize journals. They're stark, honest, and beautiful.

www.joebageant.com/...a-commodity-called-misery.html - Preview

psychology writing capitalism travel

  • the pathology of Americaness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state. The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized by authority since it was first openly broached in the Sixties. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things too in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind expanding drugs. And ever since then corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind numbing anti-depressants and the like, have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become. Not that I'm entirely opposed. As I've said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I'd be right there in line for my share. Hell, I'm an American -- instant gratification works for me too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain't enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: "Work with me here, guys!"

  • Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil -- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

    But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

  • 5 more annotations...

Gadling

  • Travellers' blog. - cburell on 2006-10-03

Seoul Tips

  • good alternative site
     - cburell on 2006-10-03
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »

Join Diigo