Category: Psychology

Protesting Economic Inequality

It may become an important historical phenomenon, or become a discard on the scrapheap of history.  There are people gathering all over the Western world to protest economic inequality.  The media tends to focus on the lack of clarity and singular purpose in their message.  Conservative media outlets portray the protesters as borderline communists.  Liberal media outlets portray the protesters as noble iconoclasts.  Neither interpretation is very accurate.

Corporate and institutional greed is painted as a particular sickness of our time, but it is hardly a new phenomenon.  Let us consider corporations and institutions to be private and governmental bodies (respectively) that initially fulfill the desire of a particular group.  Both institutions and corporations attempt to fulfill a particular social need; be it health, spirituality, security, shelter, food, et cetera.  As an institution ages, it increasingly fulfills the needs of its directors, at the expense of those it was designed to serve.  Institutions that begin their life in transparency become opaque with age; increasingly insular and jealous of their privileges.  Compare the Catholic church at the first ecumenical council in AD 325 with the what the church had become by the time of the inquisition(s)-twelve hundred years later.  Compare the French nation at the time of Charlemagne with French government by the time of Louis the fourteenth-fifteen hundred years later.

With an increase in population there is an automatic decrease in the personal control enjoyed by individual members.  With an increase in population there is a corresponding decrease in personal responsibility of the populace to the institution.  With an increase in the geographic distance between members and directors, there is a net decrease of the director’s personal responsibility to those that depend upon them.  If there is little chance that a member will have social contact with a director, the director will automatically have greater freedom to impose unpopular rules on the members.  Perhaps this is an emergent property of population growth upon the nature of institutions and corporations.  Perhaps it is an emergent sociopathic tendency of those who need to control others.

A loss of control tends to increase personal angst.  More than one commentator has used the word “angst” to describe the emotional tone of the protesters.  There is a palpable fear of the future; an anxiety over their children’s experience of the world.  If the current Western socioeconomic systems remain static, parents will fail to maintain the modern social compact with their children.  Each generation shall enjoy greater prosperity than the one preceding.  It is the largely unspoken social compact between parent and child in much of the Western world.  Over the last three years, an awareness of the individual’s lack of power and worth has become all to apparent.  People are increasingly confident that the next generation will be less prosperous than the last generation.  It is likely that this awareness has fueled the current protests.

Five hundred years ago, Thomas More wrote that “I see nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own advantage under the name and title of the commonwealth.  They invent and devise all ways and means by which they may keep without fear of losing all they have amassed by evil practices, and next to that may purchase as cheaply as possible and misuse the labour and toil of the poor.”  The same could be written a thousand years before in the Western world, and perhaps three thousand years before in the Eastern world.  From Socrates to Marx, great thinkers have pondered the sickness of social and economic inequality.  Socrates believed slaves and idle thinkers were indispensable to a republic, versus Marx who believed that both were evils unto themselves.  If two of the greatest thinkers in Western intellectual history are unable to agree on the ideal society, how can the media criticize a group of people in the park for failing to provide a solution?
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The solution is for all public institutions and private corporations to become more transparent and regulated by the members they serve.  Lewis Mumford wrote that,”any group that operates in secret…loses touch with reality by the very terms on which it operates.  What begins as the suppression of a critical opposition ends with the suppression of truth and the elimination of any alternative to the accepted policy, however patent its errors, however psychotic its plans, however fatal its commitments.”  This statement holds true for both the Catholic church during the Reformation and Lehman Brothers during the last financial crisis.  The directors of modern society, as in all past societies, have no motivation to change the system by which they profit.  It is unfortunate that society does not change with great ideas, rather it changes when the directors become fearful of the members.  Any system that does not impose constant scrutiny on its directors will find itself in the present situation.  Transparency and accountability are the answer.  The present protests are an indicator of frustration, not a process leading to a solution.  It can be taken for granted that imposing transparency and accountability will not be accomplished with the cooperation of the directors.  The issue is less what must be done, than how it will be done-if it will be done at all.  Perhaps Robert Crowley can summarize these thoughts better than the author.  He penned these eerily apt lines in the sixteenth century:

And this is a city in name but in deed

It is a pack of people that seek after meed (profit)

For officers and all do seek their own gain

But for the wealth of the Commons not one taketh pain.

And hell without order I may it well call

Where every man is for himself and no man for all.

Is it Nature or Nurture?

This famous phrase is often repeated in the halls of academia.  It has become particularly important since the discovery of DNA; nature’s mechanism to pass on traits to the next generation.  The question really asks to what degree are the traits we observe a product of DNA versus the environment.  Much like the mind and body, it is a dichotomy formed from two inseparable concepts.

Increasingly modern genetics has demonstrated how DNA is influenced by the environment.  Identical twins share the identical strands of DNA, yet exhibit unique traits as they grow older.  Proteins manufactured by the DNA template may encode information and influence subsequent protein transcription in ways as yet unknown.  In the early days of genetics, much of the DNA code was labelled “junk,” but subsequent research increasingly proves otherwise.  Moreover, the longevity of each cell has been shown to be influenced by the environment.  Cell death had been assumed to be programmed from birth, but it is now known that diet and lifestyle influence the core program.

On the other hand, the opposing process can be observed in the average American family.  Even though family members share a nearly identical environment, each person is physically and mentally unique.  Among identical twins, the inheritance of schizophrenia is only around fifty percent.  If one identical twin develops schizophrenia, there is a fifty percent chance the other will fall ill as well.  All other mental impairments, assumed to be congenital (from birth), exhibit less gene penetration than schizophrenia.  The good news is that there is no congenital mental problem that affects over fifty percent of identical twins.  Among nonidentical siblings, the incidence is always less than twenty five percent, which is what would be expected if both parents carried a recessive gene for a mental illness.  If the child of suspected genetic carriers is reared in a different environment from the family (adoption), then the percentage typically falls below statistical significance.
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Let us assume that schizophrenia is the one proven mental impairment that may be passed from parent to child.  Even when reared apart, identical twin children of schizophrenic parents still have a nearly fifty percent chance of developing schizophrenia.  Other psychological and neuropsychological impairments typically fade away when the identical twins are reared in different environments.  Nonspecific environmental influences have ruined many a doctoral thesis.  A genetic predisposition to develop a mental illness is just that; a slightly greater risk to develop a mental or cognitive impairment than the average person in the population.  Of equal or greater importance is the environment that surrounds and influences the genetic information.  A genetically schizophrenic person is less apt to express the maladaptive genes when reared in a supportive and minimally stressful environment.  Conversely, when a strong a man as Admiral Bird was isolated at the South Pole, he began to hear voices and see images that were nonexistent.

There is no material that is impervious to the environment, and our genes are no exception.  The direction of current research has amplified the extent to which nature and nurture are reciprocal influences, down to the molecular level.  The genetic potential of the human brain has allowed us to shape and control the environment; more than any other creature known to this planet.  The future of biochemical research will allow us to increasingly alter our own genetic programming.  At this juncture, the nurturing human environment is directly influencing nature. Perhaps it is not wise to mess with mother nature, as the old saying goes.  Messing with mother nature has, it must be admitted, put humans at the top of the food chain.  We humans will “mess” with anything we can get our hands on, and nature is certainly close at hand.  Let us hope that she declines to “mess” with us.