Capitalism As an Emotional Trigger - Book Recommendations?

January 31, 2018 8:20 AM

Need book rec's on the endless pursuit of money compared to other emotional triggers/substitutes like food, sex, self-inflicted pain, drugs, etc. More specifically: any work describing how capitalism as AN IDEA is as addicting/harmful to emotional development as food, drugs, sex addictions, etc. are as tangible objects/experiences.

I'm currently fascinated by the idea of "capitalism as addiction", i.e. chasing a money high, or if there's an emotional equivalent to eating disorders in people addicted to profit. What does "ecomonic bulimia"? manifest as?

posted by Lipstick Thespian to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Best answer: You might be interested in the book on which All the Money in the World was based, although it's more of a case study.
posted by praemunire at 8:32 AM on January 31, 2018

Best answer: This is it! Addiction by Design by Nina Dow Schüll -- an amazing ethnography of Vegas, the gambling industry, gamblers, capitalism.
posted by flourpot at 8:59 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Jonn Dos Passos U.S.A.
posted by bdc34 at 9:41 AM on January 31, 2018

Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us--and How to Fight Back. This is an updated edition; I read the original edition in 2002 or so.
posted by jocelmeow at 10:11 AM on January 31, 2018

Charlie Stross' recent talk/essay about corporations as an old form of AI touches on this a fair bit.
posted by terretu at 10:13 AM on January 31, 2018

I'm a big fan of Robert Sapolsky, who has written a lot about brain chemistry, including rewards and a bit on addiction. His Intro to Neuroscience lectures at Stanford are on youtube and I recommend them. I think the one on depression discusses dopamine. His newest book, Behave, is a review of how brain chemistry works and then his thoughts on things like free will. It's fairly academic, but there's no test, so plow on, because you will learn a lot about how the brain works, how rewards work. It's very much the global approach to understanding things like emotional triggers, but I have enjoyed everything I've read or watched by him, and it helps me understand humans like nothing else does.
posted by theora55 at 11:22 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising talks about the 8-circuit model of human behavior, and where money attaches to that:

As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money".

He goes on to point out some examples of how this plays out in society:

Back in the real world, the tickets called "money" are the biosurvival bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex aberration, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin.

(That statement helped me understand a whole lot of the casual antisemitism I occasionally see, and why it's so hard to eliminate. Most people want to believe that some elite group is controlling all the important resources; it means both that the universe isn't arbitrary and random in how they're handed out, and that it's not their own fault for not being more successful.)

The book was first published in 1983 - some of it is very outdated. (It recommends getting access to a computer as part of one of its exercises.) It doesn't spend a lot of time talking about money, and I think none specifically about capitalism, but it does a great job of going over (one model of) how societies wind up almost worshiping concepts and structures that are, by any rational analysis, both inefficient and hostile to a lot of their members.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:10 PM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]