Failing to Act on the Paradigm Shift: A Form of Dysfunctional Passivity

Listening to President Obama's speech last night I was struck by two things. The theatrics were excellent, though his presentation did include a few verbal stumbles, and the content was incredible.  Our current economic crisis was germinated by excessive borrowing of artificially cheap money and came to fruition when we discovered that once called upon to pay back the massive sums we have been living on for the last 25 years, too many people and businesses were not in position to do so.  To then hear the President offer essentially another campaign speech promising to have the government take care of all sorts of extremely expensive problems felt a little unreal. 

There is a particular type of patient I often see in the clinic who has arrived there in a particular, predictable way.  This patient is middle class and has a history of full time employment but has recently fallen on hard times.  He, or she, arrives at the clinic in a state of despair, on the verge of losing their apartments, in serious financial difficulty.  Their problems are identified as beginning when they lost their job yet upon further investigation, that is hardly the fill story.  Very often they recognized their jobs were at risk long before arriving at the clinic yet could not overcome a type of passivity that led them to behave as if nothing was ever going to change.  They could not or would not change their behavior even when their behavior was no longer functional or adaptive.  For example, they could see that their company was cutting back, that their jobs were insecure, yet continued going into the office everyday, making only the most vague and cursory attempts to look for alternative work.  They felt a lassitude that is inadequately diagnosed as depression but is more correctly thought of as a dysfunctional passivity (which can be attended by depression, of course.)  By the time they arrive at the clinic, they would typically be 6-12 months out of work, with no insurance, and thoroughly defeated.  Although they are treated as if they are depressed and often gain some symptomatic relief, in reality their dysfunction started well before their depressive symptoms appeared; their problems began when they assumed that nothing would ever change in their lives even as they could see the writing on the wall.

Many of these people simply felt that they were unprepared to face making major changes in their lives and simply continued to exist as if such changes would never be necessary.  And, the changes were not necessary, until having lost their jobs and having maxed out their credit cards, with eviction notices in their mailbox, they suddenly notice they are depressed and need to be rescued.

I do not fault Barack Obama for acting as if nothing has changed even when we are facing an economic disruption that appears to heralds a paradigm shift in the global economy.

  After all, Barack Obama was elected on a platform that clearly promised to return us to a past that appears through the haze of nostalgia as if it worked well.  He quite clearly suggested that the last 8 years of President Bush represented a break form history and anyone paying the least bit of attention would understand that he was offering to become our Caretaker-in-chief and take care of all those who found themselves, always through no fault of their own, in trouble.  He was duly elected promising to spend an immense amount of money and nothing in the present crisis atmosphere is going to deter him from spending all that he can.  Those Conservatives and Libertarians who convinced themselves he would be fiscally responsible were fooling themselves.

The sad fact is that our economy was based on borrowing ever increasing sums of money and buying ever enlarging quantities of things.  We now are faced with starting to pay back that debt and a majority of Americans are not yet ready to face the music.  It seems ot me there are a limited number of ways we can emerge from this economic crisis.

We can continue to borrow and then inflate our currency so that we repay our lenders with devalued money.  I doubt the numbers can work for long on this outcome.

We can slash spending enough to begin to stop accumulating more debt; that way lies depression of the economic sort as well as the psychological type.

Our technology can lead to exponential improvements in productivity, with a concomitant decrease in scarcity, effectively causing money and debts to be meaningless.  This requires a belief that the nanotech singularity will arrive much sooner than even the most optimistic believe.

Or we muddle through in deepening pain and distress for the next several years until the global economy finds a new, stable equilibrium form which growth can emerge.

Option 1, to basically continue doing what we have done for the last 25 years but at an even more mammoth scale, seems like the worst possible option.  Maybe we can borrow our way out of debt; if so, I would explect to see lots of people taking on more debt; it doesn't seem to be happening yet, but through the power of President Obama's words, I expect to see an uptick in borrowing any day now. In any event, this is what the country has chosen and now we will get to see how it works out.   I hope it works better for our country than for the people I see in the clinic.