"When there is a mismatch between the way you are living a life and the structure of meaning that tells you how to live a life ... it makes some sense to say that sometimes a person should be alienated. Given certain circumstances, alienation is the proper response."
-- Carl Elliott in his essay "Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless: Prozac and the American Dream"
By Joe Bageant
Carl Elliott gives the example of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. Sisyphus may be happier sweating under that rock with a stiff dose of Prozac, but it's still a damned rock and his life is still pointless, despite his improved sense of well-being and acceptance of what made him sick in the first place. Based upon my own experience, I may have to differ with Carl a bit on that one. Throw in 200 milligrams of Provigil and a decent opiate and even a rock becomes imbued with deep meaning.
At any rate, our regulating government only issues the good zippies to fighter pilots and night-scope stalkers in Iraq, and I suspect citizen dissatisfaction will have to get much worse before it rolls out the primo stuff for the rest of us. But let's not despair. Millions of Americans already gobble illegal mood-altering drugs or hammer the bong. There's still money to be made there, still dough on the table, and big pharma will eventually get around the current regulations, or have them changed.
Scratch the surface of a blissful consumer and often as not you find a person hollowed out by anxiety and hopelessness. I watch coworkers and good friends suffer -- to the extent they are still capable of feeling anything -- anxiety, learned helplessness, excess weight, job meaninglessness, all of which can supposedly be relieved by gulping down Prozac or something like it. Then in their newfound functionality, they suddenly realize they hate their dinnerware and are tired of all of their furniture, and that a little retail therapy is in order. I swear there seems to be a link between Prozac and shopping.
Call it retail therapy if you want. Call it affluence, however tenuous. I've practiced it and it does feel good, with or without Prozac (shopping is the only vice I have whipped in my life, other than cocaine and pussy worship.) But the American Psychiatric Association now recognizes being a shopaholic as a clinical disorder. Given that every solution in America must first and foremost be a consumer purchase, the anti-depressant Citalopram is recommended as a treatment for Compulsive Shopping Disorder. Thus we find that on one hand, shopping being touted by our present administration as a national virtue, a charm to ward off terrorist evil and economic collapse, and on the other hand shopping being described as a treatable disorder.
How compulsive does it have to be to be a disorder? How much is too much?
We are conditioned to believe that if we can manage to pay the minimum on the credit cards and not lose the house, then it's all OK. Living from payday to payday is an anxiety producing experience, which in turn, is pharmaceutically treatable, assuming you can hunt down and grasp the type of work that offers insurance. Nice how that works out. Work. Stress. Buy. Stress. Buy drugs for stress. Then get relaxed and shop as a leisure activity in unstressed consumer bliss while the insurance companies, held by the finance corporations of the new transnational elites, make billions.
Behind it all is capitalism's drive for endless growth, profits and absolute safety for the elites, which can never happen if the people are satisfied with what they already have. And surely capitalism never had any better raw material to work with than the American character. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his 1848 classic Democracy in America:
In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men, placed in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. Maybe it is the price you pay for living in a society based round not happiness per se, but its pursuit.
Alexis, ol' buddy, you were looking at the best of times. You ought to see us now.
Maybe you do.
