1. Capitalism promotes mental illness because Capitalism and Capitalist societies work to destroy all social relationships that are not related to profit making and employment. To spend time on activities that do not generate profit is inefficient and represents a loss of money. Since Grade School, when you were taken from your families and isolated in a room with strangers your own age, Capitalist societies are designed to make you a good corporate employee that has no significant outside allegiances in life to conflict with the work schedule.
As a result -- all your relationships are inherently competitive. In Grade School, you compete with other students for a grade. Even your hobbies are competitive -- competitive sports, competitive games, and group contests. After college, you compete with other graduates to get a job. As an employee, you compete with your coworkers to achieve promotion and sometimes to just keep your job. As an employee, you compete with other companies for market share. At no time in your entire life is competitive thought and competition itself, considered to be anything other than "good" and "right."
As a result -- you have no relationships that are not competitive. You have no relationships based on love, trust, empathy, and concern. All your relationships are exploitative and competitive. In this environment it is nearly impossible to be mentally healthy and happy or filled with love.
Occasionally, you will declare a "truce" and work cooperatively with other people if you all discern that it is in your own best interest to do so. But this is nothing like real empathy, love, or caring. Even your marriages are based on a similar "cooperative truce."
But at no time in your entire life in a Capitalist society is any real cooperative, empathetic, generative, generous, selfless giving, personal sacrifice. or genuine love actually rewarded or considered valuable. At no time in your life are the concepts of love, empathy, joy, peace, stillness, meditation, and non-violence emphasized or rewarded except for their accidental appearance in the family of origin and even there it is extremely rare.
You live in a network that is almost totally devoid of loving interactions. The primary social exchange is a financial transaction. Everyone you talk with is a competitor and you must be constantly vigilant. It is almost impossible to be "mentally healthy" in this type of watch-your-back, business person, legal contract environment.
There is no LOVE in America, only competition...
Capitalism promotes competition.
Competition promotes mental illness.
Therefore,
Capitalism promotes mental illness.
2. Capitalistic societies are inherently unstable -- filled with self cannibalizing institutions and organizations that are always competing for top dollar and market share. There is no reliable permanence of any feature of Capitalist society. Beware.
Even the value of the basic currency of interaction, i.e. "money," changes over time and is not dependably stable. Nothing is predictable, or reliable, in a Capitalistic society.
How can you find any stability in a world that changes suddenly and is inherently unpredictable?
For example:
When was the last time you used a pay phone? a public bathroom? a personal check?
a newspaper? a briefcase? a cloth napkin? a comb? a soft drink bottle? a bath?
When was the last time you went to a restaurant? the library? the doctors office? the dentist? a lawyer? the automobile mechanic? a church? a political function? a voting booth?
How many children from your childhood do you remember? How many friends do you have?
Capitalism promotes mental illness.
3. Curious note: If you read the blog Mad-in-America, they make a convincing case that the entire field of Psychiatry and the concept of "mental illness" itself is nothing but a huge corporate fraud. According to their well reasoned arguments -- there is no mental illness, just cultural conditioning. Real physical illnesses have an identifiable component of the body that is "broken" or not working properly. This can be verified by objective test. However, in "mental illness" there is no objective test. In "mental illness" there is no identifiable component of the body that is broken -- "mental illness" is a subjective assessment based on the "experts" personal opinion of your behavior. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE TEST OR MEASUREMENT OF ANY COMPONENT OF YOUR BODY THAT IS BROKEN. IT IS JUST AN OPINION.
One sixth of the population of the USA is currently taking powerful psychoactive drugs and anti depressants for a condition that has no objective means of identification or classification. In other words, "nothing is actually broken" -- except the relationships the person experiences. People are taking powerful psychoactive drugs for a condition that does not really exist.
Capitalism promotes mental illness, because mental illness itself does not really exist.
The classification of mental illness and the resulting voluntary, or involuntary, treatment is cultural definition and not a scientific description. There is nothing observable that is actually broken. There is no part of the body, or brain, that is observably dysfunctional or broken. It is only the behavior that is classified as "sick" or "ill" by subjective observation of a trained professional familiar with the standard protocol of the industry.
Therefore it seems that:
The classification of mental illness is a process that is used to enforce conformity of behavior and obedience to the normative instructions that are necessary to maximize profit in a "free market" economy. This classification of personalities, or "stigmatization" of people is used to control people and behavior. This is done because excessive diversity, or divergence from the norm, is disruptive to the process of maximizing profit (...and therefore should be discouraged).
In order to conform, and even prosper, we are forced to pretend to accept false behaviors as being natural. Eventually we do not really even know who we really are or what is our authentic and original own true self. We wake up and realize that we have been had. We are connected to nothing. We are nothing. We are lucky if we have money.
Capitalism promotes mental illness, because mental illness itself does not really exist. Mental Illness is a concept that is used to enforce conformity of behavior without possibility of dispute with authority.
Capitalism promotes mental illness.
copyright (c) 2018
William Schaeffer
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