IGNITING THE FIRE THAT CAN DELIVER A PROGRESSIVE DOUBLE WHAMMY
(The heretofore unrecognized relationship between income inequality and an epidemic of clinically significant depression)
IGNITING THE FIRE THAT CAN DELIVER A PROGRESSIVE DOUBLE WHAMMY
(The heretofore unrecognized relationship between income inequality and an epidemic of clinically significant depression)
By
David Gottfried
“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”
La Pasionaria, aka Dolores Ibarruri (Leftist leader of the Spanish Civil War)
Emotional Depression, clinically significant depression, and what we generally refer to as the blues has been rising. Many sources make this abundantly clear. Furthermore, the consumption of psychotropic medications, to combat depression, has become more and more prevalent. Nevertheless, the suicide rate is rising.
Years ago, therapists and psychiatrists tried to discern and uncover the underlying emotional causes of an emotional malady. However, that fell out of favor in the 1970’s when people succumbed to the fiction that almost all emotional maladies stemmed from biochemical aberrations in the patient.
(Of course, I fully accept that some emotional deviations can be caused by one’s abnormal biological constitution, but it is the height of illogic to assume that all emotional quirks have a biological cause or etiology.)
Because depression has been increasing even though more and more Americans take anti depressants – and this increase in depression predates Covid by many years -- I think we should unearth some of psychology’s allegedly quaint and fanciful theories regarding the causes of depression. I think psychologists, psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers have often buried the knowledge they once had as thoroughly as Stalin buried the legacy of Leon Trotsky.
Years ago, Doctors held that depression was caused by rage turned inwards, against oneself. A person may have been hurt, that person did not have the resources to rectify or avenge his loss, and that person, unable to strike out against his oppressor, strikes out against himself, plunging into a depression. I first became acquainted with this theory in Fritz Perl’s book, entitled, “Ego, Hunger and Aggression.” Other doctors are in accord and hold that depression strikes when a defeated person, unable to combat his assailant, turns his anger inwards.
(I have seen cases in which a depressed person cured his depression by striking out against his assailant, commercial or physical. Doctors have rarely advocated this remedy, akin to what the Law sometimes terms “self help,” because doctors, even when they are in private practice, to some extent practice public health, i.e., they advance the public’s interest in stability, not the patient’s interest in vindication and liberation.)
As depression has been rising, income inequality has been soaring. Since Reagan ascended to the throne, we have been hurtling back in time to the days of Charles Dickens. Most of the time, the mass media understates the problem as the Clintonite neo liberalism of so much of the so called progressive elite is corporatist and corrupt to the core.
I know brilliant, hard-working people who are not having children because they cannot afford them. I know brilliant, hard -working people who live on the fifth floor of rodent infested walk up apartments, which are no bigger than glorified prison cells, which rent for up to 3000 a month. I know college graduates, who are neither drug users nor psychotics, who live in dangerous, disgusting New York City homeless shelters. I believe that the growing pauperization of the American people is the cause of growing depression. Sometimes these people, unable to earn sufficient bread, get depressed. How dare psychiatry tell a depressed person that he must go on Prozac, which might impede his erections, which will further his feelings of worthlessness and make him kneel even lower before his boss, his landlord, his fuhrer. An ice pick would be much more helpful.
I propose a solution: Direct, furious, mass action to redistribute power and dollars. This may achieve two results: It may put more money in your pocket and it may ease depression. Depressed people will no longer sink into paralytic depressions. Depressed people will not turn their anger inward, taking it out on themselves. Instead they will inflict their anger on the culpable parties: On the realtors and the bosses and the drug companies that have been marauding and making mince meat of their lives.
I propose that we stop acting like frightened mousey members of what Nixon and Trump called the Silent Majority and start acting like, perhaps, the French. In 1968, the whole country went on strike and wages went up by 20 percent. (The French “May Movement” started out as a student movement without concrete economic demands but broadened into a national struggle for worker’s rights).
But we don’t have to go to Europe for radical inspiration. This country has had bouts of proletarian pugnaciousness that gave the rich and mighty many a black eye, In the Great Depression, while a judge was conducting a foreclosure hearing on an Iowan’s farm, the poverty stricken farmers, having had enough of the legalized theft of the Lying Law and Bastard Bankers, kidnapped the judge, rode him far from the court house, took off his clothes, threw him in a vat of hot tar and then threw him in a barn filled with feathers. (This, and other upheavals of poor people in the heartland, in the depression, is recounted in Arthur Schlesinger’s masterful history of the depression – and they are a useful counterweight to the claptrap of ahistorical “liberals” who believe the heartland is irredeemably red and that the princes of the Eastern Seaboard have a monopoly on progressive politics) Of course, some will decry the farmers’ rebellion with the cardinal tenet of the catechism of neo liberals: Violence never solves anything.
I remember, when I was a child, hearing Lyndon Johnson say, incessantly, that violence never solves anything. If that were the case, Mr. Johnson, why did you incinerate thousands of Vietnamese people with napalm. When we fought the Nazis, do you think we could have succeeded without violence, The state often says that violence never solves anything, but they only believe in non violence when we want to solve the problems the state, or other forces of oppression, instill. They staunchly support violence when it is used to kill a black man who sold cigarettes on the street, when a prisoner is raped and given HIV, or when a mentally disturbed person loses 50 or more IQ points because of their draconian and supposedly archaic “therapies.”
Of course, if everyone were to resort to violence to remedy the injustices he perceived, we might have anarchy. However, I think anarchy is preferable to a state wielded together in Jack-booted conformity intoxicated with dreams of conquest and extermination.
But I don’t want this essay to waft in the winds of wordy abstractions and quickly blow away, as durable as fairy dust in a Walt Disney special.
Making the Dream Real:
Do you have a rotten landlord. In New York, so many of them are Donald Trump wannabes, sneering, strutting, deceiving thieves who deserve all the wrath we can amass. If you have a rotten landlord, have a rent strike. If the great majority of the tenants in a building all decline to pay rent, the landlord might find it hard to evict all of them. Don’t you think the likes of Donald Trump deserve that humiliation. Don’t you think they should be badgered, beaten and terrified into abject, squirming submission.
Don’t you think workers should take matters into their own hands instead of waiting for a lily-livered Congress to do anything. In the 30’s, Detroit workers took over an autoplant in the course of a strike, and those destitute workers, three decades later, owned vacation homes. Perhaps office workers should take over the office space of the firms that enslave them and bring all work to a halt.
Of course, if only a few people do this, that saintly few will be savaged by the unscrupulous Law. But if thousands of people do it, we can instill crippling, all consuming fear into the miserly, malignant hearts of the scoundrels of Great Neck, of Scarsdale, of Gross Point and all the other citadels of undeserved wanton, wicked wealth.