This is Your Brain on Capitalism

Saw this today in the Post, and suddenly understood the shape of things to come.
Jim

This is your brain on capitalism

Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Saturday, November 28, 2009



Drugs that reshape our character could become the defining industrial products of the century.

When Theodore Dalrymple practised psychiatry in Britain a few years ago he noticed that many of his indigent female patients lived sad lives, and looked rather sad, but never once complained of sadness. Instead, they told him they were depressed.

They had learned to speak the language. As he explained in one of his excellent magazine articles, his patients knew he had a pill to give them for depression whereas he could do nothing for sadness except suggest they re-organize their lives. In many cases he might have suggested they leave the abusive and neglectful men who were spreading melancholy in all directions. His patients didn't want to hear that.

They wanted pills, which he was able to provide.

In a sense, they understood the future of medicine better than he did. As a therapist, he imagined helping them work through life problems but science, public health services and pharmaceutical corporations were all moving elsewhere, away from talk therapy and toward the blossoming field of psychotropic drugs and the unfolding marvels of neuroscience.

Old-fashioned therapists still find good work to do but neuroscience has usurped the prestige that psychoanalysis and related forms of therapy possessed during the twentieth century. The neuroscientists have -- as C.P. Snow said about scientists in general in a famous lecture 50 years ago -- "the future in their bones." They have taught the world to regard joy as dopamine activity in the brain's reward centres and melancholy as serotonin deficiency.

The implications are large enough to reshape society and create a new economy, "Neurocapitalism." That's the title of a provocative article by Ewa Hess, a Zurich journalist, and Hennric Jokeit, a Zurich University neuropsychologist, in Merkur, a Berlin cultural review (kindly translated for those who don't read German by the excellent online Eurozine).

Psychotropic drugs are moving beyond curing the demonstrably sick. Increasingly, they are used by mainly healthy people to alter "character virtues," such as self-confidence and trust. Hess and Jokeit report that current medical journals go much farther, describing neuroscientific research into "love, hate, envy, Schadenfreude, mourning, altruism and lying." The expectation (and the reason for research funding) is that whatever neuroscientists identify can be modified by pharmaceuticals.

As Hess and Jokeit see it, psychotropic drugs could become the defining industrial products of this century. They choose the term "neurocapitalism" because the new drugs, in theory, answer the need of capitalism for more effective human beings and the need of individuals to make themselves successful in the marketplace.

Researchers are manipulating the nature of the human animal and challenging the very "self " at the core of human life. Almost everyone who touches this field understands that it raises delicate moral issues. Unfortunately, almost no one knows how to draw a line separating legitimate medical needs from purely frivolous desires. Where in the continuum would we place "neuro-enhancers" that propose to add years to a pilot's career or change someone from a B-to an A+ student? Drugs in this category can be rationalized as "compensatory" or "moderate enhancement," comparable to glasses worn to correct eyesight.




Even if medical ethicists could determine which drugs are legitimate and which are not, how would their judgment be enforced? Nation by nation? Through international treaties? It seems unlikely.

Hess and Jokeit, who have their misgivings about neuroscience and show no enthusiasm for capitalism, nevertheless point out that the freedom of individuals (as well as corporations) is involved. Pharmacological intervention expands the autonomy of people "to act in their own best interests or to their own detriment." That may turn out to be the most popular guiding principle; certainly it will have the drug companies behind it. It may be that medical ethics, confronted by unprecedented discoveries, lacking any relevant principles from the past, will never cobble together a moral structure it can apply to this largely unknowable science. Perhaps it is already happening much too fast.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

Corporations, and Serving the Common Weal

I sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of corporate propaganda that makes its way into the various media. The big drive now is to show how publicly minded various corporations are, by presenting them as major donors to community services groups and charities. Smoke and mirrors, folks.

Edward Abbey stated the problem succinctly when he said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
Corporations finance the election of governments, and, in turn, those elected serve not the people, but the corporations.
Corporations have decided to put chemicals in our foods so that the foods last longer, improving their bottom line, but playing havoc with the health of the world.
Corporations, once public outcry demanded it, removed DDT from use in the developed world, only to sell it in vast quantities to the developing world.
Corporations, not permitted to sell asbestos in Canada, still sell tonnes of the stuff to the developing world, and the Canadian government supports it.
Our fish stocks are decimated due to "corporate fishing," and our cattle and milk are so full of hormones that our daughters develop years earlier than previously.
Corporations sell us drugs, fast-tracked through the FDA and the oxymoronic "Health Canada" machine, whose lists of side effects are more dangerous than the ills they cure.
Corporations, using the propaganda machine of corporate television, tell us to consume, consume, consume, and never mind fiscal responsibility.
Corporations have left Canada and the USA to produce offshore (read China) where safety, and content, standards are non-existant, and our governments ignore the end products until public outcry forces them to chide, not the corporations, but the Chinese for permitting it. Corporations monopolise third world farming, forcing GM seed stocks upon farmers whose initial seed stocks were diverse and sustainable, resulting in a crop that needs more pesticides, and more chemicals to add to a depleted soil.

Renewal and sustainability is the way, folks, and yes, it is going to be difficult for us all. We will not be able to continue to live simply as consumers: we are too numerous, resources are too limited or dwindling, and we are taking toxic loads of pollutants into our bodies, through food, air, and water. Consider the following article that I lifted from the Web...google it yourselves. --

"What is the average life expectancy of Americans? For a long time it has been the low seventies for men and upper seventies for women. So it comes as a shock to learn that the average life expectancy for Americans has dropped to 69.3 years, according to the America's Health Rankings report, issued at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting.

This figure is exceeded by 28 other countries, including Britain, France and Germany and is about five years less than the life expectancy in Japan. According to Dr. Reed Tuckson, this dismal number reflects increasing obesity, fewer people quitting smoking (although only 20.8 percent of Americans smoke today, down from almost one-third in 1990), and increasing numbers of people without health insurance.

Officials made no mention of the increasing consumption of processed foods containing refined sweeteners, processed vegetable oils and toxic additives, and certainly did not allow even a whisper about the almost complete absence of nutrient-dense foods such as organ meats, shellfish and butterfat and eggs from grass-fed animals from the American diet."

Sigh! Time for the intellectual revolution, people. The industrial revolution has failed, and is killing us all.
Read the labels!
Follow the corporate money trails!
Time for a government of the people, for the people.

All of this is, of course, in the opinion of one tired old man, who regrets that it has taken him so long to read between the lines, to look beyond the advert, and to recognise that what a government does is not measured by what it says, but by what it does.

End of rant. Must adjust my meds.

A Meditation on Quantum Entanglement

"For almost a century, physicists have had in hand "the" theoretical framework of the known world—quantum mechanics. But whereas the world clearly comprises large complex systems, quantum mechanics is usually associated with the microworld of atoms and elementary particles, and is hardly ever considered as an underlying feature in our daily life.

This is even more pronounced for some of the seemingly weird predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, which asserts that the quantum state of physically separated objects is mutually and inextricably connected". -PhysicsToday.org

"Hinduism rejects the biblical account of divine Creation and instead accept forms of pantheism. Hindus believe that only Brahman exists, and all else is illusion (maya), including all creation. According to Hinduism, there is no start or finish of creation, only continuing successions of life and death. The soul (atman) of man is a "spark" of Brahman trapped in the physical body. Repeated lives or reincarnations (samsara) are required before the soul can be liberated (moksha) from the body. An individual's present life is determined by his efforts in previous lives (the law of karma), and the physical body is ultimately an illusion (maya). Bodies are usually cremated, and the soul goes to an intermediate state of punishment or reward before rebirth into another body. Reincarnations are experienced until karma has been removed and the individual soul is reabsorbed into Brahman. Freedom from infinite being and final self-realization of the truth (moksha) is the goal of existence. Yoga and meditation (especially raja-yoga) taught by a religious teacher (guru) is one way to attain moksha. The other paths for moksha are the way of works (karma marga), the way of knowledge (jnana marga), and the way of love and devotion (bhakti marga). Hinduism's fundamental goal is to escape the cycle of reincarnation, and thereby to erase the illusion of personal existence - eventually becoming one with Brahman".
http://www.allaboutreligion.org/transcendental-meditation.htm

A Meditation on Quantum Entanglement

Aum.
Flowing wisps of Self
dissolve:
egocentricity recedes,
lost in the Cosmic Now.

A vibration,
a pulse,
a profound sense of Balance,
of inclusion:
the arrival of Truth.

Within the peaceful vastness
the growing awareness
of Light:
countless tiny flames
acting as One,
coalescing,
joining,
uniting,
growing.

Awareness
of countless Chakra chimes
vibrating as One,
resonating with the Whole.
Belonging.
Becoming.
Being.
Now.