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 The Link Between Psychopathy and Consumerism
E.T. Barker, MD
I see consumerism as the most powerful cultural force making us create childcare arrangements -- institutionalized group daycare for children under three -- which risk making partial psychopaths.
Having been manipulated into near terminally ill consumer addicts, the necessity to end very legitimate inequities in our patriarchal society has been seen as only possible by other childcare arrangements. In my opinion that has been a dangerous tactical miscalculation in the legitimate war against arbitrary male dominance. And I see consumerism and psychopathy linked in that if a person develops as a psychopath or partial psychopath, their capacity to form intimate, trusting mutually satisfying relationships with other human beings is impaired.
The emptiness of the hollow man must be filled, and consumerism has learned how. So those two illness dovetail. Someone once said that a culture creates the kind of people it needs. Maybe we're into haphazard nurturing relationships in the first three years of the lives of our children so they will grow up with an insatiable need to shop till they drop.
If you're unable to obtain satisfaction from BEING, which is based on love and the pleasure of sharing then the HAVING MODE, as Eric Fromm put it, is your only choice:
"The HAVING MODE, concentrates on material possession, acquisitiveness, power, and aggression and is the basis of such universal evils as greed, envy, and violence..."
Psychopathy and Consumerism need and feed each other.
"...It is consumerism that drives the 80-hour work week. When we learn that consumer goods don't make us happy, we can get serious about reconstructing the family. The critical question in America, at the end of the 20th century, is whether consumption or the family will prevail."
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