The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (38 page)

This inequality between job givers and job takers presumably explains why society is expected to shower the generous job givers with so many benefits, such as subsidies and tax write offs. In contrast,
social programs, directed at the people who actually do the work, seem to be nothing more than impositions by ungrateful wretches, who are trying to extort excessive benefits from the already overburdened taxpayer—a code word for the wealthy, who, following in the footsteps of Samuel Read, see themselves as the real creators of value.

The focus of this book has been the destructive nature of the relationship between capital and labor. The ingrained Procrustean perspective is doubly destructive in this respect. First, business fails to take advantage of, and even stifles, the potential of the working class. Second, the Procrustean ideology blinds much of society, including a good part of the working class, to the possibility of a different system, one that could allow for a more productive economy—and more important—a more fulfilling life.

Self-Imprisonment

Many working-class people have unconsciously accepted the Procrustean perspective that they should find their fulfillment as consumers, while putting up with their jobs as the necessary precondition of consumption. For workers, left without appropriate outlets for self-expression and drained by stressful work, consumptionism becomes a major vehicle of self-definition.

Consumption generally fails to provide lasting satisfaction. Instead, the initial pleasure is often fleeting, especially after the consumer sees advertisements for new-and-improved products or, worse, a neighbor with a better version. Satisfaction rapidly turns into dissatisfaction, creating an emotional emptiness. This emptiness feeds on itself, creating a craving for additional consumption.

Harriet Lerner, a noted psychologist, once observed, “Our society doesn’t promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn’t sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now.”
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This negativity becomes contagious. Lerner said that “people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves
tend to pass it on. I’m sure you’ve noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others, “This behavior often takes the form of outdoing others in consumption.”
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People’s attempt to self-medicate with consumptionism may improve the immediate performance of the economy by creating more demand for commodities, but at a cost of diminishing its long-term potential.

Continually chasing a better lifestyle puts many consumers in a precarious financial state that makes the hold of Procrusteanism even tighter. Any interruption in income—or just a slowdown in the rate of growth of income—can spell economic disaster. Such continual economic insecurity makes workers fearful. In this sense, consumptionism increases the vulnerability of workers to traumatization.

Even more corrosively, fear sometimes makes people more likely to crave authority. Whether or not this craving is operational, people come to feel unworthy and doubt their own capacities. Though they might be disgruntled about their personal condition, on a deeper level people seem to accept the status quo as inevitable, if not just, in effect, internalizing the Procrustean ethic by donning the invisible handcuffs.

Politically, people in such a state become vulnerable to the deadening mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” The idea of change, even when it might be in their self-interest, cannot overcome the underlying state of fearfulness. Besides, too many promises have already been broken. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

In contrast, those born in more favorable conditions come to see themselves as entitled to the privileges they enjoy. They rarely recognize how they have profited from the network of friends and family that have opened the corridors of power to them. Such people often learn to carry themselves in a way that effectively signals their status to the rest of the world. The confidence that they exude often intimidates some of the less fortunate.

This discouraging mindset induces many people to become disengaged, or worse, to collaborate in their own oppression. In some cases, people succumb to patterns of behavior that prevent them from enjoying even a working-class standard of living. For the most part, however, fearing the consequences of destitution, the great mass of the
population continues to perform the work necessary to fuel the same Procrustean economy that imprisons them.

Politically, the great challenge is to win the support of the majority of the population—those people who would stand to benefit the most from a progressive reorganization of society, but who still unquestioningly submit to Procrusteanism.

A Meritocracy of Fools

Unlike a crude caste system, the current social organization is partially permeable. A few exceptional people from the bottom manage to claw their way up to a relatively high position. These infrequent successes of a few token people of merit reinforce the existing class system by giving an appearance of fairness. The lesson for the less fortunate is that challenges to the system are unjustified: they too could stand among the victors, if only they had made the right decisions in their lives.

More often than not, modern institutions identify merit by looking for characteristics associated with upper-class life. Once people become conditioned to accept this pecking order, the system takes on the appearance of a meritocracy. In effect, appealing to merit as a guiding principle can be a pretense for keeping existing class structures in place.

In fact, the word
meritocracy
is of relatively recent vintage. In 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term in a satiric novel,
The Rise of the Meritocracy
, set in 2033. Looking back, Young reported that he was “sadly disappointed” that the term has now taken on favorable connotations. Young admits:

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others…. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
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Young’s worst fears seem to have been realized. Those on the top appear to naturally inhabit their elevated perches; those further down also appear to belong just where they are. Given this mindset, polite society naturally dismisses questions about outsized incomes enjoyed by the privileged class as impertinent. Such rewards seem suitable for those who have risen to the pinnacle of an aristocracy of talent.

Nobody dares to expect the same harsh Procrustean demands of the corporate elite that this privileged group would routinely impose on everybody else. The public may delight in seeing celebrities experience embarrassment or upon rare occasions fall into hard times, but corporate leaders rarely fall under the harsh scrutiny of the public, possibly because most are too boring to interest many people.

This permissive attitude toward corporate leaders might make some sense in those cases when a chief executive officer successfully leads a corporation to greater profits without harming too many people, but as we have seen, CEOs still profit handsomely even when getting fired for poor performance or worse.

Every few decades, after a major economic downturn reveals waves of grotesque corporate behavior, few executives are brought to account. After the crisis subsides, once again the executives can do what they want as long as the financial markets are satisfied.

Merit or Class?

Virtually everybody accepts that some form of real meritocracy is desirable; however, nobody has ever succeeded in explaining just how a meritocracy should function. People have an easier time declaring that success (in the absence of government interference) ultimately depends upon merit.

Just what constitutes merit? Are those in a position of power qualified to determine how merit should be determined? How can society ensure that everybody has the same opportunity to develop their merit, say, through good education? In fact, society today has an
almost hereditary system in which children of the affluent have easy access to the elite universities, which then presumably certify merit.
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For the most part, talent and a strong work ethic alone are rarely enough to ensure success. Successful people almost invariably have received a crucial boost from some preexisting connections. The importance of such connections becomes obvious when well-connected people, no matter how undeserving, enjoy meteoric success.

The fate of these people brings to mind the biblical injunction (Deuteronomy 8:17):

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”

Despite the admonition of the Bible, the illusory merit of such people becomes self-confirming; at that same time it sends a signal of futility to others. The result is that many exceptionally talented people fall between the cracks. Poverty and other social pressures discourage many talented people from even trying to develop their abilities. Some of those left at the bottom of the scale internalize the perverted values of the system, becoming convinced that their fate in life is inevitable, or even well deserved.

Of course, many cases do exist in which very bright, hardworking people are able to leverage their talents and opportunities into positions of authority. These exceptions serve to make the existing social pyramid less vulnerable to questions about fairness.

Even if society could somehow reach a unanimous agreement about how to measure merit, it would still face another serious question: How should the rewards associated with various degrees of merit be distributed? For example, everybody could earn the same income, though positions associated with greater merit might offer more prestige. Alternatively, one could argue that great differences in income are necessary to induce people to prepare themselves to function effectively in positions of high responsibility. These differentials could
range from modest amounts to the spectacular gaps between salary levels found in contemporary society.

In the United States today, rewards are certainly not commensurate with contributions to society. How could anyone rationally explain why schoolteachers or nurses earn less than advertising executives or stockbrokers?

In short, on closer inspection, many of those people who rise to the top of their professions frequently do not seem to be any more distinguished than their peers. A cynic might even label our present world a
kakistocracy
, a Greek term that means government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. Although that verdict might be too extreme, the absurd distortions that Procrusteanism imposes on society should be beyond dispute.

Obviously, leaders of society would be unlikely to appreciate being compared with Procrustes. Many would protest that they generously donate time and money to charitable causes. Unfortunately, some of these causes, but certainly not all, are devoted to nothing more than instilling Procrustean values in the less fortunate. What is more, the wealth that the successful people donate—more often than not with fanfare—owes a great deal to the sweat of others, just as the hard work of others makes possible the free time our affluent philanthropists devote to their charities.

Such displays of conscience may help some people view themselves as philanthropists, a word that implies “lovers of people.” But the love that these people shower on others seems less admirable when put in a larger context. Donating substantial amounts of money on Sunday may be eye-catching, but with few exceptions such donations typically constitute a relatively small share of the wealth that was accumulated from the work of others during the rest of the week.

Any connection between their own privileges and the undesirable conditions of the less fortunate is lost on the successful. But, as Adam Smith’s friend Lord Kames once observed, “If there were no luxury, there would be no poor.”
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Not only do the masses perform the work that makes the affluence of the rich possible, but their low incomes leave more of the economic pie for the elites.

Powerful politicians and business leaders often brag about their rise from poverty, real or imagined. They almost invariably attribute their success to their own hard work and determination, qualities they find lacking among the poor. They avoid seeing themselves as part of a larger process in which the fortunes of a few depend upon the misfortunes of the many.

Of course, extraordinarily hard work was essential for many people who rose from unfavorable circumstances, although their good fortune almost invariably owed much to a strong dose of luck and/or a helping hand from the higher ranks. These exceptions hardly prove the nonexistence of the harsh forces that consign many people to a particular class. Nonetheless, many people use such cases to hammer home a strong ideological lesson: those who stay mired in the lower reaches of society owe their fate to their own personal deficiencies. Given that the majority supposedly lacks the qualities to ascend beyond their proletarian existence, how could such people ever function effectively in an environment that offered them more freedom?

Crooked Timber

Isaiah Berlin, a widely respected scholar, attempted to give a philosophical luster to Procrusteanism by insisting that people are too imperfect to flourish without the imposition of discipline. Berlin repeatedly cited Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, who used a metaphor from forestry:

It is just as with the trees in the forest, which need each other, for in seeking to take in the air and sunlight from each other, each obtains a beautiful, straight shape, while those that grow in freedom and separate from one another branch out randomly, and are stunted, bent, and twisted.
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