Speaking of "Century of the Self"....

excerpts from:

Only in America Could Misery Be Turned Into a Commodity

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com
http://www.alternet.org/story/126345/

• You need not be Marcus or R.D. Lang to feel the stress, depression, boredom and loneliness permeating everyday life up there in Gringolia. But to get an overview, it does help to be a couple thousand miles outside the place. Kind of like being high in the stands at the racetrack with binoculars rather than down at the rail next to the paddock.

• I used to think it was just some melancholic germ of my own that made me see a slowly increasing American alienation, anxiety and inner sadness over the span of my 62 years. Now however, I'm pretty convinced there is a national pathology at work, one that author Arthur Barsky called the "pathology of American normalcy." Sounds accurate to me.

• The pathology of Americanness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state.

• But who'd have guessed (psychology) would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

• After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession's best interests that it treats us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society's corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives.

• Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely, alienated "treatment" for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves.

• The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity.

• In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms.

• The American Psychological Association's initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime's torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

• The entire machinery of education, social work, psychology and medicine are meshed (though the practitioners would stoutly deny it) and help hold firm the class line in this country.

• Given the economic and societal breakdown now under way and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (what is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it's bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur.

• And what I see, based upon my own experience and watching that of others, is that alienation and the pain of utter aloneness is in the rootstock of nearly all psychic malady, excepting the clearly organic. If when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we eventually come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness.
  

• We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?), which have always been among us, although never in such strength.
  

• The night winds are rising and with them comforting assurance that The Machine is not everything ... indeed, not anything by the light of these indifferent stars.

  The Full Monty : http://www.alternet.org/story/126345/

and in fact Century Of The Self would be a good watch at this point...

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

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