" . . . the value structure that animates a culture determines ultimately, the health of the culture and the health of the people who participate in that culture."

ON THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE: A Dialogue with Michael L. Penn, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Franklin and Marshall College

PART II - THE IMPACT OF MARKET VALUES UPON HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
 
How does it impact upon the collective consciousness of a society when a society begins to devalue the intrinsic value of human life over a sustained period of time for market concerns?
 
In asking this question, I am thinking about a society that invests in incarcerating a significant number of certain citizens, a society where public schools are failing the poor and disenfranchised and where entertainment values devalue the intrinsic value of human life and human ingenuity.

MLP: Of course. Social psychologists have said for a long time that the way that a person values him or herself is a matter of social permission. In other words, a number of social psychologists have hit upon this idea that I come to understand my value by listening to what others say about my value. I do not come to an understanding of my value in a vacuum. I ask myself, what do other people say about me when they make assessments about my value? Based upon the collective assessments of those around me, I come to an understanding of who I am, what I am worth, what my value is, and so the idea would be that it is not just that products are on a value hierarchy, but we live in societies in which people are on a value hierarchy. So for example, at the top of the value hierarchy of the western world is the white male. The white male is at the top of the value hierarchy because other people can often be sacrificed; their well being, their health, their prosperity, their humanity can be sacrificed in order to ensure that the white male has a certain level of comfort, notoriety, esteem, respect, lives in a certain kind of neighborhood, etc. So, in effect, in particular types of societies, and here again I am referring to the western world, not only are objects used in order to increase the value of certain people, but people are used in order to increase the value of other human beings. Now, of course, you talk a lot about free market economics. Capitalism and Marxism are both based upon the fundamental idea that the highest value is fundamentally material.

KRM: Are there any virtues in these particular "isms"?

MLP: The idea of marxism as I understand it was to equalize wealth to affirm the fundamental oneness of humanity. This is a noble goal. But the problem was that it said that the highest value, the most important thing for society to do is to create this structure no matter what. In other words, human beings could be sacrificed in order to create that structure. The structure was more important than human beings. Capitalism similarly said that the market economy is more important than the human beings that function and live and have their being by the functioning of that market economy. So capitalism basically says that human beings can be sacrificed for the sake of the well being of the capitalist system. In other words, the highest value is not in capitalism human beings, and not in Marxism human beings, but rather the system itself that is designed to perpetuate itself over sometimes maimed bodies and disillusioned lives. Basically these systems are willing to use human beings as fodder, as food, as energy for the perpetuation of the health of the system.

KRM: Now, obviously with respect to definitely capitalism, because there are those that would say that Marxism has been defeated given the end of the Soviet regime, in order for these systems to have been maintained in human history, people had to acquiesce to those systems.

MLP: These are very, very short-lived systems. Marxism and capitalism, in terms of human history, represent almost no time in history. They are systems that have existed for very short periods. Marxism has already collapsed and indicated its failure to realize its own vision, and capitalism is very, very young when compared to other forms of market economy.

KRM: Well, when one looks at capitalism, particularly as it is practiced in the American psyche, it promotes a belief system that anyone can be successful in this system. But while that ideology is being promoted, what is always hidden to maintain that system is the necessity of structural inequality.

MLP: Why do you think that structural inequalities are necessitated by capitalism?

KRM: I don't know if I think structural inequalities are necessitated by capitalism. I think that one of the inherent qualities of capitalism is a pervasive existence of structural inequality. I think that there are times in history . . .

MLP: But, is there something about capitalism in your understanding which inevitably results in gross disparities in wealth?

KRM: Absolutely.

MLP: Okay, tell me a little about that. I agree with you, but I want to understand and see it from your point of view.

KRM: Well, just looking at America today, or the world because we have to think globally in the year 2001. We see a tremendous disparity and concentration of wealth. We see declining levels of wage and yet we see corporations just gathering enormous profits. I have read published reports which state corporate executives' salaries have increased up to 400% in the last decade or so. Yet, on the other hand, we see more and more workers in temporary employment, more and more independent contractors. We see people no longer staying in jobs for long periods of time and we see stagnating wages and weakened labor unions. It is very little, I think, that a working person or a person of middle class can take for granted in America. The sense that there will be a safety net -- I don't think anyone believes in that any longer. Yet we see enormous concentrations of wealth among some people. What I am sensing is an enormous amount of insecurity amongst the masses of people. So, for me, it is very clear that the structural inequality that I believe always exist in capitalism, is now clearly out of sync, unresponsive and unaccountable to most people.

MLP: I think you are absolutely right if you look at the emergence of capitalism from the developmental point of view. As you may know, my thinking is that individuals go through different stages of development: infancy, childhood, adolescence and then they arrive at maturity. Societies also have different stages of development. If you think about the role of capitalism at a particular stage in human development, it played a very important role. In other words, when a group of people, when a society has very, very little resource in the way of enterprise, you need pioneers to take huge risks in the hope of receiving huge gains in the name of that society in order to build industries. The industries that they build redound to the well being of that society. For example, when Ford built the Ford Motor Company, that was a capitalist move, but it completely transformed the environment in which the Ford Company existed and then in fact transformed the entire world. That transformation was quite good because people that were living at subsistence levels suddenly had the economic capacity to buy fundamental things like toilets and plumbing, and they basically moved from a rural outback context to a context which they could raise their families with a lot less labor, had much more freedom for thinking and much more freedom for studying. So the entire society evolved because people like Ford and Carnegie Mellon were willing to invest their time and energy in the development of huge mega-industrial and -financial complexes and we all benefited from it. But now we have arrived at a stage in which we have to ask ourselves whether our concerns are valid given the new configuration, given the fact that the world has been transformed by capitalism (in many respects in some very, very positive ways). Now we have to ask ourselves whether capitalism itself is the final expression of the human capacity to produce in community in a way that redounds to the good of all concerned. It is clearly the case that the answer to that question is no. Capitalism is one stage in human evolutionary development, but we have arrived at a point in which it has shown its failure to answer many, many questions that need desperately to be answered. And so, we have to now explore new avenues or new systems of governance that keep what was positive about capitalism, but walk away from that which is fundamentally destructive or not helpful. So, I would see capitalism as an important step in the evolution of political economy, but not as the final incarnation of the ideal structure of government, in the same way that I think the way that democracy is presently practiced. It represented a very radical advancement, but is not the final frontier.

Part III