Recession America, the Myth of Gyges, and History: the Quest for the Beatific Cure
Recession America, the Myth of Gyges, and History: the Quest for the Beatific Cure
This paper contributes ideas to our society’s general efforts to get out of its current economic and social malaise. I argue that although a moderate (healthy) level of consumer spending should always be welcome to jumpstart a sputtering economy, this crisis moment also represents an opportunity to positively reconstruct our society by purging from our lifestyles any traces of excessive mass consumption based on credit borrowing, for this recession, as President Obama has often pointed out, also fundamentally represents spiritual crisis, a momentary dent in America’s self-confidence, whose origins we can trace to an ethos of excess long promoted by the corporate technocrats of a consumerist way of life built on personal deficit spending and basically regressive financial speculative schemes. Any good solution to such a crisis must involve restoring the health of our will to power by returning to an even more authentic American way of life whose central features are moral but also emotional and material self-restraint. We find a model of this project of renewal in the story of Gyges, a Greek mythological figure whose will became horribly transfigured by excess but who eventually would recover his spiritual health, Plato tells us, by committing himself to ideals that help him become someone better than himself. That is, we try not to analogize our problematic with that of Plato but to seek a philosophical framework that will help us understand and successfully deal with our present economic and moral predicaments. Gyges’s story is all the more appropriate because solving the social and cultural trauma we now face requires an act of freedom on our part, that is, an ability to assert our autonomy over this crisis’ debilitating political, ideological, and socioeconomic effects.
Plato’s myth of Gyges demonstrates how the subversion of a solid moral discourse becomes the main mechanism for restoring and the health and strength of that moral discourse. Plato relies on the myth to strengthen his own argument for justice by giving his opponents the means to subvert it. Indeed on the one hand the myth becomes an internal means by which Plato’s text overturn its established order, and on the other hand it serves as the foundation for convincing all that if moral ideals are to hold, they must remain ideals that transcend Gyges’ excesses. Plato introduces the myth in The Republic when Socrates rises up to the challenge of proving that acting justly is good in-itself no matter how its consequences affect us. According to the tale, introduced by Glaucon, one of Socrates’ interlocutors eager to demonstrate that most people take the right course of actions just because they realize that they cannot get away with doing the wrong thing, Gyges, an until then honest and law-abiding shepherd from the kingdom of Lydia in ancient Asia Minor found by accident, during a violently stormy day, a golden ring that gives him the power to become invisible by simply turning it around his finger. Being a courageous but also ambitious individual, who did not hesitate from climbing down into a cave momentarily opened by an earthquake accompanying the storm, to recover the ring from the giant hand of a seemingly non-human creature, Gyges promptly manage to trespass into the royal palace, sleep with and conspire with the queen, murder the king, and assume the throne. Glaucon hopes to use the myth to support his claim that we misunderstand the nature of the Good if we fail to convince ourselves that an internal principle of self-preservation structures human nature, that human beings have no inherent respect for our moral systems, that they would not hesitate to use those moral systems to suit their needs, and that in their daily lives they would likely often violate those moral systems than not. But for Plato Gyges’ alienation and spiritual collapse also reinforce also reinforce his conviction that justice cannot be identified with mere social utility since such a practical conception of justice actually harms the soul of a human being. Plato believes that Gyges will recover his spiritual health only after embracing the moral law for its own sake. This would entail, in the thinking of St. Augustine, a “beatific” act of self-discovery, whereby Gyges empties his soul only to engross it with the logos of God by appealing to enduring ideals that had structured his being before the Fall. This process of spiritual healing would also be appropriate for modern Americans in the midst of a self-created, unusually severe economic crisis since a healthy dose of reflection would reveal how their identity is the product of a history that embodies higher principles whose imitation provides clarity, balance, virtue, and wisdom. .
I.
I.
Indeed a more devastating development underlying the financial schizophrenia plaguing contemporary economic life is a paralyzing crisis of self-confidence that muddies value and prevents constructive action. Both our financial masters and average citizens are experiencing a deterioration in their will to power, that is, in their ability to efficiently manage the economic base of our society as individuals able to shape their own history. The quasi paralysis of our credit systems in the last several months represents a flagrant expression of that collapse of spirit. Due to deep doubts about the worth of securities and bonds held by our most powerful financial institutions and resulting feelings of uncertainty, many investors, bankers, stockbrokers, and other financial actors have not only refused to speculate in both domestic and international financial markets but allowed themselves to become the agents of a frozen process that actually impedes an adequate flow of credit and money in the economy. Among the consequences of this dire state of affairs, we of course count difficulties related to businesses finding it hard to invest and grow, cuts in both production an employment, but also a sense of helplessness and despair among those very same individuals, at the top of the financial world, whose enlightenment and competence was supposed to shield society from this horrible conjecture.
Our economic leaders’ self-confidence has taken a severe hit also because they have come to the realization that not only did they fail to produce real wealth for America but also their actions may have actually triggered a generalized process impoverishment for most Americans. They have brutally awoken to the reality that much of their occupational lives have consisted in a simulated existence that confused dazzling, sophisticated computing schemes with the production of real wealth, which, something they may have never learned, must always derive from concrete work that concretely improves our society. Our financial wizards have mistaken their highly speculative and often fraudulent investments practices, their grotesquely huge and artificially bloated incomes, their wasteful and lavish lifestyles with affluence, while the average American sees her economic security erodes the more she strives to rely on honest work to reproduce her material life. Compounding their sense of failure is a subterranean feeling of guilt among speculators to the effect that their moral assumptions about the workings of American finance capitalism, as a component of our society, were pathetically false. That is, the chaos that plagues the financial system is partly the product of the weakening of our regulative agencies due to our Wall Street gods’ own cultish belief that left to its own the economic sphere would function best for the benefit of all, when in reality such a scheme only clears the way for socially harmful accumulative practices.
We also see a manifestation of this spiritual decline among average Americans, who recognize the fraudulent financial practices that originated the problems disrupting their economy but so far have chosen not to organize but allow so-called experts to provide the appropriate “quick fixes“ (even though the latter‘s knowledge, skills, technical wizardry have only served to fester and completely miss the onslaught of the recession.) In the last several months, they have learned to cope with an economy increasingly denying them a proper level of economic security and a dignified social existence based on their personal efforts, creativity, and occupational accomplishments. Millions have lost substantial portions of their savings and retirement benefits but also the only sure things they know as their best access to the “American Dream“: employment and a home. Furthermore most of them also realize that such a loss is the product not of some lack in their personal ability to display competency, skillfulness, creativity, or persistence in their work but of widespread greed and dishonesty among the managers of our financial institutions as well as incompetence and corruption among bureaucrats and politicians operating at critical junctures of our regulatory systems. But so far most Americans have shown no concrete will to mobilize and unify against this unhealthy an order of things; they have instead chosen, in the hope of seeing positive change, to allow a significant leeway to the same financial managers, misguided bureaucrats and corrupt politicians who have caused these problems in the first place. So far no reform movements in the like of those of the American past have emerged to deal with an economic situation that clearly threatens the health of our society. Americans seem to have lost a set of socio-political skills they already mastered going back to the creation of their nation: the ability to undertake political activities that ensure that whatever political and economic arrangements that structure their lives operate according to their basic love for freedom, equity, and the power to re-make themselves. Indeed with the American revolution, they had rejected any notion of being governed by political masters whose worldview and interests not only diverged with theirs but also represented a threat to their identity as self-governing agents and economic actors whose goods and services could effectively compete in domestic or world market systems should they be devoid of any imperial mercantilist pretenses; with the progressive era, they had worked to ensure that the wealth and power inequalities that subsist in their society do not overwhelmingly favor the few to the detriment of the many, while guaranteeing greater efficiency and mobility in the socioeconomic system; and with the civil rights movements and their micro-political orientations, they have learned to make sure that social relationships are open enough to give them the right to demand equality and fashion their own lifestyles.
II.
II.
An unhealthy development in the internal constitution, balance, and functioning of the will has been for a while an expression of this identity crisis. As in the case of Gyges, many Americans’ commitment to the pleasures of commodities often led to disturbing experiences of illusion, guilt, anxiety, and fear, that is, personality qualities that are fundamentally detrimental to a healthy will to power. In other words, among the forces that explain such a loss of social and cultural efficiency we count a general though personally repressed acknowledgement that the objects that structure our world represent the alienating expressions of others‘ will to power, prove the extent to which our lifestyles merely reify the tensions of things, and symbolize our powerlessness in the face of an ideology that equates the wealth and power of high finance with the economic health of our nation. Indeed the money borrowed through credit and spent ultimately represents someone else’s ownership, not the product of our own hard work. A billing statement reflects not only what is owed but also a constant reminder that the commodity being consumed has a double ownership, of both a consumer and her creditor. One acquires the title deed of a car purchased through credit only after paying off the debt, and for most people by then the car has lost much of its value and luster, a realization made acute through constant mass advertising that reminds one that a newer and better model is available but also rightfully due to us, especially when your creditworthiness has just been demonstrated to credit lords all over the world. Thus is renewed the cycle of personal loss of ownership over life itself. Even if one pays one’s bills on time, one’s lifestyle may still thrives on things that represents someone else’s ownership since one borrows to buy the next fashionable thing.
And the worst recent example of this hopeless conjecture is related to the millions of Americans who have recently lost or face the potential to lose their homes even if they maintain their normal levels of employment and income. As a result of a fraudulent collusion among investment and commercial bankers, mortgage companies, stock brokers, real estate dealers and, we have to admit, their own personal financial illiterateness, lack for prudence, and may be greed, millions of Americans found themselves in an impossible financial situation: what they owe in terms of credit borrowing substantially exceed what their houses are worth in the mortgage market. They found themselves trapped in a financial scissor of crushing indebtedness, due to excessive borrowing on the basis of their home mortgage, and ever rising interest rates in a semi-collapsed or very weak housing market. For most this has meant that given their actual levels of employment and income, they can never hope to claim or reclaim ownership of their houses. Even if they remain full participant in their society’s normal economic functioning, they cannot hope to secure the ‘dream” of homeownership our society upholds as the rightful due to every American: being unable to secure the economic stability that comes with homeownership, they have become transients in their own society and can no longer claim ownership to it. Furthermore financial institutions’ perennial drive to turn profit returns into more profit returns, value itself into more value, means also a drive to turn our credit balances into investment instruments made available to financial gamblers festering in stocks markets world-wide. For both Gyges and America a political economy of excess has turned into a crisis of identity. Whereas Gyges loses his humanity by manipulating the ring of power, Americans see their freedom to shape their destiny considerably restrained. Through his invisibility Gyges merges with things, his individuality disappearing in the materiality of the objects of the world. Through excessive material consumption, the objects of our world seemed to have ceased to reflect our authentic, autonomous life-projects.
Like Gyges we have operated in a simulated, imaginary world that conveys a sense of personal accomplishment but actually betray our soul‘s deepest aspirations for the Good. When he turns the ring, Gyges in effect recreates the world as one shaped by desire: the world becomes pure enjoyment for him. The more society concretely becomes a locus of enslavement for his subjects, the more Gyges happily finds himself at the center of his world. In our society of spectacular consumption, we have reduced social prestige to our ability to consume the greatest amount of the most fashionable commodities, for things’ symbolic content structures the imaginary realm that confers meaning and social legitimacy in our world. Things are upheld as the gods whose logos cannot fail to merge with the self seeking happiness.
Furthermore Gyges’ identification of pleasure with the absolute good reflects a commitment not to confront a latent experience of guilt that underlies his betrayal of society’s normal ethical conventions. That desire almost completely governs his way of life reflects a gap in his spirit, for his favored strategy for evading his immorality is a constant recreation of his world as a world in which his moral lapses represent the norm. Likewise our historical obsession with consumer wealth reflects our individual, recurrent, losing struggle to realize in us the ideal of the perfect consumer, a baroque commodity-subject. Such an aspiration represents a desire to escape the feeling that life reduces to nothingness without the brilliance provided by commodities, for, as already noted, in consumer society happiness, prestige, mobility are associated with one’s ability to adorn one’s life with the symbolic content of things. And since one’s ability to pursue commodities depends on one’s access to borrowed credit, there subsists a latent feeling that ultimately commodities embody our creditors’ mastery over our lives through their power to lend. Ultimately the autonomy sought by our consumerist idealism remains unreachable, so that such a delusional quest actually turns into a social narrative of personal failure since what one pursues as the basic purpose of one’s life ultimately is out of reach. A sense of guilt then becomes our lore as a result of both of that sense of personal lack and our conscious realization that our rush to accumulate things only sublimates a repressed reality to the effect that our constant pursuit of credit and commodities hide the spiritual emptiness of a life defined by the logic things.
A specular dimension of this otherwise morbid profundity is an experience of frustration and anxiety. The inability to find ultimate gratification in the world of things often turns into an experience of lack but also psychological stress. Whereas Gyges fears the return of a world in which normal moral practices apply, we fear a world in which we no longer have access to commodities that we believe may yet give a brilliance to our lifestyles: our everyday life then often turns into a constant pursuit of objects as a mark of social relevancy. A logic of frustration therefore remains a basic underlying element of modern lifestyles, for in a credit-driven economy, the accumulated objects have become mechanisms that focus our very being toward a never-ending procession of things whose mastery ultimately escapes our will to power. While Gyges’ blind pursuit of pleasure hides a basic inability to freeze his life into a permanent state of satisfaction, our consumption-based lifestyles allow the pressures of objects to structure our personalities.
Whereas Gyges no longer worries about popular challenges to his power, the idolaters of mass consumption also remain confident that most of the American public would tolerate their financial charlatanism, for over the years most of us have internalized the notion that the high levels of wealth accumulated by our financial institutions is an index of both their economic health and the progress of our society. The technocrats of the society of mass-consumption seem to be aware historically most of us have operated a doubling of our personality. That is, in an apparently materially flourishing society, we have often chosen an identity that tends to repress that part of ourselves that subconsciously longs for an existence determined by concrete work activities contributing to a collective level of happiness, thanks mostly to recent economic ideologies stressing personal gratification based on individual rational calculations. For example, the ideologues and publicists of consumer capitalism have recently worked hard to inculcate in us the notion that the value of one’s life reduces to one’s worthiness in terms of personal line of credit held or investment in the stock market. Often our internalization of this notion represents our most potent means for dissolving the residual guilt associated with our hidden recognition of the alienating life conditions that derive from an existence governed by the circulation of things. Such a personal decision to organize life according to reigning idols is reinforced when we find similar models in the lifestyles of most people around us. As a community of consumers, we recognize in the ideological prototypes of a “credit card nation,” as molded through the spectacular forms of the mass media, a condensation of materialistic ideals that calm our hidden sense of economic insecurity. In the social brilliance of the demigods and demigoddesses of TV commercials, we find reassurance that a life according to commodities can only mean social happiness, for their self-confidence and quasi-superhuman capabilities have successfully equalized , in the eyes of the world, a structurally unsound economic arrangement with our pursuit of happiness. Whereas Gyges finds himself alienated by a normal world in which most people tend to conform to moral conventions, we find ourselves alienated by a world in which our collective needs are evaluated according to the requirements of the thing-credit
Therefore in their search for a world whose stability translates into their realization of personal happiness, modern Americans, like their mythical alter-ego, have set loose a power whose developments ultimately betray their best interests and their deep intention to have a positive impact on the world. Gyges believes that the world should be a total inscription of his desires; he has turned his dominion into a regimented world designed to gratify all his longings for power, for turning the ring removes normal social-ethical sanctions against impunity. But as Plato retorted, Gyges’ apparent freedom to pursue his excessive aims also reflects an utterly immoral and empty mode of Being. In our case, the willingness in the last few generations to actualize in our lives the claim of our corporate leaders (in mass commodity production, mass media, mass advertising, and the credit card industry) that an adequate way of life should be one founded upon high financial borrowing and consumption has resulted in a situation in which we have lost control of our lifestyles: the profundity of symbols turns out to be the symptom of a process of substituting its natural capacity for creative and positive action with personality features that breed stress, anxiety, fear but also a process of social de-skilling recently introducing into American society a widespread unfamiliarity with the critical thoughtfulness, rigorous patience, and tenacious activism any types of successful social reform require.
III.
III.
Not surprisingly the whole import of the Republic is Plato’s commitment to find a cure for Gyges’s disordered soul by compelling it to substitute its obsession for the pleasure principle with a complete reorientation of personal existence toward the transcendent world of Forms, that is, those immutable and universal ideal truths that provide the concepts, order, and evaluative norms we need to make sense of our lives. Plato thinks that the Form of the Good is very significant here, for it tends to illuminate our way of life with rational and spiritual norms that guide and enlighten our daily practical decisions. For Plato then knowledge of the Forms, as the enduring foundations of a healthy civilization, would help us subdue immorality and truly accede to the good life. He believes that by developing a healthy understanding of the Good, we also learn to love and imitate It, for the elements of clarity, moral tranquility, justice, and efficiency it contributes to our lives are more spiritually and psychologically beneficial than the elements of pain, fear, frustration, and lack that accompany life molded by the logic of pleasure. So likewise America must look to her founding practical and spiritual ideals to heal itself from its current crisis of self-confidence. She must reiterate its vision of human betterment on the basis of freedom, moral clarity, and cultural self-affirmation as a highest expression of the human condition.
As a society, Plato would suggest, we may achieve such a work of cultural renewal if we make it our duty to reiterate the values of hard work, moderation, industriousness, and self-government that had defined the lives of most people in the colonial settler communities that founded this nation four hundred years ago. These values were grounded on the assumption, popular in our recent past, that individual Americans owe their dignity, as solid members of a progressive society, to their ability to practically transform their world in basic human terms. We find a good historical translation of this notion of course in the pre-modern Jeffersonian vision that a “Great Society” locates its source of sustenance in those among us who work the earth, thriving on tangible, real labor but also inventiveness, self-sufficiency, a spirit of civic flourishing, but also self-control and historical efficiency. Such a way of life emphasizes our basic interdependence. We learn in the most transparent ways the extent to which others’ actions, goods, and thoughts make possible the lives of everyone in our community. We learn that we cannot but only cooperate with others to develop all the means we need to enjoy a healthy level of personal subsistence. That is, whereas in pre-modern America farmers in the frontier learned to “neighbor” or barter among each other to cope with the rigors of life in an often hostile world and to provide each other goods and services that a non-existent consumer market then could not provide, we can as well learn to make sure that the types of work we do, whatever it is, improves materially and spiritually our own life and the lives of others and our environment itself, for such an ethos demands that we see the aim of work as being for the sake of not only personal subsistence and advancement but also producing a quality product for the enjoyment or profit of another. Such a perspective will help personally tame excessive and unhealthy competitive habits and develop our cooperative tendencies, for they compel one to recognizes that the quality of one‘s life depends on not only on one‘s effort but also on the effort of others. Since such an interdependent life cannot depend on how much credit one can command or how much of a consumer market one can command, one is forced to share our capacity to work and provide services with others. Therefore a way to successfully confront our current economic and social predicaments would be to reclaim this old American value that defines the quality of our existence in terms of the practical contributions of all members of our community. This way of life is foreign to the wastefulness of contemporary postindustrial society, for it focuses in a sustainable way on the progressive reproduction of both an individual and the society in which she lives. It encourages citizens to take a critical look on the nature of their lifestyles since the latter have serious practical and moral implications for the whole society. It tends to discourage excess as matter of general ethics but also associates a healthy human spirit with a healthy communal and ecological context. Such a society ensures that human beings are masters of their history.
Though such a work of spiritual revolution need not be conducted “from above,” for any American national leaders trying to restore American spiritual and socioeconomic health, a task to which our current President has strongly committed to, making such a work of cultural recovery part of one’s very being represents one of the best strategies available to them. For America’s founding ideals can reform the internal constitution of our leaders in ways that can benefit our society, whose well-being ultimately reposes on the ability of our leaders to minimize their personal ambitions and allow their skills and vision for the long-term progress of our society to guide their decisions. If Plato’s solution to Gyges’ sociopathic inclinations is an appeal to transcendental ideals that overcome the latter’s propensity to violate any man-made social conventions but also which strengthen the soul of the effective statesman by raising the rational over the impulsive parts, ours is an appeal to enduring values whose re-affirmation can re-establish our officials as true cultural and social leaders. Reconnecting with America’s past involves recognizing that our past leaders could not have built this nation if their uncertainty and sense of alienation in a “new world” had obliterated their sense of personal courage. America’s “founders” recognized the higher purpose that informed their everyday, practical struggle to afford a humane, sustainable existence for themselves and later generations. An American leader that identifies himself with the enduring values of his society then acquires the levels of personal fortitude, moral clarity, and social foresightedness that necessarily represent the personality make up of any good leader. Thus his virtues as an individual becomes the framework through which we learn to collaborate with each other and express our solidarity a program that provides authentic solutions. His exemplary life as an authentic leader of a democratic society, highly informed about the history and needs of his society, becomes the medium through which we learn to abandon our selfish and narcissist attitudes toward our world and build living social bonds among each other since through his display of freedom, courage, moral-religious certainty, hard work, honesty, and civic mindedness, we locate the realization of the most important virtues we personally aspire to. He in effect becomes an individual whose spiritual constitution is collectivized in ways that in turn bring us together since through a process of identification with his quintessential American values, we personally find ourselves in him as if he has transposed himself into us. Through President Obama, for example, we can then successful apply Plato’s beatific notion of spiritual healing as a solution to our present social crisis: we can learn to exorcize the selfishness, greed, shortsightedness, sense of willful incompetence, and moral corruption that has characterized the practical existence of many of our leaders.
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Education: MA Philosophy,
Hobby: Movies,
Location: LA, California
