"Don't Be afraid of Hard work!"
Happiness in Times of Plenty - and Scarcity
David Brooks' column in the New York Times earlier this week discusses the emergence of a "scarcity mentality" in Donald Trump's Republican party. Trump runs on the idea that resources are limited, so we need to control them as completely as possible. Generosity becomes foolish. Trump also seems to think that all games are zero-sum.
The idea of the rest-cure for romance gone bad seems as far-fetched as the idea that you could put in seven long workdays a week if you just managed your emotions properly. There's some truth to the "use it or lose it" idea that's part of the way we think in the US today – but we also have good use for the phrase,"overdoing it."
Win-win situations don't exist: there can only be one winner. So Brooks sees Trump setting a tone that focuses people's attention on lack and aggression.
This can't sustain itself, he explains:
The shift toward a scarcity mentality "seems like a shift in philosophy. But it’s really a shift from a philosophy to an anti-philosophy. The scarcity mind-set is an acid that destroys every belief system it touches."
Let's look at this idea, though. When your cup runs over it's easy to find joy in the abundance. But is it possible to sustain healthy, happy lifestyles on a broad scale when people believe there isn't enough to go around?
That was Then…
This was the case for much of the 19th century – and, really, most of history before it.
Historian T. J. Jackson Lears explores the ideas behind cultures of abundance and cultures of scarcity. When there's lack, as you might imagine, there's a sense that people do best when they conserve not only their money and things but their energies as well. Minds are complicated,, and, at any rate, invisible, so people look for metaphors to understand them. If households run best on a conservative, resource-restricted philosophy, then maybe people operate that way, too. This is the origin of ideas that seem so foreign in today's generally abundance-oriented world: the rest-cure, and literary characters whose health is permanently destroyed by a disastrous love affair. Lears explains it was believed that "even babies faced psychic ruin if they became overexcited while at play."[i]
So Brooks isn't quite right when he says that scarcity is always a destructive anti-philosophy. (The way Trump handles the idea is a different story.) It doesn't fit in comfortably with our philosophies today, but in the past it worked – and it had to work because scarcity was the norm.
And Then, It All Changed
By the early 20th century, though, as economies flourished, metaphors about abundance and the mind changed also. "Use it or lose it" attitudes came into the lexicon eventually.
One of the best-selling books of 1921 was by a pair of psychoanalysts, Josephine Jackson and Helen Salisbury, who wrote Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer in Psychotherapy.[ii] The main point of this odd book (Freudian, and yet still somehow prim) is that two serious ailments of the era – shell shock (what we now call PTSD, experienced by veterans of World War I) and the interestingly named "brainfag" – can be overcome when we gain rational control over our emotions. This is important, they explain, because, if we're going to keep up with an expanding economy, our ability to be productive most grow in kind:
There is greater need than ever for people who keep at their tasks without long enforced rests; people who can think deeply and continuously without brainfag; people who can concentrate all their powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the top notch of vitality by well digested food, well slept sleep, well forgotten fatigue, and well used reserve energy.[iii]
So theories of the mind mirrored what people were thinking about in that day – if factories churned endlessly, producing more new things with only the proper upkeep, maybe the human mind could, too.
The point isn't that David Brooks is wrong about philosophies built around the idea of scarcity, or that anyone else here is wrong, either – they're all reflecting the world they lived in.
When I look at these older approaches from here in the early part of the 21st century, they both look a little ridiculous. The idea of the rest-cure for romance gone bad seems as far-fetched as the idea that you could put in seven long workdays a week if you just managed your emotions properly. There's some truth to the "use it or lose it" idea that's part of the way we think in the US today – but we also have good use for the phrase "overdoing it" too.
But what does this say about our world today? What is this a reflection of? How have we calibrated our ideas about happiness in the balance between conserving and expending, and why have we done it that way?
There's a lot more to say on this subject, and I plan to say some of it – but I'd like to hear from you as well.
If you enjoyed reading this, please help me out by passing it on to other people who might appreciate it, sharing it through e-mail or your favorite social media platform.
[i] T.J. Jackson Lears, “From salvation to self-realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, New York: Pantheon Books, 1-38.
[ii] Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer in Psychotherapy. New York: Century Company. 1921.
[iii] Ibid. p. 9