When Society Makes Us Sick
The Psychological Case for Democratic Socialism (Vol. 6; Issue 28)
Identification with any group carries certain risks. Once an individual sees themselves as part of a particular group, they’re liable to become associated with its fringe elements. Within the democratic socialist movement, for example, you have people like Graham Platner, a former Democratic candidate for US Senate from Maine. He caused the movement terrific trouble through his unethical behavior.
Another democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of New York, once called for the “globalization of the intifada.” What a foolish statement. That phrase, commonly used by pro-Palestinian activists, calls for aggressive resistance, even violence, against Israel. No movement devoted to the common good should advocate violence against any other group; it should endorse the rights of Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Christians, Latinos, Native Americans, and every other religious, ethnic, and political community.
Regarding maintaining one’s individuality, Sigmund Freud1 feared that groups exert forces contrary to it. He thought individuals in groups are prone to infection by collective emotion through “mutual induction.” Because groups invite people to act on impulses that would otherwise be curbed in individual behavior, maintaining individual personhood requires work.
All that being noted, anyone interested in the democratic socialism movement need not lose their singular identity. Each person needs to find a way to endorse their identification with a group without losing their singularity. In truth, ideals like “democracy” and “socialism” can cut across Republican, Democrat, or Independent lines.
Perhaps the best way to understand the movement is to carefully define each of the two words:
Democracy means that the rights of individual voters are privileged. The will of the majority of the people becomes enacted by their elected officials. Capitalist, free-market economies remain active (as seen in Scandinavian countries). That second word in the phrase, socialism, is wrongly associated with communism (including recently, but unsurprisingly, by Donald Trump). The word socialism, accurately applied, means that profit motives are constrained rather than controlled by government. It also refers to thoughtfully expanding extant public welfare programs, such as schools, fire departments and libraries into other realms, like health care, housing, and childcare.
Innovative, ambitious, hard-working people deserve to thrive, but not at the expense of the poor. Hard-core capitalists, of course, fear democratic socialism. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board recently sowed fear about wealthy people leaving New York, noting that:
The highest out-migration rate was for households making $500,000 or more—about one in 100 of whom moved out that year.
Is one percent even anything to worry about?
The editorial writers fearfully noted that:
Other flight propellants include New York City’s poor public schools and disorderly streets.
They sardonically conclude that we need “good luck” to fund universal health care and fair housing policies because those few taxpayers are leaving New York. Well known for their highly conservative viewpoints, the editors of the Journal fail to note that the “poor public schools” and the “disorderly streets” result from lousy government. The rich pay insufficient taxes; the government emphasizes defending our country over ensuring the welfare of its citizens; solutions exist to the shameful childcare and healthcare situation.
The way that wealthy individuals and massive corporations unduly influence the American government’s functioning is, quite literally, a form of fascism. Democratic socialism, in contrast, is devoted to that ideal of government by the people, for the people. It replaces our current system, fearfully a form of extinction capitalism,* with one driven by social need and economic democracy rather than profit.
How might democratic socialism improve the well-being of Americans?
Consider just a few simple examples:
The United States, a participant in the World Cup, is the only participating nation without universal national health care. Creating such a system would undoubtedly be difficult, but solutions exist, like Medicare-For-All. Health costs remain the primary cause of bankruptcies in America. Many choose to forgo paying for health insurance. And the executives of major health corporations, like Aetna, earn more than $20 million per year.
How is this fair?
How do these shocking inequities not adversely affect Americans?
Many feel hopeless and despondent, living in fear of contracting a serious illness or sustaining a serious injury. Others work two jobs just to pay for childcare. The vast majority of Americans spend their lives paying major corporations for housing, education, and healthcare; they becomes commodities for exploitation instead of citizens deserving protection and care.
Or:
Consider the unethical practices of companies like Google, which sells users’ information for a profit. It would be more egalitarian for Google to pay its users, since it benefits from their information. Instead, and perversely, we pay them to profit from our information.
Google, then, exploits us. As users, we are manipulated and, pun intended, used. The company causes many to suffer from identity theft; it contributes to the ever-increasing amount of garbage entering our digital inboxes. Having one's privacy violated, being used and manipulated, certainly contributes to the current international mental health crisis. Meta has already been found guilty of deliberately addicting users to its services.
Who thinks one individual, namely Elon Musk, should be worth more than $1 trillion or that immense corporations, like Google or Meta, should be allowed to deliberately manipulate us? But many struggles remain if striving to increase democracy and social services: How to develop a more equitable health care system. How to develop ways to offer free childcare and university education without triggering fears of communism. And, finally, how to become engaged in “democracy” and “socialism” without losing personal identity. These problems are all solvable. However, they will require a new form of unity to finally achieve that ideal of government by the people, for the people.
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*The term, extinction capitalism, holds that uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources will eventually lead to the destruction of human civilization. Ashley Dawson2, in books like Extinction: A Radical History, link global capitalism with the mass extinction of species, including our own. Jason W. Moore3 views historical capitalism as not just an economic system, but an ecological project—dating back to 1492—that survives by endlessly extracting “cheap nature” and unpaid human labor. At its core, “extinction capitalism” describes a machine that converts social bonds, human happiness, and planetary health into financial capital.
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References
Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18:65-143.
Dawson, A. (2016). Extinction: A Radical History. New York: OR Books.
Moore, J. W. (2016). Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. In J. W. Moore (Ed.), Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (pp. 1–11). New York: PM Press.