Psychoanalyst Says Western Society Is Sick And Heading For Collapse

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-psychoanlytic-guide-to-the-financial-crisis-2012-6

Western society has behaved neurotically for the past twenty years and needs to be cured.

Professor Mark Stein draws this conclusion in a psychoanalysis of the financial crisis (via Steve Keen).

Symptoms of denial, omnipotence, triumphalism and over-activity were manifest in reaction to a series of crises—the fall of the Soviet Union, the Japanese and the Asian/LTCM crises—when the West did not respond with caution but instead by increasing risk:

'I suggest that these ruptures caused considerable anxiety among these leaders, but that, rather than heeding the lessons of these crises, such leaders responded by manic, omnipotent and triumphant attempts to prove the superiority of their economies in relation to the vulnerabilities thrown up by these ruptures. This response thus entailed the destruction and obfuscation of the data and the dismantling of regulatory warning systems, as well as the creation of reassuring myths such as the ‘great moderation’, all of which led to a culture in which massive increases in risk-taking were seen to be justified. I go on to argue that this manic culture was influenced by a triumphant response in the West to the collapse of communism. I argue that the conditions for the 2008 credit crisis were thereby set in place.'


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-psychoanlytic-guide-to-the-financial-crisis-2012-6#ixzz1xg9ECzb8