I don’t know why I’ve been so obsessed with understanding economics of late because honestly, I don’t think my understanding is going to help anything.   But, I persist…

I took two basic economics classes in college - macro & micro economics.   I remember next to nothing about those classes except that they were my least favorite classes…. EVER!!   I detested my instructor who was an arrogant young, T.A. (not a Prof.).    Thinking it might help to have the basic information presented by an actual professor with decent credentials, I recently ordered a Great Courses class on Economics led by Professor Whaples at Wake Forest University to see if that might help my dismal view.   I finally started watching the first few lessons last night and realize that one of the problems with Economics I had in college is still problematic for me.

Here is my specific issue:  Whaples says that he and the vast majority of economists assume we are all rational utility maximizers:

People act in a consistent manner, with a reasonably well-defined notion of what they like and what their objectives are and with a reasonable understanding of how to attain those objectives.

But is this true??  Are we rational utility maximizers?

This was the assumed sociological model in the nineteenth century.  But sociology has long since moved beyond it and psychology has provided all sorts of studies that show we are not, in fact, rational utility maximizers.

Cognitive psychology has shown that we consistently deviate from the rational choice thanks to cognitive bias.   We think our personal experience captures the “truth”, but that’s not necessarily so!  It has been repeatedly shown that human beings are overly confident about their judgments, especially when individuals hold strong convictions.  Also, our conscious desires are very often at odds with our unconscious desires.   We tend to distort our perceptions to see what is we want to see and then make our choices based on our distorted  perception.  Perhaps our choices are reasonable based on culturally skewed perspectives, and maybe this is why the rational utility maximizer model seems to work so well.  But this still seems problematic to me, although I can’t quite put my finger on why.

Whaples says Economists recognize that there are factors that inhibit rational choice and that these are called  “market imperfections”.   Whaples hasn’t gone into this yet but I seem to remember being taught that the way to minimize market imperfection is to teach people how to be rational utility maximizers.   (Thus, the primary function of public education is to produce effective consumers and producers.)  So couldn’t we say that our current economic system is based on an inherent economic bias that people should be rational utility maximizers rther than upon a “truth” that people are rational utility maximizers?

My husband has an MBA so I’m always asking him economic questions and presented him with this one.  He jokingly replied, “You are being un-American!”   But I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t try to be rational utility maximizers.    Perhaps that is an important American duty.

It’s just a musing…  if classic economics understood the rational utility maximizer model as descriptive knowledge, what does it mean to Economics that the model is now primarily viewed as prescriptive knowledge from a social sciences point of view?

As I said, I’ve only just started the lessons.  Hopefully Whaples will go into some of this and help me understand how Economics has adapted to current models of human behavior because I can’t believe it would simply ignore them.

I have never read anything by Carol Gilligan although I am somewhat familiar with her book, In a Different Voice. How could anyone who was in college in the mid-80s not be? She did sort of start a revolution. Almost all of my female professors were talking about it. Men focus on rules, women on relationships so how we make moral decisions is different. Men are not morally superior to women, they simply have a different approach to morality. That was truly huge back in the day! Especially having grown up in a heavily fundamentalist Christian area where women were expected to submit to men because the Bible had deemed them morally inferior.

Potential Spoiler Warning!

Kyra is about a woman whose husband was murdered 10 years or so ago by her half-brother. She’s had no interest in other men, considering herself to be still married. But she meets Andreas, a Director of Opera and she falls in love and begins letting go of her first marriage. But then Andreas suddenly leaves without warning and Kyra falls apart. She no longer knows what is real - the typical existential crisis.

To help her through the crisis, she goes into therapy with Greta, an older woman. Like Gilligan, Greta believes therapy is “tragically” flawed - especially for women who are asked to submit themselves to the rules. At some point in the therapy, woman cease to make progress. They hit a wall with the therapy that men do not and Greta offers a lecture explaining that this is very likely thanks to the difference in men and women.

Andreas leave Kyra without telling her because he fully expects her to understand that he cannot stay. He has internal rules he must obey and he thinks Kyra is as obedient to those rules as she is. But being female, she is far more tuned into the relationship than to the rules so is devastated when he leaves. She is likewise troubled by the “ending” in therapy. Therapy is a sort of “love” relationship but when it is over. This understandably frustrates Kyra and she and her therapist courageously work through ways to break through the old, masculine structure.

I had a very difficult time connecting to the characters. I didn’t really like Kyra or Andreas, in part because I had a very difficult time picturing them. I’d have an image and then Gilligan would add something that would dash it. But Gilligan’s not a novelist and I’m sure her intention was not to create the next great novel. She was trying to convey something through story telling and I think it worked, however awkward the story. (I don’t understand why we didn’t get to travel to Thailand with Kyra and experience the shift she experienced there - it seemed important but goes, has some sort of enlightening experience, but we don’t get to share it with her. We have to hear about it in a lecture.)

Going through some of what I highlighted:

Kyra to Andreas talking about her first husband, Simon: “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.” Do you think this is true? I am not at all in love with my husband’s work. I have major issues with it and sometimes it bothers me a lot - it would be nice to be married to someone who is really passionate about what he does and is making a difference in the world through his work. But for the most part, my husband likes what he does and feels that he makes a difference in the small circles he inhabits at work by just being who he is and not fully buying into the corporate mentality. But I couldn’t do what he does - it would be like death to me. Of course, I’m not so sure Kyra is so in love with Andreas’ work even though she admires it so perhaps this comment is really more about being reliant upon the structures that have been created by man. Kyra realizes much later in the book that her relationship to Simon isn’t perfect and that he required a subtle submission she hadn’t noticed until her work in therapy.

Kyra to Greta (the therapist): “But the problem is not just that women need to discover they can change the structures in which they living. That’s what my work is about, changing the structure. It’s why do you set up this situation, this structure, in the irst place. Why wet up a relationship with an ending built in? You’re asking women to buy this, but my question is, why have you bought it?” This makes the therapist mad. What Kyra recognizes is that therapy is structured in such a way that the patients problem is really just their problem and exists separately from the therapist. If the therapist withholds her feelings or manipulates them, it’s confuses Kyra’s feelings. Greta’s answer? This is the way she knows how to work. It was how she was trained - she knows therapy is inherently flawed, but she hadn’t questioned the structure in the way Kyra is questioning it and she now fully realizes. Which, of course, always makes us angry at first. It’s terrifying to take away those railings.

Speaking of railings, my husband and I had an interesting discussion about Kyra’s dream of walking out on the narrow bridge and realizing there are no railings but she’s too far out to go back. My husband asked me what it felt like to me to have the railings taken away and I said it felt like freedom. He said for him, it felt like chaos. I really do think Gilligan is on to something here. We women are used to a structure of submission and that submission is built into the structures of society - physical and idealogical. Submitting yourself to something greater than yourself generally requires an absence of railings. But submission to the so-called “stronger gender” is a different baby altogether. It’s a sort of bondage - not the freedom inherent in the paradoxical, mystical submission “to God”, wisdom, trust, etc.

The idea of wanting to know what is real makes a lot of sense to me. I could see cutting myself, like Kyra did, to try and figure that out - especially when what seems to be so connected turns out to be yet another superficiality. It gets extremely tiresome to have parents and societal authorities tell us who it is we are and who we are supposed to be. There is almost no concern whatsoever about who it is we are.

My parents sent me to college to ensure that I’d meet a man who would be able to take care of me financially.   Going to school had nothing to do with getting a degree in something that interested me.   When I married a man who didn’t have a college degree, they didn’t show up to the wedding. I got a telegram from them on my wedding day, and then didn’t hear from them again for 6 months. I didn’t submit to their rules.    From their perspective, I’d been disloyal.  But from my perspective, I was being loyal to myself.  And even though the marriage ended unhappily, I learned far more about myself through that troubled marriage than had I followed their rules.

At some point, when you begin to trust yourself, the reigning rules and structures do begin to feel incredibly superficial.   It’s easy to think reality is based upon the structures we are born into or are trained with.  But do a bit of interior digging.  You soon realize that structure influences the experience of reality, but otherwise has very little to do with it. AND! It’s the relationship of the individual to the structure that creates the experience of reality.  We can’t know reality in any other way except through relationship.  That’s why both Kyra and Andreas were trying to a develop a fluidity within their respective structures rather than a structure that requires submission to it’s rules.

Last month, while reading Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, I remembered that I had bought a book several years ago called Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore that I had never gotten around to reading. I think it is probably good I waited to read it because I think I probably got far more out of it having read it now than had I read it earlier. I feel like I’ve spent the last 3 years working through a “Dark Night” and have definitely concluded it is much better to go through it than to try and resist it through religion, depression medication, or other distractions. It’s ironic, but I do think when we give up our fear of it and accept the Dark Night, it makes us better able to trust.

It’s so confusing in our society, though. We are told that happy is good and sad is bad. Sad has to be “fixed”. This leads to the tendency to either blame our sadness on others or an inherent flaw. What we don’t realize is how healing sadness and dark nights of the soul can be. We tend to think in terms of progress and personal growth. The western idea of enlightenment is understood in terms of this progress. It’s understood to be a state of being we reach where nothing can bother us any more. But that’s not what enlightenment is about. There is the Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, depression. After enlightenment, depression.” Enlightenment doesn’t “heal” our emotions, it gives us a different perspective on them. It allows us to understand that dark nights are instructive and that sadness isn’t something to fear. It is every bit as “good” as happiness. What dark nights do is help us to become who it is we are by making us deal with the delusions of the ego. Moore says that the end result of our dark nights is not a final victory or an end to suffering. It is a moral development that allows us to engage life more energetically and helps us discover a level of meaning that dissolves discontent.

Moore says, “contemporary America values opinion over reflection. It always wants to know who is right, and not who has the most interesting and suggestive ideas.” The dark nights of the soul, I think, are somewhat akin to Nietzsche’s lion stage. We’re thrown off balance and have to slay the dragon. But we can’t do this if we are convinced that sadness is bad. Instead, we will do everything we can to distract ourselves from the stage so that we can remain a camel - dutifully following the dictates of culture. That’s nihilism. It’s the stuff of the Last Man who only wants safety and comfort. Moore says that Ancient societies focused their attention on the unfolding self. We favor the practical self. But the self is always becoming. It is always evolving. To focus on the practical is definitely practical, but it’s not imaginative. We are told to get past our mood and get on with life. But art understands the depth and character that comes with sadness.

The dark night is a cleansing of perception that allows us to move into the deeper life of the soul. Moore writes, “A society is like an individual: in the face of a dark night it can either become defensive and avoid the challenge of new life, or it can reform itself and discover in the darkness where it has gone wrong. It takes a strong heart, a steady intelligence, and a visionary imagination to go in the direction of life. Sometimes society moves in the right direction; often it retrenches and gets worse. There appears to be no middle ground.”

The best way to deal with a dark night of the soul is to be made luminous by it. Not enlightened, but translucent. He writes: “You are not the eye seeing in the dark, you are the candle being burnt for its luminosity. It is not your luminosity that issues from a dark night, but the dim light of existence itself. Your dark night tells you that life is never as bright and successful and meaningful as you might imagine. If you never learn this lesson, the essential moonlight, the Claire de Lune, will forever be hidden from you.”

Scintilla was a term used by medieval theologians to describe personal brilliance. It is the spark that lies at the heart of a person. Moore says, “When that inner genius shows itself in personality; way of life, values, and expression, mediocrity disappears. It is a cloud that prevents the spark from being seen. Mediocrity is the attitude of “do only what is necessary and sufficient,” the feeling of not having an essence worth showing. It involves giving up on the possibility of living an outstanding life.” But there is something deep in us that perceives something of immense value in the world even if it is clouded by mediocrity.

I think this is very similar to what Nietzsche has in mind when he says we can open ourselves to “the ideal of the most high spirited, energetic, world affirming man who has not only come to terms with and assimilated with what it is but wants to have it again as it was and is for all eternity - insatiably calling out, ‘Once more’.” We have to be willing to go through our dark nights in order to recognize who it is we are. We have to be willing to suffer and through this suffering, we discover that our discontent is an illusion. (James Hillman said that depression is a special problem in a society hell-bent on happiness.)

I am still slowly making my way through Ken Wilber’s Grace and Grit. It’s about his wife’s life and journey through cancer and subsequent death.

I wish I had read this before my dad died of cancer. I think I would have known how to be with him better through all of the life and death decisions he had to face. It was such an excruciatingly confusing time for me. The idea that you need to work through all of the objections to a procedure before one is decided upon makes a lot of sense. I can only imagine how important it is to feel confident about which path it is you have chosen and if well-meaning people undermine that path with their own suggestions about what they think it is you should do, then that undermines your confidence in what it is you have chosen and the last little bit of control you have over your life is gone. Even if you are going to die, it’s far better to feel confident about the path you have chosen, however whacky, than always second guessing it. Nobody really knows what is best in a situation like that. You have to decide what is best for you if for nothing else than peace of mind.

I think the understanding of pre-rational, rational and transrational awareness is also extremely helpful. Pre-rational awareness is based on magic and superstition. Manipulating God through prayer, casting spells or creating magic potions to alter reality, avoiding certain things like breaking mirrors, etc. are all forms of pre-rational awareness. It’s narcissistic because reality is viewed as an extension of the self. Rational awareness doesn’t need to be explained. It’s simply the idea that there is a logical explanation for all phenomenon. Belief in magic and manipulative prayer is not rational. But, there is also a deeper form of understanding called transrational which is often confused with prerational awareness because it is nonrational. This fits with Huston Smith’s spiritual hierarchy. What we believe about the world gets mirrored back to us. If we believe in magic and spirits, then we’ll see magic and spirits. If we believe only in the logical, material realm, then we will see only the material, logical realm. But if we reach the level of transrational awareness, we are able to see both the spiritual, magical realm and the rational, logical material realm. But the difference in prerational and transrational awareness is that in transrational awareness, the world is no longer understood as an extension of the self. Transrational awareness recognizes the limitations of both prerational awareness and rational awareness. It is aware of a universal unifying force in everything.

Wilber uses an example from Berkeley students who protested the Vietnam War. A sample of students were given the Kohlberg test of moral development. What was found is that 20% were operating from postconventional stages (trans-conventional/rational). Their objection was based on universal principles rather than societal standards or individual whim. They were genuinely concerned about the Vietnamese people. Most of the other 80% were preconventional. The reason they didn’t want to fight was because they didn’t want anyone telling them what to do (not because they were concerned about the Vietnamese.) A very small number of trans/postconventional people attracted very large numbers of narcissistic preconventional people to protest the Vietnam war. Their motivation looks the same, but it is very different.

Many advocates of the New Age movement claim that their beliefs have a firm foundation in the world’s great mystical traditions. The thinking is loosely along the lines: since I am one with the Godhead and God creates all, I create all. But Wilber believes that the pre-trans fallacy that was true of Vietnam war protestors is likewise true of the New Age movement. There are maybe 20% of new agers who are actually transrational (transcendental and mystical). The other 80% are prerational (magical and narcissistic). The idea that you create your own reality is particularly troubling to Wilber. He says it has all of the hallmarks of “the infantile and magical worldview of the narcissistic personality disorder”. Yes, our thoughts influence reality. But to think we can single handedly create our reality through our thoughts - that we can manipulate the thought and thereby omnipotently and magically manipulate the object - is narcissistic. This is where I have parted philosophical ways with my more new agey friends because it seems to me to be very similar to the thought process that lies behind fundamentalist Christian thought. It is motivated by a fear of suffering.

Often, fundamentalist Christians will blame illness on sin. If you had simply behaved properly, then God wouldn’t have given you the illness. This can be an excruciatingly painful belief if you are going through something traumatic like a life and death illness or loss of a child because what is implied is that if you had just done things right, this wouldn’t be happening to you. And why do people maintain this belief? Because it’s based on the narcissistic need to control and manipulate reality. “This happened to you because you did something wrong. It won’t happen to me because I’m doing all the right things.” “Behave according to my belief system and all will be well. Go against my belief system and you will be punished by God.”

Wilber points out that the same exact thing happens in the New Age movement. He says this is because lurking right beneath the surface of narcissism is rage: “I don’t want to hurt you, I love you; but disagree with me and you will get an illness that will kill you. Agree with me, agree that you can create your own reality, and you will get better, you will live.” Wilber points out that this sort of thinking has no basis in the world’s mystical traditions. It is based in narcissistic and borderline pathology.

This is slightly off topic but I really liked the Wei Wu Wei quote Wilber used…

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9% of everything you think,

And everything you do,

Is for your self,

And there isn’t one.

I have read, although I don’t know if it is actually true or not, that the mother-daughter relationship is the most important relationship of all human relationships. Men are expected to break away from their mothers and very often have no relationship whatsoever with their fathers. Women often have rocky relationships with their mothers, but very rarely do they break the relationship because women so heavily identify with their mothers. (Men identify with their fathers, but not with the same intensity women identify with their mothers.)

Yet, more and more you hear about women in the U.S. who no longer speak with their mothers and it is almost always blamed on the fact that the mother places too many demands on the behavior of her daughter so the daughter has to break all bonds in order to cut the apron strings.

I think there may be a historical basis for this issue and I think it might also explain why narcissism is becoming such a widespread societal problem.

Before the industrial revolution, both men and women raised the children because most men worked at home. The image of women as stern but angelic caretakers of children arose with the industrial revolution when men had to go to work and were no longer home to help raise the children. (The view of children had also drastically changed.) The American Government under Roosevelt created a sort of “angel in the home” campaign which was an attempt to make women feel compelled to be the sole care-takers of the household. This was how society was to be held together while men left home to work in the factories.

This is from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech “On American Motherhood” (1905):

The woman’s task is not easy—no task worth doing is easy—but in doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to her the highest and holiest joy known to mankind; and having done it, she shall have the reward prophesied in Scripture; for her husband and her children, yes, and all people who realize that her work lies at the foundation of all national happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.

Motherhood took on romantic angelic images as a way to make good servants out of women so society could enter into the industrial age with as little disruption as possible. Get the women to take over the duties of the household and the fact that men are no longer at home to share in the workload won’t disrupt society.

So what happens to women who don’t want to be stuck in this role but have been convinced that it is their godly duty to fulfill it? They put a lot of the stress for household duty on their daughters. This is because the only control many mothers felt they had at the turn of the century was over their children - especially their daughters. If the mother had bought into the “angel in the kitchen” idealism, then it was very likely she was going to repress self-expression in her daughters at a very young age. If this is done early enough, narcissistic disorders are very likely to develop. And what happens when mothers with narcissistic disorders raise children? They tend to repress self-expression in their own children and their children grow up with heavy amounts of narcissism, too. Families of narcissists often appear to be extremely well-behaved because the children believe that if anything goes wrong, it is the fault of the child, not the parent. The child is made to believe the narcissistic parent has it all together and this compels compliant behavior. (Compliance is gained by making the child feel worthless unless he complies rather than being gained through a development of mutual respect.)

C.S. Lewis, Huston Smith, Richard Rohr and many other theologians I’ve read claim that Fundamentalism is a product of the industrial revolution. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that Christianity became a factual, mechanized religion to be marketed. In that fundamentalism tends to see everything as an extension of itself, fundamentalism is also highly narcissistic. It’s not the religion or belief system that is problematic, it’s the people who don’t comply with it. If you do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God in a very specific way, you will be sent to Hell by a very narcissistic God who carries on like a 6 year old when he doesn’t get the compliant behavior he demands.

It’s really difficult for kids to break out of narcissistic families because they feel that they are betraying their family through their non-compliance. I imagine this is what it is like for a lot of fundamentalist Christians, too. You start making that break with your religion and you are told you are horrible, no good, worthless, and evil. I had a similar but somewhat less intense experience breaking with conservative mainstream Christianity. But I think the same is true of people who are raised atheist who join a church when they get older. They are heavily chastised for it and sometimes considered “evil” for becoming religious. (Fundamentalist atheism.)

Sam Keen says that with the industrial revolution, we ceased being homo-sapians. Homo-sapiens are creatures who look for wisdom and knowledge to explain their being. With the industrial revolution, we became homo-faber- makers of things. Now we are homo-economicus and are dominated by ideas of onward, and upward (which is a secularized version of the utopianistic ideals in religion - we want to believe we are safe). As Allen Callahan points out, the current onward upward mentality is a sort of greed that is at the expense of unprecedented numbers of people. There have never been so many displaced people in the history of humanity. And it’s getting worse.

An inner journey almost always turns you away from what your family or your culture tells you which involves a certain amount of suffering. We don’t want to accept the absurdity of what it is we have bought into because it feels like a loss of innocence. We think of that as negative and avoid it. We’d rather act out the culturally accepted norms than to become who it is we are because that is much more comfortable than going against the culture. But if we don’t become who it is we are, we are likely going to create our own destruction.

I’ve had an interest in Narcissistic Disorders for various reasons over the past few years. I’ve read several books on the subject and most equate people with NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) with vampires. These people drain your life energy so best to just keep your distance because there is nothing that can be done unless you want to allow your life to be sucked dry by their emotional needs and demands.

But I’ve been reading Ken Wilber’s Grace and Grit and and he says it can be treated. His focus is actually on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but he claims Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is closely related.

According to Wikipedia, a Personality Disorder is a class of mental disorders characterized by rigid and on-going patterns of thought and action. The underlying belief systems informing these patterns are referred to as fixed fantasies - beliefs or systems of beliefs that an individual holds as genuine but can’t be verified in reality. The inflexibility and pervasiveness of these behavioral patterns often cause serious personal and social difficulties, as well as a general impairment of functioning. It includes overwhelming narcissism. The patterns don’t typically start showing up until early adulthood, but in rare cases can be traced back to adolescence. (Meaning, it is typically inappropriate to diagnose someone as having a personality disorder if they are less than 18 years of age because rarely can it be proven that a personality disorder pattern exists before that age.)

The DSM-IV lists both BPD and NPD under Personality Disorders in Cluster B (dramatic, emotional, or erratic disorders). They occur in early (primitive) pyschological development and because the conditions are so primitive, they were historically considered to be untreatable. (NPD is considered to be more primitive than BPD.)

According to Wilber, at a very young age (by 2 or 3 years old), the individual has to make the separation from the material world and establish a higher-order identity with the body as a separate and distinct entity in the world. Margaret Mahler calls this the “separation-individuation” stage of development. There has to be a separation and individuation from the mother. If this doesn’t happen, difficulties like BPD and NPD can occur. It’s called borderline because it exists on the border between psychosis and neurosis but isn’t quite either. Boundaries of self remain vague, fluid, confused. The world seems to “emotionally flood” the self which makes the self very volatile and unstable.

Most of psychology attempts to treat disorders by digging up something from the unconscious. But this doesn’t work with people with BPD and NPD because they haven’t yet reached that level of psychological development (that happens at the next level.) In otherwords, BPDs and NPDs haven’t yet developed a dynamic unconscious so there isn’t one to dig up.

Mahler, Kohut, Kernberg and others have created structure-building techniques which have been fairly successful at helping individuals develop stronger ego boundaries. This helps the individual differentiate self and other by explaining and showing that what happens to the other does not necessarily happen to the self. (Wilber’s example - you can disagree with your mother and that won’t kill you.)

In the borderline conditions, the problem is not that a strong ego barrier is repressing some emotion or drive. The problem is that there isn’t an ego barrier or boundary in the first place. So what you have to do is get the person up to the the level where they can repress and then psychotherapy techniques of digging into the unconscious can be used. But until then, the self isn’t strong enough to forcefully repress anything.