Finanical crises take a toll on bodies and psyches as much as they do on bank accounts and lifestyles. Suicides, family violence, stress-related diseases, and mental disorders are all too common consequences. Yet even during the best of times, capitalism’s dependency on social hierarchies — coupled with its unpredictable cycles of growth and retraction — raise anxiety, sometimes to the level of traumatic stress.

For decades researchers have documented the health impacts caused by the social hierarchies common to capitalistic economies. Nancy Adler discovered perceived socioeconomic status is a reliable predictor of the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and the level of stress hormones circulating in someone’s body. Irrespective of how secure a person’s circumstances, a subjective interpretation of oneself as having low social status contributes to stress-related diseases. Consequently, a poor Appalachian miner in the affluent United States experiences more status-related stress than a relatively poorer member of a developing nation where the majority endure the same level of financial hardship. Furthermore, countries with the highest levels of economic inequality have the greatest number of people with stress-related diseases.

Capitalism’s capricious economic cycles also contribute to stress. In the presence of a traumatic threat, our bodies often respond with agitated alertness, especially when there is a coinciding belief that taking action is necessary to avoid injury. In trauma lingo, we refer to this as a state of hypervigilance, or the need to continually scan the environment for the possibility that past threats will reemerge and once again endanger one’s survival. Living in a capitalistic and globalized economy seems to require hypervigilance and near continual scanning for potential job loss and devaluing retirement accounts, if not the decimation of entire market sectors and local economies.

For the most financially precarious (an ever-widening sector of the population), capitalism may create a state of psychological domination similar to, albeit milder, than what can occur when someone is held captive. Psychological domination is more likely when 1) threat of harm, such as torture, is unpredictable and 2) there are periods of relative safety amid the chaos and abuse. Together, these two conditions make submission more likely. In her studies of psychological terror, Judith Herman observed, “The ultimate effect of [psychological domination] is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance.” Although the psychological impacts of capitalism fails to reach the severity of a person whose basic right to freedom from harm is taken away, nevertheless, the current capitalistic economy does create a sense of inescapability and capriciousness that contributes to traumatic stress.

In his book On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail made a connection between global capitalism, social hierarchies, and the body’s reaction to threats. Smail argued capitalism exploits the body’s survival responses (e.g., freeze, fight, flight, submission) by creating the conditions of psychological domination as well as providing relief from the feelings of powerlessness that capitalism and social hierarchies engender. Smail argued capitalism generates stress through its unpredictability and hierarchical power structures, but it also alleviates stress by producing an economy organized around the production and circulation of addictive substances and practices.

According to Smail, from its inception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, global capitalism was organized around creating and feeding addictions. The first imports to Europe from Africa, the Arab World, and the Americas were coffee, sugar, chocolate, tobacco and “spirits” — all mood-altering substances. During this time, the term addiction gained its modern meaning as a self-inflicted behavior rather than the state of being indebted to another, such as serfdom, that previously distinguished the addict. With this shift in understanding of addiction, also came a new organization of society away from a focus on managing external forms of control to a focus on internal ways of responding to dominance by self-medicating its effects.

Today, the use of addictive substances and activities to regulate stress is so common it is difficult to demarcate between what counts as recreational use of substances and what constitutes lifestyle maintenance. Addictions are a widespread way of managing feelings of agitation and overwhelm, which for many are habitual responses to the pressure of trying to make a living in the current global economy. Typically when confronted with threats to body or psychological integrity, our bodies either becomes so activated that they enter a state of extreme agitation (referred to as “hyperarousal”) or move towards a state of shut down in response to feeling profoundly overwhelmed (called “hypoarousal”). Addictive substances and activities are now everyday methods for escaping such states — a role religion and other spiritual-based practices historically served, especially in the preindustrial world.

Yet capitalism is not the only social system that exploits the body’s natural responses to power and dominance. All societies must contend with the human capacity for dealing with power dynamics and the stress they can cause on the body. Status is integrally associated with power and is present in all forms of society, even those such as the Inuit, Navajo Indians, !Kung San, and other indigenous societies noted for their egalitarian social structures. What differs is how members deal with the quest for status and power. In smaller, egalitarian societies the quest for status and power is often systematically undermined, whether through derogatory remarks to the one who boasts about his successful hunt, or the isolation of those who attempt to bully others into submission. Capitalism differs from such egalitarian societies when it exploits conditions that activate traumatic stress rather than minimizing them. Whereas egalitarian societies respond to power and status by trying to mitigate its effects, capitalism propagates traumatic stress in ways that promote the pursuit of power and status, which ultimately keeps the system functioning.

If we want feel better, we’ll need to begin to dismantle our reliance on capitalism and all the ways we try to escape its traumatic effects.

References

Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: BasicBooks.

Smail, Danial Lord. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Waal, Frans De. 2005. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books.

© Laura K Kerr, PhD. All rights reserved (applies to writing and photography).