Money is a Schedule 1 drug.
If greed is an addiction, excess wealth needs to be a controlled substance. (THE BODY IS THE SOUL #4)
[Audio version for paid subscribers will be sent out before noon Eastern on January 24.]
Over the weekend I encountered two articles that resonated together despite being about different topics, at least on the surface.
First, I listened belatedly to the audio version of veteran journalist Anne Applebaum’s comprehensive and frightening article posted way back in the December 2021 issue of The Atlantic entitled “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”1 The year-old article is, I assume, excerpted from or closely related to her current book called TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF AUTHORITARIANISM.
Second, I read a New York Times piece about the closing of Noma2, an undeniably innovative, ultra-fine dining restaurant in Copenhagen rated the best in the world several years over. Noma’s $500 per person tasting menu was made possible in large part by a cadre of unpaid interns (!!) and a rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian kitchen culture—a joyless culture stubbornly in place despite its chef-owner’s famous and well-publicized spiritual journey to become less abusive than the chefs he trained under. One of the interns interviewed for the article—an Indian graduate of culinary school who spent an entire three months doing nothing but creating perfectly constructed fruit-leather beetles out of jam and stencils—notes that she was expected to work in silence and especially never to laugh.
The rise of global wealth-hoarding and the autocracies it supports is, to my mind, not just intimately connected with the existence of $500-per-person restaurants but also perfectly mirrored in the exploitative and abusive practices making such institutions possible. Pleasure for well-heeled hedonists rests upon pain for the lowliest enablers, and this seems a reasonable ordering of things not only by the diners but also, too often, by the willing volunteers themselves.
The Finnish chef Kim Mikkola, who worked at Noma for four years, said that fine dining, like diamonds, ballet and other elite pursuits, often has abuse built into it.
“Everything luxetarian is built on somebody’s back; somebody has to pay,” he said.
Mr. Mikkola, who is building a chain of sustainable, equitably run fried-chicken sandwich shops, KotKot, said he values the artistry he learned at Noma. “Do we want to tell everyone not to have great experiences, to just eat potatoes?” he said. “Absolutely not. That’s the dilemma.”
Dilemma is a very specific word, literally indicating that there are only two options available. This chef implies that the only alternative to subsistence living on potatoes (recalling thoughts of the Irish famines) is an elite meal that features, as Noma has done, items such as “grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl.” It’s as if Chef Mikkola’s imagination itself has been bifurcated into have or have-not just as surely as the ownership of global wealth.
(I’m thinking now about how some of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had were in modestly priced joints, even in the local currency: paella in a neighborhood pub in Barcelona, dosas and hot coffee in a busy breakfast spot in Bangalore, a spaghetteria in Milan featuring a 5-course tasting menu of small plates sporting simple pastas in different sauces, four of them savory and the last one made of sweetened ricotta and blueberries. Meanwhile, a pricey lunch at celebrity chef Brian Voltaggio’s place VOLT out in Frederick MD about ten years ago was interesting to look at but more or less forgettable in terms of flavor. Oh, wait: that one tiny, briefly tasty puff of asparagus foam as a so-called appetizer has stuck with me due only to its absurdity. I’m so glad the only reason we went was that we’d won a gift certificate in a school fundraising raffle.)
When historians and sociologists theorize what exactly drives a nation’s population to favor strong-arm dictatorships over citizen self-governance, the most widely acknowledged answer is fear. People frightened of poverty, powerlessness, complexity, and/or hordes of “barbarian invaders” will always choose the perception of paternal protection and safety—and a simple set of messages that require rote acceptance rather than thinking—over individual liberties and messy democratic negotiation. In the exact same manner, people frightened of hardships in the afterlife will throw in with theocrats promising them a sure path to heaven.
If fear explains why people love their dictators, then a simple two-way dependency might explain why dictators claim to “love” their people and their countries. But of course, where’s the actual love? Applebaum’s article jolted me by focusing on sociopathic levels of avarice among tyrants in Russia, Venezuela, China, Hungary, the list goes on—greed for themselves, their families, and their closest/most necessary consiglieres—while the people of their nations are told, in so many words, to go fuck themselves or risk imprisonment, torture, and death. Just like our own most recent ex-president and our right-wing death cult here at home, those in power clearly don’t care if humans under their nominal watch are starving, dying, or killing each other wantonly, or if the built environment is crumbling, or if the earth itself is on track to become hostile to civilization within a few generations, as long as they can remain holed up in their executive palaces with full refrigerated larders. Dictators abuse the populations in their charge, seemingly without limit. This might seem counterintuitive but only if you expect that these individuals and families care at all whether there are any people left for them to rule over, save for their servants and slaves.
It’s not hard to find scholarship or commentary that treats greed as an addiction, one that becomes as “self”-destructive (not to mention generally violent) as being hooked on hard drugs.3 In a fascinating paper called Fear, Greed, and Financial Crises: A Cognitive Neurosciences Perspective, published in October 2011 and focused on the 2007-2008 global financial meltdown, MIT Sloan School of Management professor Andrew W. Lo surveyed the history of neuroscience and addiction-related experimentation alongside the behavioral economics of speculative bubbles to conclude, simply:
In the human brain, monetary gain stimulates the same reward circuitry as cocaine—in both cases, dopamine is released into the nucleus accumbens, reinforcing the behavior. In the case of cocaine, we call this addiction. In the case of monetary gain, we call this capitalism. In other words, our most fundamental reactions to monetary gain are hardwired into human physiology.
I can’t find the article at the moment, but I recall reading the answer Carl Icahn (now worth $18 billion) gave when a reporter asked him how much money would be, finally, enough for him. All of it, he said. This is a level of rapaciousness almost none of us can fathom, in the same way that those who are generally free of chemical dependency can’t fathom the minds of people who might rob their grandmothers or pimp out their own children to get another hit.
These people need our help, don’t you see? They can no longer stop themselves and we must step up to keep them from destroying everything around them. Progressive tax policy, antitrust legislation, inheritance taxes, rules against C-suite self-dealership, tight Wall Street regulations, community reinvestment requirements, all those things that we’ve allowed Republicans and centrist Democrats to kill off or let fall by the wayside—all those tools well-understood in FDR’s time—have to be reinvented for the digital age and put back in place.
I know it seems hopeless—I’m not certain I have any faith in a soon-enough democratic renewal at all, to be honest—but at least there’s evidence that some of our leaders get it. As her website notes, recently “U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) led 50 Members of Congress…in introducing an amendment to the Constitution that would end corporate personhood, reverse Citizens United, put power back into the hands of people, and make it clear that money does not equal speech.”4 The We The People Amendment is an unlikely wishlist but at least it's now in the public record as something desired by a significant number of voters. It's obvious almost nothing is going to get done for the next two years while the extremist House GOP holds the government hostage via the debt ceiling and runs out the clock on meaningless distractions like Hunter Biden's laptop. But at least it's a little heartening to see genuinely progressive ideas getting aired at the federal level once again.
Here’s another positive note. Matt Stoller’s excellent blog BIG follows growing anti-monopoly sentiment and actions, and he notes that Biden’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have blocked 22 corporate mergers in the past two years, far more than any such antitrust activity in at least a decade.
It’s not just mergers. Enforcers resurrected dormant areas of law, such as the Robinson-Patman Act against price discrimination and corporate bribery, a section of the Clayton Act that bars exclusive dealing, and a provision of antitrust law which bars having directors sit on the board of rival firms. In addition, Congress passed the first meaningful antitrust reforms since 1976, as well as gave significant funding boosts for the agencies. State attorneys general also ramped up their role.
There’s a long, long road between slowing down the continued consolidation of corporate power and somehow dislodging the entrenched wealth of global elites—and by historical standards, the road gets very violent along the way. It’s not a wonder. We’re not speaking about rational human beings anymore, but addicts who will engage in escalating levels of destruction and antihuman behavior to keep their cash stash growing. I suppose it’s distasteful, at the very least, to think that we the powerless must stage an intervention for the billionaires who don’t give a fuck about us. Saving them from themselves hardly matters, except for the fact that we can’t let them burn their moneyed “meth lab” down around us.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/dining/noma-closing-rene-redzepi.html
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1943325
https://jayapal.house.gov/2021/04/06/we-the-people-amendment/#:~:text=04.06.2021%20%7C%20News-,Jayapal%20Introduces%20Constitutional%20Amendment%20to%20Reverse%20Citizens%20United%2C%20End%20Corporate,are%20for%20people%20%E2%80%94%20not%20corporations.