← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:10]
A
Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. I must again with this ongoing coronavirus chaos and crisis, ask your understanding. We are producing this program in a new place, far from our normal studio, which has been closed as so many institutions have been, ours as well. And so we are having to make do under special circumstances. And so we ask your understanding that we are working under those special circumstances. But we have every intention of continuing to bring you right regular programming of the sort that we have produced in the past and that you've come to expect today. As before, I want to focus on an aspect of the coronavirus pandemic from a different angle, to look at the mental health dimensions of this crisis. You know, we've had a lot of attention to the physical dimensions, what the virus is, how it works, how to recognize the symptoms and all of that. And that's of course important. But there are just as many dimensions to the emotional, the personal, the intimate, the psychological aspects of all of this. And there, I mean, not only the illness itself, but also the anxiety about the illness which is separate from the illness itself. And that's an anxiety of one kind before it hits another anxiety, if it hits, et cetera. And I also want to look at the psychological implications of the fact that it took so long in the United States to formulate a response. Even now the response is half baked, unthought through partial, when what is obviously needed we can, you know, that from China, South Korea, Italy and so on, is a full throated holistic approach that uses all of our resources for so dangerous a threat. And the steps being taken, quarantine, isolation, social spacing, you know, them all, those too have enormously important psychological effects that haven't been understood, haven't been addressed, and certainly were never planned for as they should have been. So those are what we want to focus on. To conclude, before I introduce my guest and have this conversation about some of the psychological implications of all of this, a quick reminder. Viruses have been with us as long as there has been nature. They pre exist humans and, and they have coexisted with humans forever. Periodically, these kinds of crises, viruses can get very dangerous and kill large numbers of people. Perhaps the most famous one was over 100 years ago in 1918. The so called Spanish flu shouldn't have had that name because if it was going to be given a name, it should have been scientific viruses. Some people don't seem to get this, viruses don't have nationalities. People do. Viruses don't. The Spanish flu, which killed 700,000Americans at a time when our population was much smaller than it is today, began in Kansas on a military base of the United States. It's interesting. Why? Because we learned what a pandemic from viruses can be like. But we've learned it many times. A few years ago, we had the SARS epidemic, a virus for many, many years. We've had seasonal viruses that have killed sizable numbers of people. We had the MERS virus, We had the Ebola virus. The knowledge that viruses come and can be devastatingly dangerous is well established and has been for a century. The problem, therefore, is not that we have a virus. The problem is that the United States, and not alone the United States, but particularly the United States, was unprepared. Or if it was prepared, and there is evidence of preparation in various parts of the United States, that preparation was not activated. That preparation was not put into play when this virus became known, which was in December of the last year, 2019. Only now, in the last very few weeks, have we begun to see the kind of mobilization and the lost time. There is no excuse for that. Months during which we could have been prepared.
- [05:23]
B
We weren't.
- [05:24]
A
And that is a failure of the private sector that produces the. The equipment, the tests, the ventilators, the hospital beds, and of the public sector, which didn't step up either. And probably because it's got the same mentality at the top of the political system as we have at the top of our economic system, given how closely they're allied. So with that as the background, let me with great pleasure introduce you to someone who has been on this program. Her name is Tess Fraad Wolf. She is a psychotherapist practicing in New York City who has worked with individuals and couples for nearly a decade now. She is also trained in art therapy and in hypnotherapy.
- [06:12]
B
Welcome very much, Tess, to the program.
- [06:14]
C
Thank you.
- [06:16]
B
Okay, let's jump right in. As this pandemic unfolds, the economy is also threatened. We have a kind of a mixture now of a failed response to a medical emergency now becoming a crash of the economy on top of a crash, let's call it, of our health. And one of the things it does is say to people all over the country, wow, I better get together with other people and try to get through this to become, if you like, pulled together, which in a sense, we might have expected to happen. But we also live in a society that has become More and more divided ideologically, politically. And so we seem in a peculiar way to have been unprepared to get together. And how is that playing out in people's feelings and in the whole response of the United States?
- [07:14]
C
I mean, I think it's a really important question. I also think that polarizing you talk about the divides are reflected in the responses and the reactivity of the population. Meaning that, you know, there's always opportunities and crises and the reverse. I think a lot of people know that. I think a lot of people right now are within their fear, reaching for each other, some with more and less anxiety. There can be enormous beauty of behavior and action witnessed. Solidarity, generosity, you know, co respectivity, real respect for each other's life values. We're sort of chiseled down to the essentials right now. We're not allowed to go out much. And, you know, there's a whole arms of commerce that have shuttered. And so we're really involved with each other and we're scraping up as much human interactivity as we can through social media, often maybe through the phone. But human interactivity has taken on a much greater importance. And people are strategizing around that in some ways that often not always force them to recognize the importance of this interactivity. So all of that can be very positive and certainly has been. I think there's. Because there's that positive and we're talking about polarities. There's also a lot of destructive energy unleashed.
- [08:35]
B
Tell us about that.
- [08:36]
C
Partly because I think people are being deprived of basic resources and forgotten about many already neglected populations who will be forced to become increasingly desperate, perhaps violent and so on?
- [08:50]
B
Who are you thinking of? Can you think of a couple of.
- [08:52]
C
Underserved populations, people who are relying on their jobs from paycheck to paycheck, People in the service industries that have been shuttered. Restaurant workers come to mind. So many different workers. But people who are just shut down from paychecks, they're not given breaks in terms of food rent, not as yet anyway, feel mounting desperation. There's also a sort of emotional anxiety that's galvanized by inactivity. People become reliant on the schedules and the structuring of work. It helps them sort of organize their life. And suddenly that's yanked out and they're shuttered inside for the most part, mostly speaking, and also taken away from structure. It can make people go into panic and states of sort of free fall and fear, which then may bring them into more destructive spaces where they act out upon each Other where they lash out verbally, physically, in all the different ways. Where petty crimes may become more frequent and less petty, more significant. I've heard stories of people being robbed in broad daylight, you know, in very safe places and with seeming impunity. I've heard stories of people being struck. Reasonlessness has intervened. There's no reason. This woman had been struck in the back of the head by a man she didn't know. He didn't take her money. There was nothing, you know, she was able to right herself. The child who was with her was not hurt. They were both emotionally shaken and disturbed. So these are just actings out described. Perhaps the robbery had to do with financial reasons. The other instance had to do with nothing.
- [10:36]
B
Let me ask you a question to you as a professional. Is it known in your field that if you put people into this, what we now call lockdown situation, they, they can't go to work, they can't go out, they can't mingle, they can't be with groups of people and so they're isolated. That these kinds of psychologically and socially dangerous behaviors are part of what will happen. Is that understood?
- [11:05]
C
Yes. Yes. I mean, if you take it to a claustrophobic description, I mean certain cities are particularly small, obviously some place people have bigger homes and that relates to class too. But if you're in a very small place especially, it can become more immediately claustrophobic. And the fear of this encroaching boundary can unleash all sorts of panic and anxiety riddled behavior.
- [11:31]
B
So is the following inference reasonable if you knew that sequestering people, quarantining people in, is a rational response to a pandemic, and if you knew that you were sooner or later gonna have to do more or less of that, then a rational response would have included, let's call it a mental health component in which you plan. What are you gonna do so that these potentially damaging behaviors don't explode? I mean, if we have a society that now challenged by the virus, challenged by economic crash, we don't want an additional explosion of asocial or antisocial behavior. And yet I know of no coordinated plan, effort, program of any kind mobilizing or training skilled people in mental health advice to handle all of this? You're explaining something which is now obvious or clear, but there's no management of.
- [12:37]
C
It, There was no preparedness. I mean, I think it could have helped enormously if this had been considered instead of this last dash desperate. I received a communication. As I know many, many people in my field and other fields related did from the governor of New York asking for mental health workers to volunteer to which I'm open and plan to do. But now it's scrambled. Now people are already in tatters and there are multiple ways in which we could have prepared for the kind of powerlessness we feel when we're told we have to quarantine social distance, we can't go to places we're used to going and so on. Very difficult for people to hold powerlessness as a feeling to speak to it to say, I feel helpless or powerless. I'm not sure what to do. I don't feel like I have the control I need. All of these statements, the identifications of this difficult feeling to hold will help.
- [13:38]
A
Okay, we will be right back, folks. We've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Be sure to visit democracyatwork.info, our website, where you can learn more about other democracy at work shows, our union co op store and our books that we've recently published, Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism. And lastly, of course, a special thanks now more than ever to our Patreon community whose invaluable support helps make this show possible. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more. From Psychotherapist Tests Fraud Wolf. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update where we're speaking with psychotherapist Tess Fraud Wolff.
- [14:46]
B
Tess, I want to ask a question that has to do with the peculiar leadership or to be more honest, lack of leadership that we have seen in this coronavirus pandemic.
- [15:00]
A
By that I mean from the president.
- [15:02]
B
On down for a while, this is not an important issue. We don't have to worry about it then. It's the greatest issue in the world. But don't worry, I've gotten control of it to an exploding statistics of people getting sick, infected, dying, scientific leaders in our society at variance with the political leadership. I mean, it's a mess. And there's loads of evidence that large numbers of people are at a time when they need to believe in a leader or leaders and are unable to do so, feel, in fact, leaderless. Is that something you've noticed, seen? Tell us about that?
- [15:47]
C
Yes, I've noticed that a lot. I've seen it spread across different communities in different ways, reflected more individually and collectively. I think you're exactly right about leaderlessness. And people perceive that. They perceive it before they're even conscious of it. And many, I think, are also increasingly conscious of it. I think it speaks to the kind of polarities we were discussing earlier, wherein we see some people stepping up that we might not have thought would step up. Certain governors come to mind feeling we feel that they're solid. We feel that some people have stepped up to the task and started trying to take care of the community, be honest with the community, be clear, explanatory, committed, and be respectful and protective of the community, which is so precious now. So we've seen some of them come up, and that's been really beautiful. And however, we've also seen, as you mentioned in administration, for me and for many, I think, reveal degrees of apathy combined with ineptitude that are dismaying. I think I see a lot of reactions to leaderlessness in individuals and in large groups. I feel people's senses of permission emboldened that you could get away with things now that you might not have been able to get away with before due to a possibly compromised police force. People in charge of all varieties being compromised, I'm sure children being giddy and sort of caregiverless, running amok, feeling sort of excited, but also frightened because the limits on which they rely are no longer being provided or provided steadily. I think we're all in this right now where we're gonna watch people act out in ways like we were talking about before that are destructive, and there will be ways of acting out that are productive.
- [17:43]
B
Let me ask you to pull on this a little bit more. I've been recently hearing in the street, in the few places where you can still talk to people which aren't that many, and mostly over social media. The phrase the country's falling apart or everything's falling apart, is that sort of the other side of a sense of leaderlessness?
- [18:05]
C
Yes. I think that there's this idea that we trust a government and we hope that we elected a government, and then we see a government by which we don't feel cared, protected, provided for, and we have to really reorient there. And within that reorientation is that sense of leaderlessness is. Is that sense of free fall that I spoke to. It's also just that we don't feel like anything on which we were relying is reliable. You know, we relied on going to work like we were talking about before in the structure and all of that. We relied on these interpersonal reactions, the small ones maybe with someone from whom we bought coffee, people we stood in line with at all the various places we would go out to many of which are gone now. We rely on that. We rely on the interpersonal ST stuff. We just don't know that.
- [19:01]
B
So let me pull on you again a little bit in another direction. Had we understood, which I know the folks in your profession do, that we are going to have a pandemic, that we are going to have a serious struggle with this new virus.
- [19:17]
C
Right.
- [19:18]
B
And we're going to therefore have to plan to the physical, medical care for them. But you're telling me, if I understand you correctly, that we should have understood, because we know the science, that if we put people in a position of feeling leaderlessness, without the structure of going to work and all the other normal routines of life, that's going to produce a sense of anxiety that can be socially dangerous, add to our problems. But nothing, again was done. There was no plan. We what do you do to give people a sense that there is a society, even if it's not the normal one they're used to? I can see almost from your speech, a person whose job is no longer there, whose community of restaurants or friends or shopping is gone, being cooped up at home, feeling the world is falling apart, desperately in need of something that will replace all of that.
- [20:18]
C
So.
- [20:19]
B
But there isn't anything.
- [20:20]
C
Yes, there's been no provisions. I mean, I think psychology and social psychology perhaps in particular, are often neglected as areas of study. You know, I think you have to specialize in order to access those in ways that is not optimal. I think since we're all people and social psychology is the study of our social interactions, it would be deeply preferable if it was offered very early in more remedial forms, at least so that we had an idea. But you're absolutely right in that this was another arm of the neglect and that this could have been prepared for in many, many ways. And also there's a relationship between our psychological and our physical experiences. So that when people are cut off from social interactivity on which they have consciously and unconsciously depended, they will be much more likely to exhibit physical symptoms of illness.
- [21:16]
B
So the irony is the pandemic being so badly mishandled, will, through its provocation of anxiety, worsen the disease. And we have a vicious cycle like that.
- [21:30]
C
Yes, absolutely, a vicious cycle, and could well spawn other illnesses. Anxiety is hard on the body. Loneliness is now being said to have the same effect on the body as 15 cigarettes a day. And we've done extensive research on the cigarettes. But to regard those as physicians are now doing and statistics are now holding as comparable in terms of their damage is something we should all take note of.
- [21:58]
B
And so nobody apparently in authority figured out we're going to be overloading our hospitals with coronavirus victims. Yet we're making people sick through loneliness, depression, anxiety. Those people will need to go perhaps to a hospital, but can't be accommodated.
- [22:19]
C
Absolutely.
- [22:20]
B
The level of. I mean, in a way we're thinking our way through to where people already are with a sense everything's falling apart.
- [22:28]
C
Yes. A lot of people are talking about the world crumbling, democracy crumbling. That's been a talk for even longer than this pandemic has been been around. But certainly so many things on which we relied being suddenly it felt yanked. Suddenly you look down and the floor isn't the floor anymore. You know, you don't go to work, which was regarded as such a constant for so many. The stores aren't open that have been open your entire life for decades. You know, this really throws people's emotions into chaos.
- [23:02]
B
I know this is a difficult question since obviously neither the private sector nor the government figured out that we would have these perfectly predictable mental health issues. So it's difficult to ask you to do what all of them couldn't. But I'm going to ask you anyway. Are there things you can think of, can say right now that might help people psychologically so that we're useful, we're not just analyzing, which I have every confidence we ought to be doing, the failures that got us to where we are, which is the only hope of not repeating them. But put that aside for the moment. What could people begin to do if they become conscious of what you're saying about the mental health dimensions of all of this?
- [23:49]
C
Yeah, there are definitely things people can do. I think routine is very important in general and specifically now in this time of great lack, the damage to structure we talked about the yanking of jobs and all of these reliable routines. So I think we need to stitch together new routines, hopefully informed by our new values. Many people are speaking to, valuing connectivity with other people with new depth. These are some of the more beautiful and I think connective, hopefully.
- [24:17]
B
How could we do that?
- [24:18]
C
We could schedule social interactions which is already happening. It's happening with all sorts of people. I know hear about, see social media, speak to live people. I know in my personal and professional life across the board, people are scheduling, if you have access to an Internet zoom, hangouts with groups of people, FaceTime, Skype, phone calls. All of these are being regarded with new, rejuvenated respect. Hearing someone's voice, hearing the Pauses and seeing their face, right? Hearing the voice on the phone, seeing their face on these other media, seeing them laughing together. People are having cocktail hour, they're sharing their morning coffee. They're working out together. Our technology affords people to work out together. Exercise, one of the most important things you can do now to work your body out. Because we don't have as much movement outside as we did, even if we moved very little, and especially since we moved a lot, some of us.
- [25:14]
B
And these are all ways, for example, if I understand you, to reduce your loneliness, to reduce your isolation, to reduce your anxiety and to produce more schedule. And they really are therapeutic in the biggest and best sense of the term.
- [25:29]
C
That and the arts, anything creative writing, it doesn't matter if you're good. This isn't about being good. I feel like that's a problem too, in our society. This pressure to be good, be proficient, be successful, to sell it, to own it, to best it. I don't really think that's a great idea. I think people make a terrible piece of artwork, really go for it. But get a piece of artwork out, an artwork that describes the anxiety you feel, the loneliness, the anger, the powerlessness.
- [25:55]
A
It's not so important to be best.
- [25:57]
C
Oh, God. God, that one's the worst beworst. That's my advocation, my new hashtag, beworsed. What it really is is be productive in terms of making art and trying to unleash your feelings and trying to identify them. Talk to people about them on the social media, on the phone. Write it down. Try to give yourself the therapy that you can and use the kindness that you can.
- [26:20]
B
As I listen to you all, I can think of imagine a society in which you had not the political hack leadership we do, but a society that had in place programs to enhance, to facilitate, to help organize, to help schedule the community we all need so badly and lack more now than ever would have been able if they had done it. To turn this crisis, as you put at the beginning, into an opportunity to rebuild community in this society, which would have been a lasting benefit to pull out of this otherwise disaster.
- [26:59]
C
Yeah, I think community is a very important word. I'm glad you used it because I think people are realizing how important community is. That's the rejuvenation of our understanding of connectivity.
- [27:12]
B
It's extraordinary. I mean, I don't know. Just speaking for myself, I waver between anger and bitterness at the failure of the private sector. We don't have tests, we don't have ventilators, we don't have enough beds. What kind of society neglects its own health? Well, the society that makes decisions about producing those things based on when it's profitable. I don't want to produce a test.
- [27:37]
A
If I can't sell it, I'm not.
- [27:39]
B
Going to stockpile it.
- [27:40]
A
It'll sit there for a year or two.
- [27:42]
B
It's the public's health that you're subordinating to profit. That's crazy. But I waver between anger at such a system and then a kind of yearning for an alternative society that could.
- [27:55]
A
Have found a way to.
- [27:57]
B
To build itself and its community out of this disaster and miss that opportunity, too. So we rely on the few individuals who see it. Thank you so much. I wish, as always, we had more time.
- [28:09]
C
Thank you.
- [28:10]
A
Folks, we've come to the end of another economic update. I want to say an extra word about it. Economics, you know, isn't, or needn't be, the narrow technical field that the profession here in the United States unfortunately lapsed into after World War II. It once was a study of the goods and services we produce and how they interact with everything else in our lives. I'm trying to go back in that direction. And I want to bring people who are not economists like Tess Fraad Wolff, to bring in the richer dimensions of the society, to intermingle them with equality economics. I hope you find that interesting. Do let us know. And in any case, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.