Capitalism Normalizes Sociopathy

From a book review of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, by Steven Bloom. We just discussed Postville a few days ago on this blog. For background information on the Postville Hasidim kosher plant story, see the previous post. Here is another review of the book from the Jewish Tribal Review. JTR is a very problematic site and Chad Powers is a most provocative author, but this review is pretty fair to Jews.

A New York Times review and a Boston Globe review are sort of disgusting, seeming to defend the Lubavitchers and condemn Bloom as a bad guy.

This book looks at how tensions gradually erupt between locals and Hasidic Jews who opened a kosher slaughterhouse in a rural farming community. This book was written by a secular Jew from the West Coast who had moved to Iowa to take a job as a university professor.

While the author certainly has issues of his own (He actually cites the scoutmaster mentioning Jesus Christ at his son's Boy Scouts meeting as an example of antisemitism he has experienced in Iowa!) I don't think the most rabid Jew-hater could have done a better job of making the Hasidic Lubavitchers look bad.

After being taken under the wing of Lubavitchers who wanted to convert him, as a secular Jew, to their Hasidic sect, Bloom in the end exposes the Lubavitchers' worst traits.

From their petty haggling over prices in local stores over the smallest of items, to their racist attitudes towards "goyim" and "schwartzes", while simultaneously accusing anybody who disagrees with them of being antisemitic, to their refusal to pay debts and honor contracts in business dealings and other bullying business practices, to their importation of illegal immigrant riffraff to this once homogeneous crime free town to cheapen their labor costs, and even to their cruel way of slaughtering animals to make the meat kosher, the worst behavior of the Lubavitchers, described by some reviewers as "unbearable", are brought to light.

All of these factors, along with the Hasidic Jews' refusal to participate in the community other than by using it to make themselves rich, gradually over a period of time caused major tensions between multi-generational locals and the Lubavitchers. On the other hand, he does show some of their admirable traits, like being family-oriented and their obsessively strict adherence to preserving their own culture and customs.

What's interesting is that the behavior displayed by these Jewish ultra-capitalists (refusing to repay loans, not honoring contracts, and just being all-around callous, rude, manipulative shits) is known around my neighborhood as "ghetto" behavior. The more civilized folks look down on this behavior, as it is sociopathic and narcissistic in addition to being downright uncivilized and just "low".

Getting away from the Jewish angle for a moment, as Jewish capitalists have traditionally just been grotesque caricatures of capitalists in general, and I would argue that nowadays, most Gentile capitalists don't act any better, as society has been "Judaized", and hence distinctions between Jewish and Gentile capitalists are fraught with difficulty at best and antisemitic at worst, my point is:

It's interesting that the same behavior that society rightly condemns in the urban poor, is, when glommed onto wealthy capitalists, actually glorified as sharp, sharp-elbowed, ruthless, or this and that.

This is one of my main beefs against capitalism. Sociopathic behavior becomes normalized and even glorified in business culture, and the businessmen who are less sociopathic get eaten alive by the more sociopathic ones.

The entirety of business sociopathy is glorified by the nation's culture, in art, media, etc. as tens of millions of Americans long to be the next Bill Gates, who is nothing more than a White Crips/Bloods gang member with glasses and a high IQ.

Less sociopathic businessmen who try to act decent are destroyed and then, for their decency, are attacked in common culture as losers, failures and even scum. Women avoid them and their families look at the ground when someone brings up their name. At the individual level, people who try to play fair and be nice are told that they are displaying loser attitudes and ordered to harden up and act more sociopathic.

Capitalism is really the normalization, rationalization, glorification and even deification of sociopathy across society.

But there are problems with this championing of sociopathy. While it's pretty much ok for the bosses and businessmen, when the ordinary folks try to act as sociopathic as the business class, they tend to get handcuffs slapped on them. Meanwhile, the boss gets regaled as "Meanest Boss in America" by Fortune Magazine (yes, this is actually a regular feature in Steve Forbes' terrible but predictable magazine).

This creates confusion. Sociopathy is championed, but one is ordered not to be a criminal. Or at least not to be a certain kind of criminal. Or something.

I'm not here to defend criminals of any type, but we really ought to try to examine why crime is so out of control in many capitalist societies. We might note that many of these same societies under socialism had very low crime rates. There is something about capitalism that causes wild crime rates in the humans that live in these societies, and this is what I want to get you to think about here.

This is one of my main problems with capitalism. Granted, it's great at producing stuff and creating a good standard of living for many people, while state socialism, at best, has only been able to provide a low standard of living. Nevertheless, I wonder if the malign nature of capitalism's sociopathization of entire nations and cultures is hard to defend. Socialism is at least a moral system.

References

Bloom, Steven G. 2001. Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. Harcourt Harvest Books: San Diego.

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