Bipolar Expeditions (40 page)

A manic style is an asset not only in legitimate business, but also in the mafia, at least in fiction. The powerful mob boss Tony Soprano from the HBO series
The Sopranos,
struggles to optimize his manic energy and eliminate his depression (as well as his panic attacks) with therapy and medication. In episode 12 of the first season, Tony's psychiatrist signaled her diagnosis of him as manic depressive by prescribing lithium (alongside the Prozac he was already taking). At the time, Tony was submerged in a deep depression, apparently because he had had to sanction the murder of Pussy, a close friend, who had betrayed the organization by wire tapping for the FBI. Ominously, we see Tony open his bathroom medicine cabinet to reveal two prescription bottles labeled “Prozac” and “lithium.” He empties both bottles into his mouth and waits to die. Tony is rescued, and after he recovers, although the terms “manic depression” or “bipolar disorder” are never explicitly mentioned, we are left wondering what intensely driven profit scheme he will launch next.

Is mania only valuable for men? Certainly, most “manic” figures described in the mass media are men. In college and university lectures where I have introduced this material, the only women whom audiences ever suggested as candidates were Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey. Other audience members were quick to disagree with these suggestions, objecting that Martha Stewart is too rigid and controlling to be included, and Oprah Winfrey is too empathic and kind. I suspect that with mania as a sign of power, as with other such signs, women fall on the twin horns of an old dilemma: if they attempt to wear the signs of power, they lose their ability to be women; if they are really women, they cannot effectively wear the signs of power. Martha Stewart is an instructive case study of this double-bind. In a review of Christopher Byron's
Martha, Inc.,
Anne Kingston attributes Stewart's corporate success to Wall Street's mistaken belief that she was a “woman.”

What she had done was nothing short of amazing: she played the needs of one corporation off against another and then staged an end run around the traditional sources of capital, namely the banks. No one had done it before in media. And Stewart got away with it precisely because the suits around her confused the personal with the corporate Martha Stewart. They thought they were dealing with the mythic Betty Crocker. The fact that Stewart's business is domesticity confuses the matter further, because domestic carries with it associations of servility and unflagging graciousness, qualities Stewart doesn't possess.
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But a Betty Crocker could not bring off such financial success, Kingston concluded. In reality, Stewart was a “man”: “She was a harridan with her husband … she doesn't like children; allegedly she treated her daughter, Alexis, with contempt, and elected to get a hysterectomy in her child-bearing years…. She's not a nurturer. Her employees are terrified of her.” Only after describing her as temperamentally, emotionally, and physically a “non-woman” did Kingston make the move to include Stewart in the category of powerful manics. Citing Byron's book, Kingston said, “Just before her IPO, she tried to sue the
National Enquirer
for suggesting she was mentally ill.” But then she added, “What Byron fails to mention is that manic depression is not unusual in the executive suite, particularly among visionary entrepreneurs.” On this account, Stewart achieves manic style, but at the cost of losing her womanhood entirely.

This suggests that today Fortuna—symbol of eighteenth-century market instability—might better be called “Fortunus”: powerful masculine figures enact the attributes of the market rather than keeping the market separate and under firm control. The emergence of men who—in a sense—personify the traditionally “female” market brings a lot of unease. There are those in the financial world today—called “contrarian”—who disparaged the 1990s stock market as dangerously inflated and urged a high degree of caution in “minding Mr. Market.” They specifically cite the dangerous “female” properties of the market, who is always—like a woman—changing his mind.
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Financial reports, such as
Thestandard.com
, also disparaged the fluctuating market for its female characteristics: “The market must be a woman—entitled to change its mind. It closed the day down for the week—its first negative week in a month—but not before first rising, then falling and then rising again.”
⁶⁷

Fear, perhaps from feeling the consequences of markets unleashed from control, accompanies these shifting frameworks. Perhaps fear could serve as a wedge that would allow us to see things we normally repress. Decrying the dominance of free market ideology today and our inability to conceptualize alternatives, the geographer David Harvey comments sardonically that the usual view in the United States pits “the supreme rationality of the market versus the silly irrationality of anything else.”
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But perhaps the irrationality of the market and what you have to do and be to succeed in it has been forced into the open as a result of policies in the United States beginning in the 1980s that have given markets free reign over more spheres of life. These policies—loosely termed “neoliberal”—fueled investment in the stock market and, in turn, set off a spiral of corporate mergers, layoffs, technological investment, increased profits, and higher stock prices. All this was achieved at the cost of job loss, wage stagnation, and a widening gap between rich and poor—each with its price tag of misery. Perhaps it is hard not to see anymore that “rational choice” contains within it “irrational” choice: it is irrational to promote the well-being of society through means that are sure to damage and impoverish many of its most vulnerable members. Fear might also arise from the prospect that even more dire consequences will surely flow from the hallmark of the neoliberal regimes that are now ascendant, extending the operation of untrammeled self-regulating markets to every imaginable sphere: education, social security, health care, and the environment, just for a start. Neoliberal policies in the United States and elsewhere have deliberately cultivated practices that bolster market mechanisms and entrepreneurial competition, attempting to remove all impediments to their operation.
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They have aimed to anchor the entrepreneurial form in the very heart of society and make it universal.
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Is it any wonder, as the economist Karl Polanyi warned long ago, that we fear the unrestrained operation of self-regulating markets, which could annihilate “the human and natural substance of society,” physically destroy man, and transform “his surroundings into a wilderness”?
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Manic Affinity

If we step back a moment to the days when industrial capitalism was emerging in the United States, we can gain deeper insight into the affinity between mania and powerful contemporary entrepreneurs. As Max Weber showed, modernity put into motion a relentless process in which almost all aspects of work and life were “rationalized.” Although the standards of precision, speed, and efficiency associated with rationalization penetrated more and more deeply into institutions, their penetration was never complete. Weber made an analogy to division in mathematics: “The calculation of consistent rationalism has not easily come out even with nothing left over.”
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Some of the “leftovers” hide in “irrational presuppositions” that are accepted as given and incorporated unseen into daily life.
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Other “leftovers” hide within the “vocational imperative,” the passion and energy associated with an individual's calling. Before the emergence of capitalism, in Weber's view, a vocation could emerge from a calling for religion or a passion for meaningful work. But in capitalism, the passion and energy of the vocation would become predominantly linked to the universalized standards of rational capital production: “[W]e are all as it were conscripted as unconsenting participants in a universalized vocational culture, our horizons limited to the rationalized, endless, and inwardly meaningless certainties of vocational humanity.”
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What passion is left becomes “stripped of its religious and ethical meaning,” and usually finds a place only in association with “purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”
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Thus, in capitalism the vocation is “stripped of its structures of meaning.”
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For Weber, the development of capitalism depended on the emergence of a new kind of person with an unprecedented degree of engagement with work. On the one hand, there was willingness to restrain desire as a form of asceticism; on the other there was willingness to impose and tolerate “increased rigor in the supervision of labor, new marketing methods, a new willingness to adapt to the demands of different customers, large turnover and low prices, and reinvestment of profits in the business.”
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These developments led to intensified competition among firms, in which “whoever did not rise had to decline.” Weber, following Marx, saw the capitalistic economy as an encompassing world that appears to individuals and firms as “an unalterable order of things.” In so far as they participate in the market, firms and individuals must conform to the rules of the system. Anyone who does not adapt to these rules will eventually be eliminated from the market or thrown out of a job.
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Those with a calling for this kind of work needed “temperate self-control,” “clarity of vision and energy,” and “vigor for overcoming the innumerable oppositions.” Above all, however, the entrepreneur needed the capacity for an “endlessly more intensive rate of work.” He needed to be poised and daring but, more important, strongly disciplined and devoted to his work.
⁷⁹

In Weber's description, the capitalist entrepreneur is a pale reflection of the man with a true vocation. As we know, the term “mania” straddles the concepts of mood and motivation. The more mania drifts toward “motivation,” the more aptly it fits the rational “male” elements of capitalist firms. The more it drifts toward “mood” the more aptly it fits the unpredictable and irrational “female” emotional elements present in the same capitalist firms. The optimum condition would be just enough unexpected manic ingredients to leaven the deadly control that rationalization requires. Weber himself described this desirable mix. He thought that the danger in all modern work, whether scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic, is that one might work hard but never have a valuable idea.
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He wrote that being “truly creative” requires that one brood and search at one's desk with a passionate inner devotion
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in hopes that one might happen upon the kind of frenzy that Plato described as “mania.”
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As I have already pointed out, the problem with looking to the mania of manic depression for true creativity is that it is tightly bound to social conventions—it is likely to be innovative only in terms the market can value.

A Few Fallen Heroes

The entrepreneur departs from the pattern of manic depression because he is (ideally) always manic, never depressed. Some manic entrepreneurs might have manic depression that is well managed by drugs or therapy or both; others might rely on family or business associates to protect them from the damaging effects of fluctuating moods. Ronald Fieve suggests in
Moodswing
that among affluent families, manic behaviors such as compulsive spending and traveling sprees are “less noticed and in some instances … almost a normal style absorbed within the family pattern.”
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In any case, the wealthy and powerful can depend on access to material resources, which are far less available to others. The sociological literature contains eloquent statistical studies of the disparities in health and mental health care in the United States that run along lines of race, class, and gender. My field research was not designed to contribute further statistics to these studies, but it can shed light on the experience of moods in a range of current economic settings.

In support groups, people sometimes directly linked mood states to finances. At a meeting in the inland part of Orange County, Jim was serving as facilitator but nonetheless talked extensively about himself. His manner was energetic and animated. He talked continuously in a way that did not admit interruption, with an intense expression and dramatic hand gestures. His face—bright eyes, ruddy cheeks, and dimples—was wreathed in smiles, but all the while he was talking about his profound depression while living alone in a rented room.

I was a nuclear engineer who worked for a major defense company near here until six years ago. Then I froze at work one day. The company was laying off workers—they had already laid off more than 4,000 engineers. But I beat them to it. I sat there for six hours catatonic, just holding on to a pencil in my hand and staring down at my desk. That is how security found me. The doctor wrote a report and they couldn't do anything about it, so I got on disability. After this my family fell apart, they didn't like living without money…. Ever since then I have been living in one room, my own psychiatric ward, and I am a recluse. Some days I don't get out of bed, in fact days go by that way. Except to pee, of course. I eat one meal a day at most, chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken, and only part of the meal at that. Lots of Cheese Curls and orange soda. I am just sleeping in bed, hour after hour … I can't work. My doctor says my serotonin levels are minuscule, nonexistent. This town has a big aircraft manufacturing complex, and they have also recently laid off 6,100 workers. These people came into work one day and were told they had two weeks' notice. If you were to walk down Main Street, you would walk over many bodies of dead engineers.