Bipolar Expeditions (52 page)

16. Denby, “The Quarter of Living Dangerously.”

17. As depicted impressionistically in the film
Enron
and captured successfully by firms like Thrillseekers Unlimited, corporations are big customers of extreme sports adventures. Friedman, “What's the Lure of the Edge?”

18. Sutton, “The Weird Rules of Creativity.”

19. Ibid., 102.

20. Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,
161–62.

21. Koppl, “Retrospectives: Animal Spirits,” describes how animal spirits worked for Keynes; Moggridge, “Correspondence,” has the evidence that Keynes was drawing upon Descartes' notions of fiery particles in the blood that move the nerves and muscles.

22. In psychology, there have been careful assessments of what is called “optimistic bias” as it might differ between schizophrenic patients and healthy comparison subjects. Optimistic bias occurs when a person (unrealistically) evaluates his or her likelihood to experience adverse events as lower than others'. In one study, the healthy comparison subjects showed a greater degree of optimistic bias (and therefore a greater degree of unrealistic judgment) than the schizophrenic patients did. See Prentice, Gold, and Carpenter, “Optimistic Bias in the Perception of Personal Risk.” I have not been able to locate any comparative study of bipolar patients in a manic phase, but these experimental results could be taken to suggest that “normal” Americans are unrealistically optimistic.

23. See “Mood Swings and Downswings,” 2002,
Economist.com
.

24. Greider,
One World, Ready or Not,
227–28.

25. Uchitelle, “Confusion as an Economic Indicator,” 1.

26. R. Abelson, “A Sudden Breakout of Mad-Bull Disease,” C1.

27. Magnier, “Dramatic Surge in Japan's Yen Spurs New Fear.”

28. T. Walker, “Market Cools Down While the Weather Heats Up,” F1.

29. Gillmor, “High-Tech High-Fliers Get Hit Hard,” E1.

30. Kahn, “The Markets: Market Place.”

31. Denby,
American Sucker,
111.

32. Cramer,
Confessions of a Street Addict.

33. Glassman, “Psyching out Mr. Market.”

34. Mann, “Mr. Market Is a Manic-Depressive Idiot.”

35. Ignatius, “Our Bipolar Economy.”

36. “Barclays Capital Newsletter.” Economists such as Richard Thaler or Robert Schiller try to preserve the rationality of markets by seeing the source of markets' irrationality in the irrational emotions of the populace. In
Irrational Exuberance,
Schiller relies on the influence of newspapers and other mass information technology, together with psychological factors such as overconfidence and magical thinking, to explain the contemporary speculative bubble. He sees market highs and lows as inevitable: “We cannot completely protect society from the effects of waves of irrational exuberance or irrational pessimism—emotional reactions that are themselves part of the human condition” (142–43). This work is attracting attention in the mainstream press. The
New York Times
reported on Thaler's approach: “Rejecting the narrow, mechanical
homo economicus
that serves as a basis for neoclassical theory, [Richard] Thaler proposed that most people actually behave like… people! They are prone to error, irrationality and emotion, and they act in ways not always consistent with maximizing their own financial well being” (Lowenstein, “Exuberance Is Rational,” 68, 70). Thaler's work, called behavioral economics, ties research in behaviorist psychology with economic decisions and judgments. In so far as it is a dissenting view in economics that is gaining currency, one that places irrational emotion at the center of human economic behavior, it is relevant to our changing cultural understanding of the nature and source of irrationality. The awarding of the Nobel Prize to behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman in 2002 has driven an additional wedge into the assumptions of rational choice economics.

37. Farrell, “Capitalism's ‘Animal Spirits' Endure.”

38. Griffin, “Looking for the Prevailing Wind.”

39. From a writer who looks back at the breaking of the mania come some reasons for how things got so irrational: “This mania can only end the way all prior manias have ended—with public distrust of the very professionals that coerced them into the madness in the first place…. By its very definition, a mania is a time of widespread hysteria and faulty rationales. However, in order to believe, investors have to be convinced that there is a rational basis to their actions. This can only occur when certain participants are able to devise untruths and cajole the public” (A. Newman, “Pictures of a Stock Market Mania”).

40. Dash,
Tulipomania.

41. Ibid., 217.

42. Tobias,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,
x—xi.

43. Kindleberger,
Manias, Panics and Crashes, 1.

44. Ibid., 23.

45. Ibid., 20. Business writers frequently invoke this set of books to shed light on the contemporary oscillations in market value. Smith, “All's Well That Ends Like Tulip Mania.”

46. Both Adam Smith and Condorcet were preoccupied with economic sentiments: “The essential disposition of moral life, for Condorcet as for Smith, is to think oneself into the feelings of other people; to feel sympathy. This is similar, in its reflexiveness, to the disposition of economic life. To think about economic decisions is to think about how other people think.” The writings of Smith and Condorcet were concerned with how social order could be assured if individuals made their own decisions in the marketplace without overarching controls from a government. Rothschild,
Economic Sentiments,
224. For a nuanced discussion of the eighteenth-century emergence of the notion of “interests,” a hybrid condition between the “passions” and “reason,” see Hirschman,
The Passions and the Interests,
42–48.

47. Pocock,
Virtue, Commerce, and History,
112–13.

48. Ibid., 114.

49. Corrigan,
Business of the Heart,
62.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 229.

52. Ibid., 253–54.

53. Ibid., 128.

54. Pocock,
Virtue, Commerce, and History,
114.

55. Rosenbaum and Seligman,
Abnormal Psychology,
403.

56. Gay, “PBS' New Film about Theodore Roosevelt Chronicles the Many Sides of a Passionate, Energetic Man.”

57. PBS,
Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance.

58. Salamon, “Shackleton Marches On.”

59. Capparell, “Explorers: Get Ready for Shackleton-Mania.”

60. Capparell, “In the Lead.”

61. MacFarquhar, “The Gilder Effect,” 121–22.

62. Farnham, “Crazy and in Charge.” Charles Nuckolls analyzes the categories in the DSM in terms of the premium American culture places on flamboyant self-dramatization as an extreme form of independence
(Culture,
205–6).

63. Fineman, “Rove at War”; Amelio,
On the Firing Line;
Kitchen, “Using Heels-over-Heads Approach at Conference.” Elsewhere in the global corporate world, too, business leaders are turning up as virile manics. In a news story in the
Canadian Business
magazine, one that was well-known among my fieldwork interlocutors, Pierre Karl Péladeau, CEO of the Montreal-based global communications company Quebecor, was said to have “the CEO's Disease.” Péladeau had gone public about his diagnosis of manic depression, and the article placed him in the company of “the most colorful and ambitious business professionals of our times” for whom manic depression had been a “driving force.” In addition, he shared a place beside the magazine's “Peers of the Abyss” sidebar, featuring Winston Churchill, Ted Turner, and Canadian business leaders Robert Campeau and Murray Pezim. But when Péladeau first recognized himself in the descriptions of manic depression in Ronald Fieve's book
Moodswing,
he was not pleased. “I hated it; I would have preferred a heart attack. I thought it was a woman's illness” (Tillson, “The CEO's Disease”). Other international magnates seem to revel in the zaniness of their image. Richard Branson, the British founder of the Virgin Group, is called “the flamboyant CEO,” (1) who is “charismatic and competitive” with a “skillfully controlled aggressive streak,” a “rock and roll businessman,” (2) who combines “cunning, naivety [sic] and manic competitiveness,” (3) and has “manic-looking eyes” (4) and “manic energy” (5). Citations are as follows: (1) Nandwani, “The Flamboyant CEO”; (2) Ligerakis, “The Challenger: Richard Branson”; (3) Rawnsley, “Review of'Richard Branson; the Inside Story' by Mick Brown”; (4) “No More Branson Nonsense”; (5) Ellen, “Why Richard Branson's Number Is Up.”

64. Walker, “Conscience Undercover.”

65. Kingston, “Minding Martha's Business.”

66. Grant,
Minding Mr. Market,
xxi.

67. Arora, “Market Movers: Mood Swings.”

68. Harvey,
Spaces of Hope,
154.

69. Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

70. W. Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”; Lemke, “‘The Birth of Biopolitics.'”

71. Polanyi,
The Great Transformation
, 3.

72. Gerth and Mills,
From Max Weber,
281.

73. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project contains much that develops Weber's insights on this point. Benjamin contested the claim—often mistakenly attributed to Weber—that modernity, bringing the complete triumph of abstract, formal reason in many major institutions and cultural forms, led to the disenchantment of the world. Benjamin thought that even though social and cultural institutions had become rationalized in form, cultural life became reenchanted with irrational content from dream images and mythical figures. He showed that “underneath the surface of increasing systemic rationalization, on an unconscious ‘dream' level, the new urban-industrial world had become fully reenchanted. In the modern city, as in the ur-forests of another era, the ‘threatening and alluring face' of myth was alive and everywhere. It peered out of wall posters advertising ‘toothpaste for giants,' and whispered its presence in the most rationalized urban plans that, ‘with their uniform streets and endless rows of buildings, have realized the dreamed-of architecture of the ancients: the labyrinth.' It appeared, prototypically, in the arcades, where ‘the commodities are suspended and shoved together in such boundless confusion, that [they appear] like images out of the most incoherent dreams.'” Buck-Morss notes perceptively that Weber actually did appreciate the persistence of the irrational in modern life
(The Dialectics of Seeing,
254).

74. Gerth and Mills,
From Max Weber,
88.

75. Ibid., 182.

76. Scaff,
Fleeing the Iron Cage,
88.

77. Goldman,
Max Weber and Thomas Mann,
28–29.

78. Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
54–55.

79. Ibid., quoted in Goldman,
Max Weber and Thomas Mann,
29.

80. Gerth and Mills,
From Max Weber,
136.

81. Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
137.

82. Ibid., 136.

83. Fieve,
Moodswing,
24.

84. Jamison,
An Unquiet Mind,
74.

85. Ho, “Liquefying Corporations and Communities.”

86. Gusterson,
Nuclear Rites,
111.

87. Kraepelin,
One Hundred Hears of Psychiatry.

88. Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis,” 250.

89. Painton, “The Taming of Ted Turner.”

90. Auletta, “The Lost Tycoon.”

91. The mortality rate for untreated manic-depressive patients is higher than it is for most types of heart disease and many types of cancer. At least 20 percent of deaths among manic-depressive patients are “secondary to suicide.” Goodwin and Jamison,
Manic-Depressive Illness,
227, 228.

92. In addition, in many cultures, wrongful death, incomplete burial, suicide, and other socially anomalous events in which life and death collide often produce restless ghosts in their wake. See Hertz,
Death and the Right Hand;
Mueggler,
The Age of Wild Ghosts.

93. In Roland Barthes' terms, this is a “punctum.” I am indebted here to Gordon's
Ghostly Matters.

94. “Pocket Quiz,” Diversions, April 7, 2002, available from
http://www.economist.com/diversions/pocketquiz
.

95. “Barclays Capital Newsletter.”

96. Cultural critic Slavoj
i
ek explains that to be willing to die for some cause is to have the “very excess of life.” This means terrorists are fascinating because they are “more alive” than others and it means the way to defeat terrorists is to become as alive as they are. Under this logic, a war in which American citizens die is the simplest way for the nation to demonstrate its excess of life.
i
ek is not condoning terrorism: as Walter Benn Michaels clarifies, “the question of whether we are doing the right thing has been redescribed as the question of whether we are living our lives to the fullest (whether we're as alive as the suicide bombers.)”
i
ek,
Welcome to the Desert of the Real,
103, quoted in Michaels,
The Shape of the Signifier,
176.