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Photo by Anne Burke UCLA Today
Peter C. Whybrow has examined the psychological and sociological
implications of America's affluence. |
GOING BACK TO THE BASICS
NPI's chief: Is more ever enough?
by Ajay singh
ucla today staff
When millions of Americans got richer in the Internet stock boom
of the late 1990s, pundits predicted the onset of a “new economy”
that would make just about everyone wealthy and happy.
But Peter C. Whybrow, director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute,
saw something different in the get-rich frenzy: a form of “mania,”
that dysfunctional state of mind that begins with a sense of exhilaration
and heightened productivity, escalat ing into reckless pursuits,
confusion and, eventually, depression.
This insight prompted Whybrow to write a book, “American
Mania: When More is Not Enough” (W.W. Norton and Company,
Inc.), a study of the psychological and social implications of America’s
affluence. Whybrow suggests that the United States is mired in a
culture of greed and excess, which is making its people sick.
The statistics are startling. Although half of U.S. households
have a net worth of just $17,800, Whybrow tells us, more than 70%
of Americans believe they will become very rich, given enough time
and luck. “We have built this mythology that everybody can
be president, everybody can be Bill Gates,” he said.
His main argument is that Americans confuse pleasure with happiness.
“One of the fascinating thoughts about America is that if
you have energy, intelligence and opportunity, then, hey, it’s
sort of a chocolate box,” he said. “The only problem
is that we’ve created so many chocolates they are now essentially
choking us.”
We’re also being smothered by too much instant information,
Whybrow warns. “The barriers to human communication used to
be distance,” he explained. “The only barrier now is
language and time zones, which diminish the opportunity for individuals
to savor their lives in ways they once were able to.”
To escape this 24/7 world in which businesses never sleep, Whybrow
suggests going back to some basic principles. “There’s
an amazing irony in the thought that the people who used to live
in this part of California 20,000 years ago — or even 300
years ago — enjoyed all the things that everybody is so desperate
to get to on weekends,” he said, laughing. “So it depends
on what you believe human life is about.”
An immigrant himself, Whybrow was born and raised in a small farming
town near London. The son of a music teacher, he spent much of his
youth “riding around on a bicycle, fishing in ponds and working
on the farms on weekends.” And yet, despite the utter lack
of luxury, “it was a very happy time,” he recalled.
In his book, to be published next year, Whybrow introduces us
to Gordon Wilder, a farmer in Plainfield, a small village in New
Hampshire where Whybrow has owned a farm since the 1970s. With a
population of just over 2,000 people, Plainfield was once a closely
knit rural community similar to the one Whybrow grew up in. It’s
now a very different place, and Whybrow quotes Wilder about what
has been lost: “What was once community in America is in danger
of becoming nostalgia, the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings.”
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