Discussion Capitalism Exploits The Body's Response To Traumatic Stress

Learned helplessness, basically.

For the most financially precarious (an ever-widening sector of the population), capitalism creates a state similar to the psychological domination that can occur when people are held in captivity. Psychological domination is more likely when 1) the threat is unpredictable and 2) there are periods of relative safety amid the chaos and abuse. Psychologist Judith Herman observed, “The ultimate effect of [psychological domination] is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance.”

According to Smail, capitalism generates stress through its unpredictability and hierarchical power structures, but it also alleviates stress by producing an economy organized around the production and circulation of addictive substances and practices.

Smail notes that, from its inception in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, global capitalism was organized around creating and feeding addictions. The first imports to Europe from Africa, the Arab World, and the Americas were coffee, sugar, chocolate, tobacco and “spirits” — all mood-altering substances.

During this time, the term addiction gained its modern meaning as a self-inflicted behavior rather than the state of being indebted to another (e.g., serfdom) that previously distinguished the addict. With this shift in understanding of addiction, also came a new organization of society away from a focus on managing external forms of control to a focus on internal ways of responding to dominance by self-medicating its effects.

If you stop working for a week your life could fall apart