As the old proverb goes, “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.” From a god’s eye view, we’re pretty sick birds, spewing massive amounts of carbon into our atmosphere and dumping an endless stream of plastics into our oceans. Why is that?On first glance, the answer is obvious. We have an economic system organized around the endless pursuit of more, excess known technically as the profit motive. Always seeking more on a finite planet was never going to end well.
Given the profit motive’s centrality to global capitalism, it’s curious how rarely we discuss the motivations behind it.
Interestingly, Karl Marx—the great critic of capitalism—didn’t have much to say about greed. For Marx, greed was an ugly human impulse that predated capitalism. The system, however, incentivized the impulse, throwing it out of proportion with our other drives. Change the system, and the problem falls away. This might be true, but the greed and corruption that helped sink many socialist regimes are cause for pause. Understanding the deeper motives behind the “more” motive is important for transforming capitalism and affecting lasting change.
Writing in 1932, before the planetary impacts of endless profit-seeking were as clear as an unpolluted stream, economist John Maynard Keynes described the “money motive” as a “somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” Keynes saw greed as a necessary evil that could power enough economic growth to pull all people out of poverty, at which point we could compost the money motive and enjoy the fruits of its often cruel labors.
Some of those benefits have come to pass, and yet poverty persists as concentrations of wealth intensify. Moreover, we are undermining the Holocene conditions that have allowed human life to thrive. We are fouling our nest, creating a “Craposcene.” It’s long past time to call in the “specialists in mental disease.”
Crapitalism?
One of the enduring strengths of psychoanalysis is its insistence on our animality. Despite our continuous efforts to deny our fleshly carnality with various taboos and cultural mores, we all live in animal bodies. As French author Georges Bataille once observed, humans are “the only animal to be ashamed of that nature whence he comes, and from which he does not cease to have departed.”
For psychoanalysts such as Freud, our highest ambitions and virtues can never be sundered from our existential experience as fleshly animals who hunger, fear, yearn, shit, and fuck.
Interestingly, there has long been a psychoanalytic association between money and anality. In the psychoanalytic canon, capitalist money—something held to have the highest cultural worth—is likened to shit. How can that be?
The basic argument developed by psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Lou Andreas-Salomé is that toilet training is one of the first cultural prohibitions we encounter, thus also making it one of our first repressions.
We repress our excremental freedom to please our parents and caregivers, the source of our love, nourishment, and very survival. By this early point in our lives, many of us have already experienced the highs of suckling at the breast and giggling alongside a parent or caregiver, but we’ve also experienced the lows of hunger, pain, fear, and general bewilderment at this existence we’ve mysteriously joined. Even when everything is going well, basic human life is pretty intense.
Since toilet training is one of the first prohibitions, it’s also an early rumble with power, the disciplinary power of our parents, but also our power to resist.
Deploying the tools of the master against them, we might decide to repress our need to shit when placed on the potty by our expectant parents. “You want repression, watch this!” Holding onto our feces becomes a way of asserting our will (and maintaining the pleasure of deployment at our leisure). Poop power.
In Freud’s classic essay “Character and Anal Erotism,” he shares a story offered to him by a patient. The patient recalled discussing Freud’s theories on anality with a friend over a pleasant lunch. With some dessert chocolate sitting on the table between them, the friend spontaneously recalled a fantasy they had as a child. They had imagined themselves a chocolate manufacturer and that they “possessed a great secret for the preparation of this cocoa, and that all the world was trying to get this valuable secret from me, but that I carefully kept it to myself.” Sometimes a chocolate bar is just a chocolate bar, and sometimes it is “more.”
In his retelling of the story, Freud includes the following analysis in parentheses: “Excrement becomes aliment: the shameful substance which has to be concealed turns into a secret which enriches the world.”
While the psychoanalytic link between excrement and aliment—caca and cuisine—can seem like early twentieth-century clickbait, it makes theoretical sense from the perspective of a generally powerless child seeking to soothe itself.
If we had a self-generated secret ingredient that we could keep to ourselves, nibbling on when we felt hunger pangs, we’d be unstoppable. We’d no longer need our parents, or anyone else for that matter. Total independence. Total freedom. In the psychoanalytic canon, excrement is a source of power in the unconscious lives of children.
Filthy Rich
As we age into capitalist societies, this hunger for power, which buffers us against the uncertainties of a fragile and finite existence, gets sublimated into the quest for money (sublimation is when infantile and embodied desires are redirected into more respectable pursuits).
As Norman O. Brown argues in Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, “Money is inorganic dead matter which has been made alive by inheriting the magic power which infantile narcissism attributes to the excremental product.” Or as Ferenczi poetically puts it: “Pleasure in the intestinal contents becomes enjoyment of money…dehydrated filth that has been made to shine.”
Consider the slang we have for the rich: “filthy stinking rich,” “flush,” “loaded,” “dirty capitalist pig.” Likewise, consider how taboo it is to ask about someone’s salary. It’s a generally secret and private topic, like matters of the flesh. Finally, consider that the mediums of exchange used in capitalist society—from gold to paper money and credit cards—are worthless from the perspective of use value. “The essence of money is its absolute worthlessness,” writes Brown.
The unconscious wish for power does not determine the profit motive in a simple and unidirectional way. As Otto Fenichel argues in “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” there’s a “reciprocal action between a relatively primary instinctual structure and the social influences modifying it.” All existential experience happens inside history and culture, which shape our primal encounters. And yet we are missing a significant part of the equation if we subtract childhood reckonings with hunger, dependence, pain, and impermanence from our explanation of social systems. Existential experience and social systems are always shaping each other.
Shit That Shines
During the pandemic, when nerves were especially high, I developed a new spending habit: flavored fizzy waters. Even as that anxious time has passed, I remain hooked on my sparkling soothers. There is something primally pleasing about opening the refrigerator and having a cold and flavored soda waiting, ripe for the taking.
The real labor involved in sourcing the aluminum, canning the liquid, shipping it worldwide, shelving it at the store, managing the waste stream—and even my own labor of procuring the product—magically disappears when I grip that cold cylinder, pop the tab, and take my first gulp.
On the one hand, soda waters are simply refreshing. But in my experience, there is a quasi-magical element to the enjoyment, to being so immediately and easily satisfied by this “fast food.” It is a small hit of power in what can be a scary and overwhelming world.
While I don’t consciously fantasize about feasting on my own fecal “deposits,” it’s intelligible to me that a lingering infantile desire for what Brown calls a “narcissistically self-contained and self-replenishing immortal body” persists in my predilection for soda pops and other convenience foods. In consumer capitalism, it’s not only the desire for money but also the conveniences that money can buy that are shaped by the unconscious and magical wish to eat our own shit—food for thought the next time you see images of Donald Trump feasting on a McDonald’s hamburger. Indeed, with this analysis in mind, those at the top of the capitalist podium are full of their own shit.
I think psychoanalysis offers a helpful perspective on why the “capitalocene” is such a shit show, on why we are fouling our own nest.
By unconsciously seeking the fulfillment of an infantile wish—edible excrement and the power and freedom it promises—many of us in capitalist worlds lay waste to our actual and beautiful home (with uneven impacts, given massive differentials in wealth and shit, and then the way waste streams are regularly sent to communities on the bottom of social and international hierarchies).
What is to be Done?
In 1888, shortly after helping bury his friend Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels amended the Communist Manifesto to better represent the existence of egalitarian societies such as the Haudenosaunee, which the dynamic duo had been reading about before Marx’s death.
Haudenosaunee territories extend across the US-Canadian border in the northeast of the continent, particularly in presently named New York State and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) have been credited as an inspiration for American democracy and Marxist visions of a classless society.
Since Marx and Engel’s initial encounter with the Haudenosaunee through the pages of early anthropology, little has been done within the Marxist world to genuinely learn from the Haudenosaunee achievement.
According to Haudenosaunee historian and activist John Mohawk, Marx and Engels misunderstood how his people achieved relative egalitarianism before colonization. For Mohawk, a key factor was his ancestors’ insistence on embodying deep gratitude for earthly existence, despite its fragility and impermanence. In Basic Call to Consciousness, Mohawk writes: “We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives—the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun.”
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Haudenosaunee rituals that Mohawk writes about offer cultural resources for metabolizing a child’s existential anxieties, transforming infantile wishes for omnipotence into a mature appreciation for an earthly existence that will one day end and fertilize the ground for new life in a generous cycle of birth and death. In the way they feed new growth, decay and shit are already magical in the real world.
The existential comfort this worldview provides helps the Haudenosaunee approach each other and their more-than-human kin with generosity instead of avarice, a dynamic that was easier to maintain before colonization. Feeling already rich, as opposed to insecure, is the affective ground for generosity. In sum, a cultural focus on “thanksgiving” can help process childhood insecurities and help people grow up.
Composting Crapitalism
Capitalism is a complex system, and changing it will require diverse strategies that work on multiple scales. The psychoanalytic approach warns that failing to address the psychic drivers of greed will limit any strategy’s effectiveness. Those of us in the Anglosphere who lack the cultural resources honed by the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous peoples need to find ways of respectfully learning from them (in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer argues that Indigenous people all share “cultures of gratitude”). The health of our bodies, societies, and planetary nest hinges, I think, on our ability to collectively answer this question: What narratives and practices can help us compost the infantile wishes for omnipotence that are turning the world to shit?
I’m interested in practices of ancestral recovery that include reconnection with the earth-honoring traditions that exist deep in the ancestral lines of all people, including European-descended settlers, such as myself, who were disconnected from these traditions by colonialism within Europe and then the settler-colonial experience in North America. In my case this would include Celtic cosmologies and practices. I think ancestral recovery, when done well, can proliferate the practices available for metabolizing our existential anxieties and growing up.
In the meantime, I am grateful to Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki and Chögyam Trungpa for sharing Buddhist teachings across the Euro-Americas. I started practicing Buddhist meditation because it offers the trust in life, decay and death—and practices for embodying that ontological trust—that I crave but cannot easily access in my Christian cultural inheritances.
Buddhism is an invaluable resource for peoples disconnected from their ancestral traditions by colonialism, slavery, immigration and Christianization. There are many different ways to face the facts of life and grow up, Buddhism being but one. But it is a helpful one for those of us disconnected from ancestral teachings. Moving from cultures of greed to cultures of gratitude requires institutional change, but it also requires that we look inwards, gently put our infantile wishes to bed, and wake up to this rich earth, with its soils made healthy by shit and decay.
Notes
- John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren (1930), 6, http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
- Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 62.
- Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” in Collected Papers Volume 2, ed., Joan Riviere (New York: Basic, 1959), 48.
- Ibid.
- Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 279.
- Sandor Ferenczi, “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in First Contributions to Psychoanalysis (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1952), 327.
- Otto Fenichel, “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 7 (1), 1938: 70.
- John Mohawk, Basic Call to Consciousness, ed., Akwesasne Notes (Summertown, Tennessee: Native Voices, 2005), 116.
- Ibid, 86.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013), 106.
