A Binding Burden of Ever-Worsening Affect

Reading Shame and Pride again for the umpteenth time, I ran across a passage that inspired me to want to place another posting here to express a pet peeve of mine. On page 424, I found an important section that begins with this quote: “Evidence for the ubiquity of the link between avoidance [e.g., as in the set of avoidance scripts due south on the compass of shame] and consummation may be accumulated from many fields of inquiry.” Yes indeed. Don continues to describe how our economy is artificially robust because of consumer debt, how banking practices encourage this, and how persons throughout society are encouraged to disavow any danger in all of this excess. Many adults work at two jobs to support exorbitant living styles associated with continual purchases beyond their means. When both parents work to support more than what can be comfortably afforded, home becomes a “pit stop on an endless loop of striving” rather than a place to commune with one another and allow each other to decompress (reduce negative affect). This description of the lives of almost everyone I know is found appropriately in the chapter on overload (affect beyond the limits of tolerance). Here we have, as Don succinctly puts it, a formula to “bind us to an ever worsening load of affect.” Note carefully the word “bind,” as in stuck---not festooned.

My pet peeve has to do with the fact that this use of the avoidance script in the form of wealth addiction is a subject that was brilliantly analyzed with breathtaking perspicacity by the sociologist Philip Slater back in the 1970s. His book Wealth Addiction (1980) is one of the most cherished books in my library. He ragarded wealth addiction then as "America's most powerful drug," and, socially speaking, things have surely only worsened.

I confidently predicted that Slater’s insights would catch on like wild fire among psychologists and mental-health professionals. Talk about naive! You can well imagine why I now use that prediction as a model to remind myself how thoroughly lacking in prescience I can be despite feeling confident in my optimism. From where I sit now, it looks to me as if wealth addiction is in general unquestioningly regarded (at least among almost everyone I know) as something much closer to virtue and wisdom than to a binding load of worsening affect. Like a hypothetical alcoholic who strangely never learned about water or nonalcoholic beverages to quell thirst, most real-life wealth addicts have no idea that anyone can be anything but wealth addicted; and, as Slater notes, they regard a desire for almost unlimited wealth as "only sane."

Usually I am treated as warmly as a herd of pigs tracking mud through an opera house when I claim that in today’s social climate “wealth addiction” is a serious component of much human misery. It may be that I create distress in the way I go about making this claim, of couse. After all, I am peevish about this topic, having had to endure the shame of premature abatement of interest-excitement in a failed prediction of Slater’s fame as one whose thinking on wealth addiciton would have a widespread enlightening effect. But I also believe wealth addiction is such an integral but disavowed part of the background of everyday life that this must have something to do with the difficulty Slater, I, and others have in finding a receptive audience for addressing the subject.

Don, it was extremely gratifying to read (again) that you are evidently keenly aware of this type of important addiction script rarely spoken about. Your identifying shame as the ultimate underlying originating affect that is avoided by a mountain of magnified additional affects leading to a binding, ever-worsening load of affect tells the story of wealth addiction. Slater did not use the word “shame,” but he was fundamentally describing just that subjective state in identifying the grave sense of personal inadequacy that underlies wealth addiction. If you, Don, would care to add any more remarks on this topic, I would be fascinated to learn of any further thoughts you may have.

• Scripts for Wealth Addiction by Don Nathanson, 5/27/97
  • A Nice Addition to Your Book's Observation by Jim Duffy, 5/27/97