Anger, grief, and denial are common reactions to the Bernard Madoff financial scandal.
Moreover, we empathize with the people who suffer directly and indirectly through damage to funded programs — Birthright; ending the Jewish Chaplaincy Program, cuts at The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, etc.
I am a psychologist and I can feel the loss, pain, and despair surrounding Madoff and the entire economy. The pessimism even seeps into our humor.
A joke reportedly going around Russia (according to National Public Radio) is that the economy is so bad, they had to turn off the light at the end of the tunnel.
I hear a lot of anger about Madoff diverting his ill-gotten gains to his wife. We all know that he has no right to do anything with the money he misappropriated.
However, is his desire to take care of his family an indicator that he has some remnant of feeling for others? The humanist in me is always looking for a gleam of something good to latch onto and build upon.
This approach helps me work with some very difficult people in the Wisconsin prison system — people who carry a lot of psychological baggage, yet are responsible for doing grievous wrongs and hurting countless others in horrific ways.
I believe they have a glimmer, a spark that if nourished, might help them work towards atoning and redeeming themselves to some extent. Following Pirke Avot, the Wisdom of the Sages (2:21), we might not complete the task, but we have to persist in trying to get as far as we can.
Are we wired?
As we look inward, we wonder about our collective responsibility. Are we psychologically wired to fall prey to deceivers, motivated by greed, willing to bail out AIG and then pay obscene bonuses?
Are we all suckers for the grand confidence operator, the great con, the global Ponzi scheme that the world economy appears to be built upon? Who is that person behind the curtain (“The Wizard of Oz”)? Did showman P. T. Barnum have us pegged, that we are suckers being born every minute?
While Madoff was blatant about it, wasn’t he doing what everyone has been doing — living off of illusory gains, assets without foundation, confederate tender packaged as something else?
Then again, he would probably use that as an excuse, and that’s the problem — since everyone is doing it, since the whole system is a bubble that burst, why point the finger at me? So no one takes responsibility and everyone is to blame.
Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859, Dec. 13, 1968, pp. 1243-1248) warns us what happens when we all take bigger shares of the common resource, bigger slices of the pie.
If we believe the pie itself keeps expanding, we justify our greed by pointing to the projected expansion, until we learn that the projection is not real and we have just consumed a lot of hot air. Oy, the gas!
It’s so easy to keep following the pundits, the soothsayers who proclaim: Just wait until the end of the year; in two years we’ll be back where we were; even the Great Depression eventually ended and was followed by a period of great prosperity; etc. Rebuilt illusions are still illusions.
What are some ways out of this? Some principles come to mind.
If everyone produced or contributed more than they consumed, the problems would dissipate. Also, if we work on bettering ourselves for tomorrow, only then will we be able to create a better tomorrow.
If everyone took responsibility, used what is real and not illusory, produced more than they consumed, and worked on bettering themselves and each other — then we will climb out of this, individually and collectively.
The various funds and companies will do a good job creating the appearance of cleaning up their act, but will they ground themselves in reality? Will their values change? Will they really, in Captain Picard’s (“Star Trek – The Next Generation”) words, “Make it so”?
I remember what one of my first patients told me in 1985, a 95-year-old woman blind with diabetic retinopathy, yet smiling a disarmingly charming smile.
I asked her what her secret was to living a long life and continuing to smile. She told me, “Always be happy with what you got.”
This pearl of wisdom applies to the economy.
If we can bury the twin con artists of greed and fear, if we can feel and express our gratitude for our relationships, friends, families, our ability to show kindness to strangers (for we were once and to some degree continue to be strangers) — if we can always somehow “be happy with what we got,” then we will endure. And smile.
Robert Hirschman, Ph.D., is director of psychological services at Jackson Correctional Institution in Black River Falls. He is a member of Congregation Sons of Abraham in La Crosse and Congregation Beth Israel in Milwaukee.
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