American Mania Quotes

“IN AMERICA the central message is that each of us is free to write our own story. A polyglot nation of prodigious energy, we are held together by dreams of material progress. Seventy-eight percent of Americans still believe that anybody in America can become rich and live the good life. All it takes is desire, hard work, a little luck, and the right timing. The fable of wealth for the 1990s was telecommunications and the “new economy” of the Internet. But throughout the nation’s history there have been similar stories of riches won and lost—in the westward migration of the nineteenth century, in the excesses of the Gilded Age that closed it, in the champagne bubble of the 1920s before the Great Depression, and during the deficit spending spree of the 1980s—stories that reflect the hopeful striving of a daring people. It is because of this bounding optimism that America is an amazing and seductive place to live, something that continues to be affirmed each day by the battalions of migrants that scramble ashore in the risky pursuit of happiness. Thus the dream endures. But”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“We did not evolve in such a world, where every waking moment carries its own microemergency. Prolonged exposure to such conditions tends to confuse our ancient protective mechanisms, exhausting the body’s stress-arousal systems and lowering resistance to disease. And yet despite these warning signs, we press on. Drawn forward by debt, desire, or both, Americans are emerging as the first addicts of the technological age, driven still by some ancient instinct for self-preservation that in our time of affluence is misplaced. Ironically, we are better tuned physiologically to face the privations and dangers inherent in an unexpected terrorist attack than we are to endure the relentless propositions and stressful abundance of our consumer society. It is in this blind pursuit of material prosperity that Americans have begun to push the boundaries of human adaptation, as is evidenced by rising levels of greed, anxiety, and obesity. In”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“This hijacking of the brain’s attention by an overload of social stimulation engages the same chemical pathways of reward as do such drugs as caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, and the amphetamines. Drugs with abuse potential short-circuit and amplify the rewarding dopamine responses to normal social interactions by blocking the dopamine-recycling systems that balance dopamine with the other chemical messengers, such as serotonin, and protect the brain from excess stimulation. Cocaine or amphetamines, for example, when taken in small doses induce the rush of an immediate and pleasurable high. But with repeated use or excessive dose, the pleasure dissolves into a dysphoric and dangerous, drug-driven mania. From”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“In Smith’s optimistic and passionate belief, therefore, greed and similarly undesirable behaviors would be held in check by the powerful human need for peer recognition and neighborly social acceptance.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“Smith had been particularly impressed by Hutcheson’s belief that human desire and self-interest are balanced by a need to be loved by others and by the need for social acceptance. Later Smith adopted these tenets as a cornerstone of his economic philosophy, asserting that in the give-and-take of a free-market society the instincts for survival and self-preservation—self-interest, curiosity, and ambition—are balanced by the powerful need to seek and obtain the sympathetic support of others for one’s enterprise.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“While there was ready agreement that self-interest and the opportunity for personal profit fostered market growth and entrepreneurial endeavor, the important question arose as to what would contain the juggernaut? Did a system of free enterprise have any natural brakes? What was to prevent those caught up in their own success from running away to greed? What was the counterweight to self-interest that would ensure virtue and social balance? The pursuit of profit in classical Christian theology was considered a close cousin to the sins of avarice, lechery, and self-indulgence (all termed luxuria by the church) and thus damaging to virtuous behavior. Smith,”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“The American dream is now heavily mortgaged. So what went wrong? Why do we live this way in this land where we are free to choose? What drives our mania for material things? As citizens of the richest nation in the world, why do we not choose to simply enjoy what we have, to slow down, to save more, and to spend more time with those we love—as we say we wish to do? Economists”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“But now, for millions of Americans, the magic of the dream is tarnished. Something is not right and an alien sense of discomfort grips the dreamer. Despite the excitement and promise that heralded globalization, American business seems frenzied and fickle. Many Fortune 500 companies, once considered havens of lifetime employment, have transformed themselves into profit-driven workaholic cults. The scramble for “the dream” demands a lengthened workday, diminished sleep, continuous learning, unusual energy, and a high tolerance for financial insecurity. To be “successful” is to be a multitasking dynamo. We rise early and burn the lights late. We exercise to CNN at breakfast and telephone while driving, for there’s not a moment to lose. At dinner we graze on snacks and fast food, but with a laptop computer as the preferred companion. In the culture of global commerce, which is etched most visibly on the face of America but increasingly apparent in Europe and other industrialized nations, the quest for economic prosperity has become a competitive high-speed game. For some the pursuit is seductive—as when I rise at dawn in Los Angeles to dine at dusk in New York—and it offers a mask of accomplishment and purpose. But for those snarled in traffic jams and crowded airport lounges, and for the lonely children who do not understand, America’s accelerated lifestyle is increasingly a source of anxiety and frustration. Thus”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“Los Angeles—the dream-making capital of the world—serves as the backdrop for a number of the stories I recount. Some readers who cut their teeth in the urban centers of Europe or on the East Coast of America may prefer to dismiss what happens in Los Angeles as from a place apart, the aberrations of a migrant’s city within a migrant land. Such sentiments are understandable. Awash in the solar energy of a subtropical paradise, Los Angelinos engage life in the moment. The pace is fast, the music loud, and money is on display. Part of me, too, would prefer to dismiss such an existence as a mythmaker’s parody. But the place is real. In its immediacy and in its magnification of the familiar, Los Angeles creates its own reality and in so doing offers a “fast-forward” simulation of our collective future as a migrant culture. As Americans we must now decide whether such a future is of our choice, and whether it is sustainable. In the pages that follow, it is my goal to help inform that choice. Will we learn as a people to constructively channel the opportunities and individual enticements of the Fast New World toward an equitable social order, as Adam Smith had envisioned, or will the material demand for economic growth continue to erode the microcultures and intimate social bonds that are the hallmark of our humanity and the keys to health and personal happiness? Have the goals of America’s original social experiment been hijacked by its commercial success, threatening the delicate dance between individual desire and social responsibility, or will the nation in its migrant wisdom effectively apply its market and military dominance to remain a “beacon of hope,” enhancing the well-being of all the world’s peoples? This is a critical time in America, a time for careful thought and diligent action, for we have discovered in our commercial success that in an open society the real enemy is the self-interest that begins with a healthy appetite for life and mushrooms into manic excess during affluent times. Americans are again in the vanguard of human experience, and the world is watching. It is again a time for choosing.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“Given the social conditions that prevailed during his lifetime, Adam Smith was prescient in his judgment. Experience tells us that small markets do produce their own constraint and rational order, founded as they are on an interlocking system of self-interested exchange. However, Smith lived before the invention of the megacorporation, before instant communication with a global reach, and before the double cheeseburger and stock options. In America, living with such an abundance of choice, we have discovered some disturbing facts about human behavior—facts that from knowledge of modern neurobiology are predictable and that confirm Smith’s worst fears.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“In times of material affluence, when desire is no longer constrained by limited resources, the evidence from our contemporary American experiment suggests that we humans have trouble setting limits to our instinctual craving. This comes as little surprise to the behavioral neuroscientist, for it is now well established that under certain contingencies it is possible to “overload” the reward circuits of the brain, triggering craving and insatiable desire. As the quintessential reward-driven culture, America bears witness to this truth, for there is considerable evidence suggesting that unchecked consumption fosters our social malaise, eroding self-constraint and pulling the cultural pendulum toward excessive indulgence and greed. Compounding”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“Migrants are by temperament restless and ingenious and the United States represents the largest single collection of such individuals in the world today. The aggressive migrant temperament has always been a feature of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute eyewitness of American habits and culture, observed as much when he visited in 1831.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“The individual of migrant temperament, quick witted and vigilant, is particularly well equipped to deal with the challenge and physical risk of frontier life. Thus it is an odd twist of fate that the same curiosity, hard work, and intelligence that first enabled the migrant to shape these United States have now invented a lifestyle that can be physiologically and mentally disabling. Inadvertently, through the choices we have made, we have created an imbalance—a mismatch—between the demands of our time-sensitive commercial culture and the biology that we have inherited.”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“But such denial ignores that our instincts are those of an ancient brain that evolved over many thousands of years, and that the human body is tuned for optimum function under conditions radically different from those that we enjoy in America today. Hence, our ingenuity in creating novel environments—such as the competitive opportunities of a global commerce that never sleeps, or an infinite supply of high-calorie food—rather than enhancing well-being may actually disrupt the ancient mechanisms that sustain our physical and mental balance. Such is the potential danger of the social and economic environment developing in America today. The”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough

“It is through the empathic intimacy of human relationships, not in the accumulation of material goods, that true prosperity is secured. IN”
― Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania: When More is Not Enough