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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bottom Line, October 13, 2005
This review is from: Is the American Dream Killing You?: How "the Market" Rules Our Lives (Hardcover)
During the six decades since my birth, I've been endlessly dismayed by the clearing, plowing under, paving over, malling, developing, polluting, trashing, McDonaldizing, and general destruction of every place I've ever cared about in this country. And I've lived in quite a few.
The earth's rich bounty of species are dying out one by one, human cultures and diversity are being lost, the poles are thawing, glaciers are melting, and the weather is growing more extreme.
This is to say nothing of the ways in which our institutions, morals and manners have degraded in the last fifty years.
For years, I've brooded on the question of why we're so rapaciously destroying the living systems of our planet, including our own. What's at the bottom of our seeming disregard for our very survival?
If you've yourself asked the same questions, then this book by Paul Stiles can provide you with answers.
To put it succinctly, our predicament can be blamed on "the market." Not that the market economy is inherently evil, but that we've allowed it to run away with us. We've displaced paramount considerations of spirit with the maximization of financial profit, thereby letting "market values" become our god.
The chapters of this book devote attention to a number of aspects of our lives impacted by our obeisance to the market god. These include family, esthetics, politics, education, religion, entertainment, work, environment, and possibly the most alarming, our fundamental sense of reality.
Unlike many books lamenting the present state of our culture, Stiles prescribes a deceptively simple solution. Namely, that we give values of spirit, such as love, beauty, and faith, equal or preferably superior status to the values of market economics and profit. In this reassignment of priorities lies the only hope for our striking a healthy cultural balance that will nudge us back toward a world where true human progress reigns, rather than the prevailing misery and suffering that afflicts so many in our time.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bringing the Pendulum Back to a More Balanced Position, January 24, 2006
This review is from: Is the American Dream Killing You?: How "the Market" Rules Our Lives (Hardcover)
Harper Collins continues to work hard at increasing their market share in the business book segment. Under the "Collins" imprint, they have recently published a fascinating work by Paul Stiles that takes a long and hard look at the American Dream and what Stiles calls the "Hyper Market." I was initially tempted to dismiss Stiles out of hand as a curmudgeonly contrarian, but his breadth of experience and pedigree made me reconsider my early doubts about his worldview and sense of perspective. Stiles has served as an intelligence officer for the NSA, worked a Wall Street bond-trading desk, and has been CEO of an Internet start-up. A graduate of Roxbury Latin School and Harvard College, he is the author of an earlier expose of corruption within our financial markets: Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch."
I am a firm believer that an author's choice of epigraphs reveals a great deal about his values, character, intellect, frame of reference, priorities and agenda. In the case of "American Dream," Stile chooses to open his opus by citing Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"The gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something - have no doubts about that, either. He may think that his tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of his heart - but it will out. That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming."
These words serve as a cautionary tale and a perfect introduction to Stiles' major thesis: that we have allowed the forces of "The Market" to set the agenda for our lives and we have lost our grasp on humanity, proportionality and moral choice in the bargain. In his analysis, we have come to the point where we serve - often unwittingly - the Market and its insidious pressures, rather than utilizing the dynamics of the free market to increase quality of life and broaden opportunity. Emerson's words of warning echo the Old Testament patriarch, Joshua, who proclaimed: "Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve." (Joshua 24:15) The "prophet," Bob Dylan, struck a similar note with his 1985 song: Gotta Serve Somebody."
Stiles goes to great lengths to show the development of the freewheeling market economy in the U.S. and contrasts its growth with the concomitant devolution of quality of life, and steady increase personal debt, divorce and stress.
"In fact, the word stress, as applied to people, comes form the word stress as applied to metals. The result is physical, mental and spiritual breakdown. Stress is thus the critical missing link between the market economy and human health.
According to psychologists, stress is caused by `any circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten one's well-being and thereby tax one's coping abilities. The threat may be to one's immediate physical safety, long-range security, self-esteem, reputation, or peace of mind.' Such stress stems directly from all the market pressures we have just described. In effect, it is our response to the Market's efforts to make the economy more productive. And to some extent, that response is natural and healthy. It is only the hypermarket that pushes us over the edge." (Page 35)
Stiles makes a strong case for the amoral nature of the marketplace. He chronicles many examples of market pressures influencing us to make choice that encourage us to lay aside moral considerations. In a chapter entitled "The Modern God," he argues that the Market has effectively usurped the role that God and faith once played in the life of the community, family and individual.
"At the same time, the Market's innate antipathy toward the soul, religion and God is by no means an exclusively American problem. The entire modern age has given birth to an increasingly efficient economic system. The well-known pathologies of modernity - meaningless, purposeless, loneliness, anxiety, depression, fear, heartlessness, boredom, alienation, indifference, desensitization - are all pathologies brought about by the hypermarket. They are the product of an imbalance between the spiritual and the material sides of life and the social fragmentation that results. The Industrial Revolution bred them en masse. Such pathologies can be politically dangerous, as they tend to radicalize those adversely affected by them, to the point where the think the Market is the problem. Well, the unbalanced hypermarket most assuredly is the problem. But a market restrained by Judeo-Christian values, as codified in law and represented in democratic institutions, most certainly is not. It is, rather, a recipe for social success, the very recipe that made America. But like the "postmodern family" we are now in the process of changing that long-standing recipe. With great irony, we are trying to do what the Soviet Union tried to do: replace the religious core of our civilization with a materialistic ideology. It doesn't work. Our approach to the spiritual side of life may need significant rethinking, it may be antiquated, it may be represented by flawed institutions, but the eradication of religion and its replacement with the market system will only breed social chaos. Without god, anything is permissible, which is just what they want to hear on Wall Street." (Page 216)
These are strong and passionately argued words. Many will feel that Stiles has overstated the case. Perhaps so, but we have all felt the gradual erosion of the spiritual from private and public discourse and from individual and family lifestyles.
The author summarizes his argument and his plea for moderation with these words:
Moderation is not a cause, but an effect. It arises from a spiritual awakening, an elevation of consciousness, an awareness of the way things truly are. This is the great missing piece of our social puzzle. After tremendous pain and suffering, on a global basis, mankind has finally crafted a universal economic solution (the free market) and a universal political solution (democracy). What we lack is a universal spiritual solution, a common understanding of the human interior, one rooted in the nature of reality, as we experience it. As a result, the modern world now sits on two legs of a three-legged stool - market democracy - and tilts accordingly. (Page 248)
Many readers will find much to take issue with in this book, but it is still worth wrestling with Stiles' rhetoric and strong beliefs. He speaks from experience and from the heart. He waves the caution flag at a time when life for me is racing out of control.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No, but corporations running amok are., December 13, 2005
This review is from: Is the American Dream Killing You?: How "the Market" Rules Our Lives (Hardcover)
The author has identified money as the dominant value in American society at the start of the 21st century. Anything that stands in the way of increasing money or the exercise of its associated power is anathema to the now transcendent market, whether it be considerations of ethics, loyalty, community, family, health, morality, friendship, quality, the environment, and even legalities. In a society where the marketplace dominates, individuals become no more than economic entities: sellers, buyers, producers, commodities (disposable), etc. There is no end to the distortion of values and terminology. So-called market democracy has replaced political democracy as the fullest expression of freedom. In fact, political democracy is disdained because of its possible restraint on benign and free market forces.
The author correctly describes the hectic, dysfunctional, and even disastrous nature of modern life lived in accordance with market values, but he offers virtually no historical perspective. Marx over 150 years ago identified the ruthless shredding of traditional life under capitalism, a word barely used by the author. Yet we are now surprised and upset? In the early republic, corporations were chartered by states to perform one public works project and then dissolved. Gradually corporations "persuaded" the judiciary to give them permanent legal standing. But that development was hardly accepted with equanimity by the general public. The Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Wobblies, the Socialists, the CIO unions - all attempted to oppose the new power of corporations to adversely impact the lives of the working class. That historical context is an absolute must in dealing with the death grip that corporations now have on us all.
The author exhibits disingenuousness in his emphasis on the market as the active factor in our society. It is, in fact, huge multi-national corporations that have penetrated most areas of life and imposed their standards. He should have better heeded John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that emphasizing market forces or the market system conveniently hides the nature of power exercised by corporations in a capitalistic system. In addition, the author claims repeatedly that the market is mostly about production - not so. Corporations are concerned with profits regardless of how attained. Many corporations, in fact, produce nothing other than profits.
Instead of a hard-hitting approach, the author is inclined to combine concern with modern life with a heavy dose of nostalgia. The good old days for the author are based on the nuclear family with a male breadwinner and a female mother. He expresses dismay at the removal of the Ten Commandants from government buildings. He seems to give little weight to the fact that, while corporations have imposed their values on society, traditional societies and values can also be quite oppressive.
An all powerful marketplace is a huge contradiction in a democracy. Democracy requires, by definition, that the political system be dominant - certainly not subservient to private economic entities regardless of size or wealth. A political democracy requires that all citizens participate in social and economic decisions either directly or through representatives in both public and private spheres. That is exactly what earlier citizen movements were attempting. The suppression of citizens, be it from economic forces, male domination, religious authorities, or any other self-anointed authorities, kills democracy. Though far from perfect, the social democracies of Europe do exert control over the worst excesses of capitalism; of course, that is anathema to free market ideologues.
The book is tedious with its long cataloging of the dysfunctions of the modern world operating solely under market principles. And it is simplistic. Markets, per se, are not the problem, nor are market values, at least directly. Running businesses profitably is essential. However, huge corporations running roughshod over the globe are a problem - the destruction that they leave in their wake hardly needs listing here. And a sham political system that is run by the rich for the rich is a problem. The author does get it right in that the media purposely dumbs us down, jolting us with the sensational, bombarding us with advertising to create voracious wants, and substituting a fantasy world of celebrity over realistic analysis. The author offers no prescriptions for change. And it is just as well. Frankly, it seems that a majority of Americans are hooked on market values and eschew thoughtful participation in a culture free of domination.
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