Psychological and Social Conditioning of Capitalism

[Bearded Beardist]

Would anyone be able to recommend any literature, videos etc on the effect of capitalism on humans psychologically and the way in which it conditions people to think and act in certain ways? I would also be interested to hear everyone's own thoughts on this subject matter as well.

Personally, one of the things that became apparent to me as I became more of a leftist is how authoritarian our capitalist society actually is. From your childhood, where your parents and teachers will always be telling you what to do, to adulthood, where your boss will continually give you tasks that you must perform obediently; there always seems to be someone giving you orders. People are never taught to truly think for themselves so the idea that "workers couldn't possibly manage the economy, they need managers and bosses who are smart enough to do that" is in a way a self-fulfilling prophesy.

[cyu]

One of the most basic assumptions of pro-capitalist "economists" is that they are trying to figure out how to satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources. Of course, living in a capitalist society, they are conditioned by the mass media into believing everyone has unlimited wants. In fact, it is the very purpose of most broadcast media to condition people into having unlimited wants - advertising is how they satisfy their shareholders.

The illusion probably started to crack for me when I first saw http://www.davebarry.com/misccol/christmas.htm

Some of you may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on The Waltons. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: It would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.

This is why advertising is tolerated in capitalist economies. This is why economic forecasters worry constantly about "consumer confidence". This is also what led me to abandon Keynesian economics. Yes, Keynes made some great observations about how money is spent and how consumption ties into employment, but his prescription to prevent unemployed poverty is just kind of dumb when taken from Barry's point of view.

At first glance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy is just silly, but then it stops appearing silly if you try to view it in terms of preventing unemployment and poverty. But it's not that the fallacy isn't a fallacy, it still is a fallacy. The problem is that capitalism only prescribes poverty for the unemployed, and because the ruling class refuses to give up capitalism, all sorts of silliness results and cascades down from the other silliness. This is why replacing people with robots doesn't result in prosperity and instead results in poverty.