In Search of the Banker’s Brain is about the biochemical changes associated with greed. Inspired by a Dutch blogger who investigated the “banker culture” that led to the 2008 global economic collapse, it paints a troubling picture about our willingness to place the welfare of the global economy in the hands of 25-year-old ruthless macho hyper-competitive psychopaths.
In addition to several former investment bankers, the film also features a Dutch psychologist who treats Wall Street bankers and a former trader turned neuropsychologist who investigates how greed affects the brain. He begins by describing the rigged reward system that rewards traders to take enormous risks with other peoples’ money – they get massive bonuses if they’re successful and no consequences at all if they fail.
In response, they begin to crave risk, which feels just like a narcotic when it floods their brain with adrenaline and cortisol. They become cunning like heroin addicts looking for their next fix and show traits (loss of conscience and scruples) virtually indistinguishable from psychopaths in a prison environment.
Like psychopaths, they also tend to burn out around age 40, which is when they are at high risk for “econocide.”*
* Term coined by psychologists term for banker suicide.
Owned and Operated is a documentary about dismantling corporate rule. This non-ideological film features dissidents across the political spectrum, among them John Oliver, George Carlin, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Rifkin, Rob Hopkins, Ron Paul, Ray McGovern, James Corbett, Alex Jones and Brian Wilson. In addition to the film’s touchy-feely ending, I was also disappointed in the filmmakers heavy promotion of technology as the solution to the world’s urgent political and ecological crises.
In my view, the best part of the film is Part 1, The Freak Show. This is a humorous but surprisingly accurate depiction of modern corporate culture and the dangerous and bizarre effect of systematic corporate indoctrination on human behavior.
Part 2, Class War and Organized Greed, concerns the obscene greed of the 1% and their systematic takeover of our supposedly democratic political systems.
Part 3, Freedom vs Security concerns the systematic loss of civil liberties that has accompanied the War on Terror.
Part 4, The Awakening, concerns recent mass movements triggered by the 2008 global economic meltdown, including Occupy, the Arab Spring, Anonymous and the Zeitgeist, Transition and Open Source Ecology movements.
Part 5, the Future, heavily promotes Jeremy Rifkin’s views on the role of the Internet and mass connectivity in solving mankind’s most pressing problems. I tend to agree with Ronald Wright’s analysis (in A Short History of Progress) that humanity’s eagerness to rush into new technologies has tended to create more problems than it solves.
That being said the film ends on an extremely positive note by scrolling the web addresses of scores of social change movements for viewers to explore.
The title Sacred Economics sounds like a New Age treatise on spirituality. The book is actually about the end of capitalism. It offers an extremely well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the world wide movement for economic re-localization. By avoiding simplistic clichés about greedy corporate CEOs and amoral banksters, Eisenstein arrives at some startling conclusions. Tracing the western conception of money back to its earliest origins, he makes a strong case that money itself is responsible for rapacious growth and resource depletion, greed and the demise of community.
Money and the Loss of the Commons
The main focus of Part I is an exploration of the profound effect money has on human thinking and psychology. Part II focuses on economic relocalization and other practical steps activists can take to restore the original gift economy.
Part I begins with an analysis of the dual illusions of separateness and of scarcity. Both, Eisenstein argues, are mistaken beliefs stemming from the privatization of communally owned land. This, in turn, was an early consequence of the introduction of money.
Prior to Roman times, land, like air and water, was considered part of the commons and couldn’t be owned. Under Roman tradition, there was no way for an “individual” (a Greek invention related to the concept of money and personal wealth) to legitimately take possession of common lands. Thus the Roman aristocracy had to seize it by force, just as Europeans stole the communal lands of Native Americans, Maori and indigenous Australians.
During the many centuries our ancestors had access to communal lands for their herds and crops, they enjoyed a sense of interconnectedness and interdependency. This was lost when the wealthy began fencing it off as private property. This loss of interconnectedness has left all of us with a profound inner emptiness we experience as never having enough.
How Money Destroyed the Gift Economy
Part I also describes the gift economy that characterizes all primitive cultures. Public gift giving was the primary mechanism all early societies used to satisfy basic survival needs. As civilizations became more complex, gift exchange and barter were impractical over long distances. This led money was introduced as a common medium of exchange.
An early artifact of the introduction of money is the mistaken belief that the basic necessities of life are in short supply. This illusion underpins all western economic theory. In fact many textbooks define economics as the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. As Eisentein points out, this is a ludicrous notion in a world in which vast quantities of food, energy and raw materials go to waste.
The Origin of Greed
Eisenstein attributes greed to this illusion of scarcity. He can see no other explanation for low income people giving away far more money, relative to income, than their rich counterparts. Rich people worry about money more and are more inclined to perceive scarcity when none exists. Einstein talks about the immense anxiety people in rich countries experience over “financial security.” No matter how much they accumulate, it’s never enough.
Debt, Usury and Perpetual Growth
Sacred Economics argues that what economists commonly refer to as growth is the expansion of scarcity into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Fresh water, which was once abundant, has become scarce following its transformation into a commodity most of us are forced to pay for.
The fractional reserve banking system, which allows bankers to loan money they create out of thin air, accentuates the pressure to convert more and more of the commons into commodities. The amount of debt created is always greater than the money supply. Current global debt ($75 trillion) is more than twice global wealth ($30 trillion). This results in constant pressure to create more goods and services to repay personal, corporate and public debt.
Growing pressure to repay debt only hastens the rate at which natural resources, such as fossil fuels, minerals, forests, fish and water, are converted to commodities. A parallel process is causing the social, cultural and spiritual commons to be dismantled. Stuff that was free throughout all human history – stories, songs, images, ideas, clever sayings – are copyrighted or trademarked to enable them to be bought and sold.
Einsenstein’s Confusion About Marxism.
The only weakness of Sacred Economics are some mistaken and contradictory assumptions Eisenstein makes about Marxism. He makes the assertion in Part I that capitalism needs to be replaced, but not in a “Marxist” way. He claims this would remove any “monetary” incentive for people to produce goods and services that are useful to the community. This seems to contradict his call for the a return to a gift economy in which people contribute to the community for intangible rewards (public recognition, status and esteem) rather than monetary reward.
Below Eisentein speaks briefly about his book.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 