Re: Competition is sick

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

This one seems to be merely a critique of the mentality of the rich and
near-rich, since few working people were swept up in the 1990s mania. 

BTW, why isn't Whybrow's solution to give us all Prozac? 

Jim Devine, e-mail: jdevine@xxxxxxx web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/ 

From: Louis Proyect 

NY Times, March 12, 2005 

In New Book, Professor Sees a 'Mania' in U.S. for Possessions and Status
By IRENE LACHER LOS ANGELES - Aldous Huxley long ago warned of a future
in which love was beside the point and happiness a simple matter of
consuming mass- produced goods and plenty of soma, a drug engineered for
pleasure. More than 70 years later, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow, the director
of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the
University of California, Los Angeles, has seen the future, and the
society he describes isn't all that distant from Huxley's brave new
world, although the soma, it seems, is in ourselves. 

In his new book, "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough" (W. W. Norton
& Company), Dr. Whybrow argues that in the age of globalization,
Americans are addictively driven by the brain's pleasure centers to live
turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense
of the only things that can truly make us happy: relationships with
other people...