I Smell a Dead Whale

Posted on September 20, 2005 in Compassion Stigma

There’s a foul stench of corporatism in the air. A Stanford study suggests how Wall Street might be able to make some money out of the mentally ill. This bodes well if you have the right kind of illness:

A team of U.S. scientists has found the emotionally impaired are more willing to gamble for high stakes and that people with brain damage may make good financial decisions, the Times newspaper reported on Monday.

In a study of investors’ behavior, 41 people with normal IQs were asked to play a simple investment game. Fifteen of the group had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions.

The result was those with brain damage outperformed those without.

I have a couple of reasons for dreading this. First, there’s the inevitable use of this study by my fellow liberal commentators as an explanation for the behavior of Messers Bush and Cheney. Making MRI scans a condition for public office might sound like a good idea, but I’d like to just teach people how to recognize aberrant behavior in politicians. The former idea just sounds too 1984. (Note to the Bow-Wow boys: this is not a contention that there are liberals who would do this. If kindness were shown to be the product of brain damage, however, I wouldn’t put it past YOU to put us down.)

Second, there’s the more chilling implication of using those who suffer brain damage as puppets for corporate interests. The individuals they describe sound like sociopaths — men and women who just don’t care about the moral implications of their decisions. Given the way the mentally ill are stigmatized in American society, it is not far to leap from this to the exploitation of these individuals by men of power. For all their “gifts”, there is little to separate them from life on the street. Furthermore, there’s the suggestion of the centralization of function where the ordinary citizen has less and less say in how markets shall operate.

This doesn’t help the cause of the mentally ill: it merely selects a serviceable portion of the population while culling the rest. Those of us who live in our emotions cannot hope to be seen as partners in such enterprises. Despite the record of accomplishments made by bipolar and depressives, we just care too much about other people to be of use to plutocrats.

This is yet another example of blind science: instead of laboring for a cure, the Stanford researchers have managed to turn a portion of the population of the mentally ill into fish farm stock.