Quote: The Last Psychiatrist On Mercantilism

“As long as America remains the largest current market, it sets the standards. The Chinese are going to need Viking refrigerators.”

Suggests The Last Psychiatrist while slapping us in the face with the idea that Americans want what they’re told to want, and so long as Americans define the world’s cultural models, everyone else will want the same things Americans want.

I recently linked to The Last Psychiatrist for his post on “manufacturing reality“. This time, I’m linking to a much shorter and coherent post that is no less refreshing in the points and implications it makes. Refreshing because while most educated people probably don’t need him (or I) to realize these things, we do tend to forget about them as we live our everyday lives, slaves to the impulses we’ve been socialized to see as our own.

Sound interesting? A little confused? Okay, a little background information is due then.

The Last Psychiatrist usually writes about issues in the medical and pharmaceutical field, though his About section ominously claims “mercantilism and fourth generation warfare”. He recently wrote about a drug named Lamictal being wrongly and widely prescribed as an anti-depressant by doctors, to which an European e-mailed him saying:

I’d be glad if I knew you’d think about it for a moment… how sick your country [The United States] appears from the outside when one reads about so many medicines and so many disorders and about medicine for …. anything slightly uncomfortable. And how all these trendy things migrate to other countries, where people don’t even know that their moods, sadnesses, uncomfortable moments, their life in a word, is a disorder.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from The Last Pyschiatrist’s public response to the above European’s e-mail, in which he sets out to explain why there seems to be medication for anything in America and, more importantly, why so many Americans might feel they have “anything” that might need medicating. The excerpt below tackles the European’s anger that what Americans are doing is “migrating” to other countries:

Your final point is the most important:  All of this is coming to a town near you.  All of this nonsense talk about whether American is losing its global dominance is a ruse.  As long as America remains the largest current market, it sets the standards.  The Chinese are going to need Viking refrigerators.

True power rests in the hands of those who define our cultural models and decide what we want or who we are.

The history of the world is the history of mercantilism; the history of men bending government to fight to the death for things they don’t really need and only barely want.

As usual, the entire post is a complete delight to read (as are the comments usually), so go read it over at The Last Psychiatrist »