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A Consensual Hallucination

"All that is solid melts into air."

Karl Marx

Timing is everything. Here I am, anticipating retirement in another couple of years, and suddenly my 403(b) account - my sole source of financial support other than social security - is heading south along with the rest of the financial markets.

Despite my appetite for edgy ideas, I am temperamentally conservative. Over the past 21 years working in foundations, I have overseen the investment of millions of dollars of other people's money. I have listened to a parade of investment advisors talk about "prudent" investing, diversification, active management, hedge funds and risk-tolerance. I've gone to seminars where people use terms like "mezzanine tranches," "credit correlation markets" and "short sales." Smart people, all. Economists and statisticians, Ph.D.s working in places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. They could have been reciting the ritualistic incantations of the Rosicrucian Order for all I really understood of it, but then understanding is rarely a prelude to action during times of mass hallucination. Everybody was buying into it, and I did, too.

We put people in institutions for hallucinating in public. But when it's a widespread consensual hallucination, we call it reality and join the party.

Take health care. Just as some people predicted the current meltdown and government bailout of the financial services industry over 20 years ago, so, too, has a Cassandra chorus been predicting the demise of a "broken" American health care system for the past 40 years. Meanwhile, we continue to build out a monstrous industrial edifice of expensive procedures, inefficient relationships, and often ineffective results as if our very lives depended on it.

Which, of course, they do. Health care is 17 percent of the GDP. Millions of us work in the industry and buy health care stocks in our retirement plans. We literally can't afford for the "system" to fail. If it did, government would have to bail it out.

The consensual hallucination operating in health care is the same one operating in the financial service industry and in many other dimensions of modern life. We equate progress with wealth. We believe wealth will increase perpetually. The circulation of things both tangible and intangible will fuel the fire. The economy will grow, people will move out and up, more hospitals and doctors will be needed, more procedures and tests, more brokers of plans and information, more consultants and wellness services, more, more, more.

The logical result of this hallucination is that in the future you will be born sick and need a lifetime of services, products and information to get well. You are here on earth to consume. Material progress both defines and demands it.

We know what is broken in the healthcare system. We even know how we might go about fixing some of it. But the beast - the hallucination - has to be fed. We have appointments to keep, payrolls to meet, things to buy, bills to pay, markets to expand. The beast needs sick people, not people who are well. What good are they? They don't consume sick care services.

Which brings me back around to retirement, a social and economic artifact of this notion of material progress. Work long enough, hard enough, and you will be able to harvest the fruit of your labor. You will be able to "retire" and do all the stuff you really like to do but don't have the time or energy for now. This is just another rung on the rigid ladder of the industrial ethos: You've been a rat on the wheel for much of your adult life. Now you've finally earned the right to get off.

My father, who had a taste for melancholy, told me that all this - the American dream of material progress, of living large, of getting more of everything - would come crashing down one day. "You can't dance without paying the piper," he said. "What you sow, so shall you reap." I was in my early 30s at the time, and dismissed his dinner table lectures as the grumblings of a man whose better days were behind him. I was in the game and had big plans. I was a future Master of the Universe. What did these platitudes have to do with me?

I never became a Master of the Universe, but I did manage to become a student of it. And I've learned that all the data and information and statistical modeling of that universe - no matter how elegant, precise and powerful - can ever substitute for the wisdom of the ages, which comes from shared human experience, not from theory. From my vantage point now, my father's platitudes seem almost prophetic.

The current malaise will eventually lift, but the linear hallucination of material progress will continue to hold sway until it is replaced by a more powerful and compelling consensual hallucination. What that might be is a question worth pursuing. If I can ever afford to retire, I might look into it.

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*The Drift reflects the views of the author, and does not represent the official view of SLHI's Board of Trustees and staff.