Erectile Alchemy And Bubble Addiction

Read more from NOTES FROM DISGRACELAND

12. IX 2018

Priapism, named after Priapus, the Greek god of fertility who sported an oversized, eternally-erect penis (so large, in fact, he used it to frighten away anyone who tried to plunder his gardens), is a condition that causes persistent and sometimes painful erections, which last for four hours or more without sexual stimulation. Apart from ED pills, anomalous blood flows in and out of the penis can be caused by a range of disorders and diseases, like sickle cell anemia, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and penile cancers, or abuses of certain prescription medications, alcohol, and some illicit drugs. Priapism can cause serious complications. The blood trapped in the penis is deprived of oxygen and can damage the penile tissue. An erection that lasts longer than four hours is a medical emergency. Untreated priapism can result in damage or destruction of penile tissue and permanent erectile dysfunction.

Economic bubbles have had a special place in American culture for the last 50 years. They encapsulate the essence of the ultimate male obsession: Everything has to be pointing skywards, from male reproductive organs to luxury condo towers, to economic growth, stock market charts and the yield curve. Bubbles hold the key to understanding the essence of American political conservatism and its ongoing transformation.

Behind this fetishized fantasy is the troubling decline in productivity growth (and economic potency in general), together with desperate attempts to bring back good old days, with governments ready to deliver temporary libidinal surrogates of any sort irrespective of their long-term consequences.

During the post-war decades, America, at 3% productivity growth, was open and welcoming, promising (and delivering on that promise) to enlighten and enrich the lives of anyone who took part in the great American project. The economic potency in those days was palpable. Each generation was doubling its standard of living; libidinal forces were abundant, optimism unshakeable, and belief in a better future consistently gratified and rewarded.

After years of misguided interpretation of the theory of comparative advantages, the American locomotive jammed in 2007. The America of today, with 1% productivity growth, has become a get-rich-quick-if-you-can landscape, xenophobic, polarized and libidinally disinvested, with rampant inequality and the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, where every subsequent generation is practically guaranteed to be worse off than its predecessor, and where 96% of people that are born poor remain poor. In today’s America the future looks more like a threat and less like a promise.

The two bubbles of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which briefly interrupt the monotonic decline in productivity growth, announce the beginning of a new era. The Internet bubble is not without merit – it presents the arrival of a genuine technological innovation and a paradigm change – an entirely novel production process, and introduces cognitariat as a new social class. However, its biggest shortcomings are related to the creation of a new mindset: an overnight lottery winner as a new type of entrepreneur and a general change of direction in the political economy. The second, the housing bubble, is much closer to the traditional definition – overconsumption financed by debt. It bears direct responsibility for the utter impotence of the third, and the largest of all bubbles, the government debt bubble, and for the current predicament. Even after nearly a decade of unprecedented government subsidies and budget deficit spending, productivity growth has descended (and still remains) below 1% (the lowest post-war levels), just as it was declared that the economy was on the way to recovery in 2015. The effect of the entire $7tr bubble remains largely undetected by the basic barometers of economic wellbeing. It is precisely the extended duration of the housing bubble, mistakenly identified as a sign of economic potency, which has compromised the hopes of a robust recovery. The current flaccidness of productivity stands as a reminder of the fallacy of the underlying political economy.

Bubbles economy as an ideological core

However, despite their repeated failures, we still seem to be unable to shake off our bubble addiction. Bubbles sit at the core of the right wing populist delusion – no longer a political movement, but a state of mind. This pastoral fantasy has evolved into full-blown alchemy, which continues to insist without any base in reality and against common sense — and economic orthodoxy is reluctant to disagree – that in order to live happier and more meaningful lives and secure prosperity and a better future, all we need is a new magic pill.

Millions of angry gun-wielding Podunk residents, the excluded who represent the excess of the population and now live at or below the poverty line, have become the most vocal cheerleaders of the existing stock market bubble, disguised as the economic boom. They use it to rationalize the toxicity of their favorite ideology and see no reason to be concerned about the true source of their short- and long-term hardship and erosion of quality of life.

Their ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge, but an outcome of cultural and political struggle. The current political economy has morphed into agnotological[1] capitalism — the systematic production and maintenance of ignorance as a major feature that enables the economy to function by allowing the creation of bubbles. In its background there is a programmatic effort to eliminate the potential for dissent. This effort relies on the creation of systemic unknowns where any potential “fact” is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value, which renders engagement with the conditions of reality contentious and a source of confusion. In this way, participants in bubbles remain unaware of the imminent collapse until after it has happened.

Erectile alchemy

Bubbles are economic erectile pills – false signals that something can happen out of nothing. They have a special allure, in the same way Ponzi schemes do — when easy money is readily available, we don’t need a rationale. Economic bubbles have become a juncture where erectile fantasy has become the main cultural dimension. The surge in transient virtual wealth they create is the extended erection we read about on ED pillboxes. The duration of extended bubbles is their most troubling aspect; the longer they last, the bigger the damage they create. So, why does the obsession with bubbles still persist?

According to medical statistics, priapism brought on by erectile dysfunction drugs is extremely rare – more than 100 million erectile pills are sold every year with fewer than 100 cases of priapism reported; that is less than one in a million. However, it is quite possible that there are many more cases of extended priapism caused by the ED pills than medical statistics show. They are just not being documented. If anything, the warning itself could be seen as a clever advertisement incentivizing the users to look for those “gold nuggets” that would trigger one such episode. Why not? Who would complain about having too much of a good thing? “If I get a four-hour erection, I’m not calling a doctor, I’m calling my friends”. Reporting protracted erections would be the most un-American thing to do.

And this is the actual point where the erectile fantasy of bubble economy will meet its maker. Do we not need libido first? Erection will come by itself after that. Or will it? This issue is, and will remain, the central theme of the ongoing political struggle for decades to come. The future of our civilization depends on its outcome. Pills, no matter how different and potent, will never work in the long run, and they have consequences.

[1] The concept of agnotology was first introduced by Robert N. Proctor as the study of culturally induced ignorance, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. In his book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso (2013), and numerous interviews and essays, Philip Mirowski argues usefulness of agnotology for explaining the post-2008 socioeconomic transformation. This paragraph is largely a summary of his thoughts on the topic.