The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom. ibid.
A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening. At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage. An assumption had become a truth. The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction. ibid.
Public Choice theory … James Buchanan: ‘no meaningful concept that could be called the public interest.’ ibid.
Psychiatry, said Laing, was a fake science used as a system of political control to shore up a violent collapsing society. Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality. Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free. ibid.
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. ibid.
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.
Economic planning: the kind that’s concerned with how we organise our entire economy … In capitalism the singular goal of profit animates economic decisions. How Companies Plan the Economy, Youtube 30.49, Second Thought 2023
We need a plan for how to continue living on this planet, meeting our needs, organising ourself collectively to manage our material requirements and our well-being. ibid.
Market capitalism is stuck in a constant boom and bust cycle that throws millions of people into sudden poverty. ibid.
Insider: ‘Starvation wages’: Walmart and McDonald’s among firms with the most workers on food stamps and Medicaid, according to a Bernie-Sanders-commissioned report. ibid. Grace Dean 19th November 2020
Walmart is the epitome of capitalist business practices. ibid.
Walmart looks a lot like a country with a planned economy. ibid.
It’s capitalists escaping the markets’ negative consequences as much as possible, and giving themselves more predictable outcomes than markets provide. ibid.
Walmart: Collaborative Planning, Forecasting & Replenishment. ibid.