The Trauma-Industrial Complex
The addiction to economic growth as a response to trauma
I’ve been trying to write about the addiction to endless economic growth in a way we can understand with more than just our thoughts. When it comes to the economy, to global-scale problems, to planetary health, social injustice and ecological disruption, it’s so easy for our abstract thoughts to take over. We start relate to these concepts purely as concepts, and we stop feeling them, like sensations we connect to with our bodies.
But if endless growth is an addiction, that’s a feeling our bodies know intimately.
Who among us has never experienced some sort of addictive cycle? Some sort of compulsive pull back to something you know is hurting you, but still can’t quit, because the addiction serves a purpose. It’s a keystone in the center of how you hold yourself upright in this world. It’s serving a core purpose. Without it, you might collapse.
The quick fix that leaves us broken, the binge that leaves us hungrier, the scratch that makes us itch. The way we respond may all look different, but the attempt to heal a wound that only seems to make it bigger — that pattern is the same. We’ve been doing this a long, long time.
When economists and social theorists describe our economy as “addicted to endless growth,” the analysis often ends here. Challenging growth at all is usually radical enough on its own, and we must not scare the economists too much all at once.
The problem with ending the diagnosis at “addiction” is that addiction is a description of a symptom. It’s an observable manifestation of illness, like coughing might be to the flu. We understand that influenza is not caused by coughing. Neither does addiction cause itself.
There’s something about addiction that forces us to look beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines. When it comes to addiction, to paraphrase Dr. Gabor Maté, biology is inextricable from biography.
Our bodies, like our minds, are shaped by what we experience, and our behaviors emerge out of those shapes. While its causes are nuanced and varied, we know unequivocally that addiction, like all behavior, is an attempt to meet an unmet need, an adaptation to a particular set of experiences. It does not arise in a vacuum separate from what happens to us.
As Maté writes in his groundbreaking book on addiction In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,
“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden — but it’s there.”
There is a strong relationship between addiction and trauma — if not what Maté calls Capital-T Trauma (acute or severe traumas like abuse and violence), then the sometimes just-as-debilitating chronic stress and pain of what he calls lower-case-t trauma: the quotidian and constant experiences of emotional neglect, erasure, precarity, objectification or neglect. The chronic stress of these smaller traumas, when repeated and built up over time, can become just as dysregulating and damaging to the body, mind and nervous system as their more severe counterparts.
My question is: if our economy is addicted, is our economy traumatized?
Trauma, while very real, is conceptually hard to pin down. The physiological and psychological state we call “being traumatized” is understood as a reaction to a traumatic experience. The definition of a “traumatic experience” is one that causes traumatization. It’s a circular definition, made all the blurrier by the fact that trauma does not have a distinct physiological signature in the body. The same physical responses that happen in the body with “trauma” happen with experiences we’d call “stress,” or even simply “arousal.”
So what, exactly, is trauma?
To pull from psychologist Peter Levine, author of the groundbreaking trauma healing book Waking the Tiger, trauma is a survival response that never gets to complete. The body mobilizes enormous energy in response to a severe threat, what we call a fight-flight-freeze response, but it never resolves into either a successful fight or flight. The body never experiences itself escape from the situation, nor successfully fight off the threat and win.
As a result, the body remains stuck trying to complete the loop, responding as though the threat were still ongoing. Hypervigilance, hyperarousal, dysregulation, shut-down and extreme reactions to reminders of the traumatic event are all symptoms of the body being stuck in this chronic threat-response state. In some cases, traumatized minds and bodies unconsciously seek out situations that create similar feelings to the initial traumatic event, in an attempt to finally complete the loop.
There’s a structural similarity between trauma and addiction, in that both these patterns are compulsive attempts to complete loops derived from a dysregulated state.
Trauma is a stuck loop trying to complete a threat response; addiction is a stuck loop trying to reach regulation. They are not the same, but their patterns follow a similar sort of logic and take on a similar sense of shape and motion.
When I say “the economy is traumatized,” I don’t mean a literal thousand individuals are simultaneously experiencing their own PTSD while making economic transactions. I mean that collective systems are stuck in repetitive loops attempting to complete threat responses and reach regulation, through means that only seem to keep increasing their distress.
You know, we’re really not supposed to talk about the economy like this, you and I. Let’s keep our voices down; don’t let the social scientists hear us using “collective trauma” as anything more than a metaphor, or at best, a social construction.
But I’m not so sure that trauma like the kind in our economies is all that different from trauma in the body. I’m not interested in the use of the word trauma, or appeals to trauma, to narrativize suffering or create collective cohesion. I’m interested in trauma-the-compulsion, the cycle of perpetually trying to complete a stuck loop that often perpetuates and exports itself when it can’t find healing.
That is the collective illness I think underpins the addiction to growth.
We know the pattern in the world like we know it in ourselves: this wound we keep ignoring that we export onto others, this pain we keep trying to without figuring out and stopping what hurts us to begin with, this fear and scraping together a sense of safety that never really lasts because we always feel alone.
Does that sound familiar?
I’d imagine that it does.
But I’m not sure it’s supposed to sound normal.
It can be easy to miss the existence of an illness that everyone has. When the illness is the water we’re swimming in, the poison is baked into everything we eat, when it’s so central to everything we do, even to what we think, we can miss that it’s even there. When pathology is normalized, for many of us, is all we’ve ever known, we can’t even see the disease.
I’m also not supposed to say the economy has a disease. Economies aren’t bodies, right? Diseases only afflict the individual.
But when I say, “the economy is traumatized,” I’m not trying to say that the economy is a literal body experiencing panic attacks and hypervigilance. What I think is at play here is something rather subtler than that.
When we go through the day, we feel like we’re independent minds and individual bodies. We don’t feel like collectives of intersecting parts, series of interacting sub-systems, many of which are in conflict, even if this is a more accurate way of explaining how our minds and bodies function.
Neither do we tend to ascribe our personalities, our wills, our beliefs or our behaviors to collective-level causes. At least, not consciously. Yet, in reality, behavior and psychology are often derived from levels larger than the individual. Beliefs are shaped by culture, behavior derives from social expectations, minds organize and develop according to relational, embodied processes, and the way we’re trained by society to make meaning of our experiences shapes what we even feel.
The mind is not so singular. Its boundaries are blurred. Even genetic expression responds to external circumstances. What we eat shapes how we feel. The language we are taught to speak shapes the way we think. Biology cannot be separated from biography. Biology cannot be separated from ecology. Biography cannot be separated from society. Society cannot be separated from the mind.
My argument is not so much that the economy is a literal collective body, but that mind and body are collective systems, too. Body, mind, society, economy, ecology: these are of the same category, the same kind. They are different examples of the same thing, and that thing is “a complex system.”
Trauma and addiction are not something physiologically unique to the mind and body, but are patterns that sometimes arise in complex systems.
The pattern of trying to complete a stuck loop and instead increasing or exporting the same compulsive reenactment, or the pattern of trying to re-regulate towards equilibrium in response to that stuck loop through increasing dysregulation, are patterns that show up in bodies, societies, collectives and economies.
We just don’t often notice that it’s happening, because it’s happening everywhere around us all at once.
We often don’t notice our own trauma responses, our own addictive cycles, until they get severe enough to threaten our lives (and often even then), or until we experience some sort of contrast that shows us that our way of doing things is not the only option.
When we’re swimming in a sea of trauma, drinking and breathing post-traumatic stress at every level of our society, inculcated and conditioned into trauma behaviors at the individual and collective level, perpetually triggered and triggering, reenacting and reacting —it’s even harder to see the problem clearly. The trauma and addiction start to just seem… normal.
Just because something is normal, just because it’s all we’ve ever known, does not mean it’s healthy. As the Mechoopda master Traditional Ecological Knowledge practitioner and educator Ali Meders-Knight once said, “If you live in California today, you’ve never seen a healthy forest.”
Just because we’ve never seen a healthy economy doesn’t mean this economy is normal. This economic system is not the inevitable outcome of our innate human nature as it would respond to every set of conditions. Human nature, like all nature, adapts to its conditions. It then shapes conditions. Those conditions then shape how it manifests.
There’s a constant feedback loop between conditions and responses to them, between the individual and the collective, between the pain and the reaction. In our bodies, the result of these interactions might show up as addictions to substances or behaviors, as unconscious trauma responses we perpetuate and inflict on others, on itches that never feel scratched and cups that never feel filled.
Those same patterns, in our economic system, might look like an addiction to growth. I think the addiction to growth is an attempt to re-regulate a system that is stuck compulsively responding to an incomplete threat response.
As anyone who has ever loved an addict knows, you cannot quit someone else’s addiction for them. You can only heal your own, show up lovingly in your community, and invite and support others to heal themselves too. Real leadership is only ever by example.
Our economy is addicted, and our systems are traumatized. We are living in a trauma response that re-traumatizes us every day. We can heal the addiction to endless growth, and heal the trauma in our systems that drives it to emerge. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.
In fact, we’re already doing it — but that’s a conversation for next time.