Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Looking currently across most sectors of American life, one sees human behavior narrowly comprehended via ‘rational choice models’. Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith once claimed that people make choices out of self-interest. Building upon Smith, Milton Friedman’s Chicago School proclaimed that decision-making out of self-interest is in itself ‘rational’. His view, when linked to the positivistic belief that only reason and rationality are real, lead to the assumption that materialism is a natural law. For Friedman and those influenced by that position, rational profit making is a high virtue and cultural ideal. Shana Hormann has noted that systems are self-referential and that systems across each sector of society shape one another. Organizational systems are expected to be ‘rational’ which means in the words of Friedman, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage activities to increase its profit.”

When accepted without constraints, according to Curtis White, profit making becomes “the basis of freedom and the defining principle of American democracy.” It should be noted that Freud’s student Karen Horney once asserted that the indicators of economic behavior – competitiveness and the desire for status and power – are also strong indicators of the neurotic personality. It is hard not to agree with Horney, given what we witness daily in the national theater of operations influenced by neoliberalism. Where depth psychological principles prevail throughout our culture and can pull down the curtain on unrestrained material wealth, each of us, in the words of Mike Grady, “must be compelled to discover and relieve the sources of our own distress.” The reductive rational choice financial models of human behavior continue daily to split mind from body, the haves from the have-nots, the healthy from the afflicted, and the human from the more-than-human world. Not wholeness but illness results. We must encourage one another and our socio-political leaders to provoke those models with a preponderance of suspicion, challenge, and resistance.