American Dream a biological impossibility, neuroscientist says

What if people are biologically unsuited for the American dream? The man posing that troubling question isn't just another lefty activist. It's Peter Whybrow, head of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA. "We've been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want," said Whybrow, a 2008 PopTech Fellow and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. "We've set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to get what you want immediately." He paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don't fit the social and economic world we've constructed. Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can't actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed. That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses–resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America's unpaid bills came due with shocking speed. But with this crisis, said Whybrow, comes the opportunity to rethink how Americans live, as individuals and as a nation, and build a country that works. "We're primed for doing things immediately. We're poor at planning for the future, unless we get into circumstances like these, where we're forced to think cleverly about what to do next," he said. "In a way, this financial meltdown is a healthy thing for us. We'll think intuitively again." Foremost among Whybrow's targets is the modern culture of spending on credit. "The instinctive brain is well ahead of the intellectual brain. Credit cards promise us that you can have what you want now, and postpone payment until later," he said. Buying just feels good, in a biological sense–and that instant reward outweighs the threat of future bills. Of course, many people use credit cards to pay bills and put food on the table, rather than buy flat-screen televisions and new computers. "That unfortunate reality," said Whybrow, "is produced by an out-of-control economic system" geared toward perpetual growth. That is no more natural a state for markets than a mall food court is natural for individuals whose metabolic heredity treats fats and sugars as rarities. "Once upon a time, this economic system worked. But for the invisible hand of the free market to function, it needed to be balanced. And that balance is gone," he said. Markets were once agrarian institutions, said Whybrow, which balanced the gratification of individuals with the constraints of small communities, where people looked their trade partners in the eye, and transactions were bounded by time and geography. With those constraints removed, markets have engaged in the buy-now, pay-later habits of college kids who don't read the fine print on their credit card bills. "You can think about markets in the same way as individuals who mortgaged their future–except markets did it with other people's money," he said. "You end up with a Ponzi scheme predicated on the idea that we can get something now, rather than having to wait. And it all comes back to the same instinctual drive." And now that the fundamental excesses of our economy have been so painfully exposed, with trillions of dollars vanishing from the American economy in just a few days, we have to think about changing both the economy and ourselves. The answers aren't easy, Whybrow cautioned–but they do exist. People can think creatively about jumping from the treadmills of bad jobs and unmeetable needs; and even if this isn't always possible, they can teach their children to live modestly and within their means. Urban engineers can design cities that allow people to live and work and shop in the same place. Governments can, at the insistence of their citizens, provide the social safety nets on which social mobility, stagnant for the last 50 years, is based. And we can–however much it hurts–look to Europe for advice. "America has always believed that it was the perfect society. When you have that mythology driving your culture, it's hard to look around and say, 'Is someone else doing it better than us?'" said Whybrow. "But you can trace the situation we're in to our evolutionary origins. Now that we find ourselves in the middle of this pseudo-abundance, we're in trouble. And the fantasy that we can restart the American dream just isn't true."