Psyche, Science, and Society

Is not understanding the profit motive a mental illness?

November 30th, 2005

In response to my recent piece on military mental health workers in Iraq, Andrew Pollack from Brooklyn sent me the following comments he had posted on a listserv. It concerns a recent Los Angeles Times article [A Journey That Ended in Anguish] on a military ethicist who, confronted with the rampant corruption in the Iraq occupation, ended up committing suicide. In response, a psychologist suggested that his lack of acceptance of the profit motive was pathological:

************* Andrew’s Comments **********************

I’m surprised no one commented yet on this piece of the article: “A psychologist… said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisareitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”

Do you hear what this pig is saying? She’s not talking about private corruption (certainly because to protect her job she’ll deny it exists). She’s saying that Westhusing was wrong — in fact, that he was mentally unbalanced — to think his military ethics were more valid than profit-seeking!

The US military has always been the source of rampant corruption by camp travellers and back-home contractors — but this shrink is saying the new, open level to which it’s been taken by Bush is to be considered the norm and that anyone who challenges it is crazy!

Now Brian is right about the pitfalls of an overly rigid mortality for a soldier, and that would be true no matter the class character of the army (although a proletarian army has to have a superior, if still flexible, moral code). But that’s separate from the range of what’s considered acceptable — and even sane — in various bourgeois armies.

Entry Filed under: Iraq, Psychology, War and Peace