Why has Addiction Engulfed Globalized Free-Market Society?
Economists usually describe the negative consequences of free-market society in terms of externalities: environmental destruction, ill-health, and social unrest. Polanyi’s great contribution was to emphasize psychosocial externalities. Free-market society fragments culture of every sort, breaking the social links that give people a sense of belonging, meaning, and identity. People find long-term dislocation from their cultural matrix unbearable, whether they are rich or poor, capitalists or workers. Polanyi’s “dislocation” emphasizes a different psychological process than Marx’s “alienation”, which was a kind of suffering experienced primarily by the working class and not by their exploiters in the bourgoisie. Polanyi’s dislocation — like addiction — has no class boundaries. Dislocation frequently occurs in conjunction with material poverty, but they are not the same thing. Although material poverty can crush isolated individuals and families, it can be borne with dignity when people
