Psychoeconomics: globalization, markets, crisis - стр. 15

In crises of this type the role of the hysteroid personality increases sharply. This manifests itself in multiple facets.

First, in changing the motivational base of making decisions from the main subjects of economic activity (excluding resonators). The motives of economic behavior become more short-term. The role and significance of the emotional component grows. The irrational component in motivation grows.

Second, the growth of defensive reactions when making decisions. People to a smaller degree than usual begin to go along with the arguments not of dispassionate contemplation, but emotional impulses, the impulses of the unconscious.

Third, as a rise in contradictions between the conscious and unconscious, which makes people’s behavior illogical and complicates managing them by means that usually provide a good effect in a relaxed atmosphere. In this way it is a stressful situation – it is not clear what specific people’s reactions will be. Hence, beyond the framework of a given crisis, the assessment of the measures taken from today’s point of view may radically depart from that offered by participants of the given process.

Fourth, managing people typically requires emotional intervention, psychotherapeutic methods on the government scale. In this regard, the management decisions and behavior of Franklin Roosevelt during the crisis do not seem illogical at all. He would have needed to manage hysterical people with appropriate methods.

Roosevelt found himself in a situation in which exiting the crisis would have been without the support of the soundly thinking elite. This is a fact that Franklin Roosevelt himself acknowledges, speaking directly to the nation and blaming the Washington advisers for their incompetence. But this his adversaries would also admit in describing the atmosphere that had formed in government institutions and Roosevelt’s retinue. Could anything really have been done with the hysterical elite? And Roosevelt did about as much as he could. He prevented the bloodshed that had previously accompanied the shift of the third-generation elite. But he could not stop the elite from making sometimes unthinking decisions. Thus, the destruction of food products at a time when people were hungry was clearly an illogical step, aimed at average Americans, while protecting the interests of merchant princes and the banks that gave them credit. And Roosevelt talks about this frankly.

The elite did everything the way the third-generation elite had done for centuries before this. It did not change its psychotype, it did not increase production efficiency, but rather increased the degree to which it exploited its subjects. And the elite made a decision to eliminate food products. This decision came to fruition not during Roosevelt’s rise to power, but under Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt could not do anything about this. But he did the main thing – he did not allow bloodshed and created the conditions for a new elite to transition to power gradually. Ultimately, here the war “helped”. Authority at the beginning of the crisis of 1929-1933 was with the elite, the Federal Reserve, the bankers and the wholesale merchants. This power remained with them after the crisis, but more realistic people came into power. And some knew how to become more moderate after what had happened. A certain part of the elite was able to change its psychotype. In the period after World War II, the U.S. was already being managed by the first-generation elite.