The junkies

We read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain in my criminal punishment seminar this week, and afterwards a student told me she wanted to write a paper comparing the life stories of Richard Sackler and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the now-incarcerated head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

I thought this was an excellent idea. Guzman was an illiterate peasant from one of the poorest regions of Mexico; Sackler was the heir to an immense pharmaceutical fortune, which he has spent his life obsessively making even more immense.

Both men are drug dealers who, in moral if not strictly legal terms, are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The Sackler name is all over various academic centers at fancy universities, art galleries, and other high culture artifacts; Guzman’s is not.

I find it much easier to imagine why Guzman has lived the life he’s lived, deplorable as it has been. As for Sackler, I asked the class: why would someone born into such vast wealth feel so driven to increase that wealth into an ever-more uncountable hoard, even if it meant, as it very much did, killing a lot of people in the process?

They treated this as a question whose answer was painfully obvious: of course he did that, because that’s what the plutocracy is. So I suppose a much more interesting question is: why is it like that?

I read them a passage from an essay John Maynard Keynes wrote nearly 100 years ago, predicting among other things what the world would be like 100 years hence, when it would be almost unimaginably wealthier than it was at present (the present being 1930). His predictions about how much richer the world would be turned out to be uncannily accurate. His predictions about what we would choose to do with all that wealth were not:

There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.

The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the
enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhatdisgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.