by Jeff Madrick

Look at the facts on the ground, say Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin, if not precisely in those words. Don’t tell us about theory. Economic theory has led us to social failure. Simply look around you.

These ninety-somethings are outraged. Hessel worked in the French Resistance during World War II and was shaped by its ultimate victory over French Vichyism and the creation in the late 1950s of what he believes was a true French Republic successfully dedicated to equality. His book Time for Outrage called on people around the world to “resist” again. This recent short book sold more than a million copies in France and inspired protest everywhere.

Now, in The Path to Hope, only slightly longer, Hessel and his friend and peer, the eminent sociologist Edgar Morin, tell us what to protest against—the strangling economic power of finance and the shocking spread of ethnic prejudice among nations that were once proud carriers of humanism and the resulting loss of community and what they call fellow feeling.

It is purist free-market economics and its rising power that both men despise. Their rhetoric is not mild. To them, finance capitalism could become the new fascism. It is already some way down that road, suppressing the citizens of both rich and poor nations. This is what they witnessed during the rise of Vichy France, they argue: a plutocracy frightened of bolshevism that might jeopardize their fortunes turned too easily to fascism.

The spread of a purist ethnic movement in Europe is the other enemy of their humanist ideals. Hessel was a contributor to the beautiful language of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 under the guidance of Eleanor Roosevelt. Here is a relevant passage: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation . . . , of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” This ideal, he and Morin believe, is now being betrayed.

One doesn’t have to agree with everything they write to be moved by them and to understand that in fundamental ways they are right. Their true enemy is not economic inequality or even the persistence of poverty but injustice itself. And so it is with Occupy Wall Street. So it is with the brave protesters of the Arab Spring, the indignados of Spain, the occupiers of St. Paul’s, the Israelis angry with their government’s policies. They all say the same thing.

In brutal dictatorships, the protesters want a voice, they want a basic democracy. In rich democracies, however, the protesters also want a voice lost to the power of money. They want a true democracy as well.

Free us of a tyranny, say the Egyptians and the Libyans. Don’t feed us the stories of the benefits of a free-market economy, say the protesters in rich nations. It hasn’t worked. (And make no mistake, the protesters of the Arab Spring link their tyrannical former regimes with the power of money in the West.) The economics of self-interest and minimal government has led us down a path of self-destruction, say Hessel and Morin, and many others. You ask us how to reform your economic systems and we answer that you should tell us why you still believe in them.

Simply look around and you find injustice almost everywhere. Poverty envelops the world, still. Hessel and Morin simplify here. Formally, poverty by some measures has fallen. But the definition of poverty according to the World Bank is tragicomically low. And the gap between rich and poor has grown enormously.

Meanwhile, income inequality has risen in virtually every rich nation since 1980. The share of wages in GDP has also fallen significantly in most rich nations over the same period, even in China. In the rich nations, public transportation is widely neglected, teachers are increasingly devalued, pollution abounds, and the climate is radically changing. Anti-immigrant movements are flourishing and gaining respectability almost everywhere we look, partly as a result of the poor performance of economies. America’s private prisons make lots of money by locking up so-called illegal immigrants. America has proportionally more people in prison—not only illegal immigrants, of course—than any other rich nation. Private prisons are a major new industry.

Hessel and Morin have written this book to present a plan for action, not merely to make known their outrage and stimulate the outrage of others. Their plan is, to say the least, broad, too abstract. It is their path to hope, not to ultimate solutions. They want to reinvigorate the values of Europe’s humanism. Few see Europe as the world’s leader, but the values of the Enlightenment and European humanism can be a guide. They are essentially true, and they have been a source of American ideals since the Colonial era. Hessel and Morin’s proposals are useful less as a blueprint than as a call for attention to injustice and failure. Basically, they want “fellow feeling” to return. They want community to reign again. They want education to be revamped to teach the young how to live fuller, less materialistic lives. They quote Rousseau: “Life is the trade I want to teach him.” They want the adolescent rebels of France and elsewhere to be saved. They want bureaucracies to be revitalized.

What breaks their hearts most is the loss of compassion. Without bonds and traditions, cultures of decency, and everyday evidence of the caring of others, they wonder how civilization will survive. Finance capitalism has not provided that. To the contrary, the race for self-aggrandizement undermines the possibilities.

They would like centers in every community that are “sources of friendship and care for others.” They want citizens to participate in civil services to deal collectively with natural disasters.

If their ideas are impractical, so be it. Take them as they are, they seem to say. They march on through this book. And they can be poignant. Adolescence to them is magical, for example, the time in which so much must be formed, a time when all is so malleable and can easily go so wrong.

Frankly, they sometimes sound like bad ads. They want to “globalize and deglobalize.” They speak of “humanizing the cities and revitalizing the countryside.”

But there is a kernel of truth, often a large one, in all the propositions. “The path toward a politics based on the quality of life cannot be undertaken and developed unless we make up our minds to throttle the octopus of finance capitalism and the barbarity of national purification and ethnic cleansing,” they write. In France, they want a “permanent council to fight inequality,” another permanent council to reverse the fall in the proportion of GDP that goes to wages, another to protect the environment. They would impose tariffs on nations that make goods on the backs of abused workers or forbid unionization. They would reduce financial speculation. They would revive education to make it not a linear recitation of cause and effect but a circular understanding of how the world works, each event feeding another with constant feedback. No summa of truths but a dialectic, they say.

It is impossible not to notice their idealism. They offer not so much plans for concrete action as a set of broad and mostly necessary principles. The Occupy Wall Streeters are subject to a similar criticism. If you are serious, we ask them, what are your specific, practical demands?

Some of the American protesters are trying to devise workable plans to change bits of America. But perhaps the wiser of them are, more importantly, trying to shine the American light on injustice and bring voice to the disenfranchised, the unlistened to, the confused, and the angry. We have heard all the solutions, they seem to be saying. But we want to be sure someone is listening. There is no voice without listeners, no sounds in the forest when the tree falls if no one is there. Washington has not listened, the occupiers are generally saying, so we need another path besides traditional government to get them to listen, and to get others to listen. The media mostly reflect the narrow, conventional conversations in Washington.

To these people, Hessel and Morin are especially relevant. Occupy Wall Street also says look around us. Do we want to make some small quick fixes to our economy, or do we want to talk more broadly of a deeper trouble? Many of them are choosing the latter. This mystifies people like Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City, who made his vast fortune on Wall Street. Men and women like Bloomberg can’t help but believe Wall Street is a great job creator and that these protesters should go get a job, start a business, as if opportunity is simply there for those who grab it, as if the American dream is as alive as it ever was, as if the unemployment rate for those in their twenties hasn’t soared to 15 to 20 percent.

In one speech after he evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park, Bloomberg said the protesters will now have to live by the power of their ideas. Implicitly, he was saying, if you want a financial transactions tax or a tax on the wealthy or a new mortgage relief program, go fight for it.

But imagine how the protesters feel about this man, who apparently thinks he became mayor on the power of his ideas. Bloomberg spent more than $250 million of his own money on three mayoral campaigns. There lay the power of his ideas. It is but one of many examples of a disconnection of values and down-on-the-ground experience between those at the top of the income spectrum and everyone else. To say that these men and women at the top are out of touch is an understatement.

What of the science of economics? The main arrogance of contemporary mainstream economics is that free-market policies are increasingly proposed as a path not only to prosperity but also to social justice. This was the revolution of Milton Friedman, who wrote just this in his popular book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and was carried forward to a lesser but still potent degree by former Keynesians like Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary, who proudly talked as late as 2001 about how he favored market solutions in many areas over government solutions. In the process, Summers condoned Alan Greenspan’s Ayn Rand–influenced free-market ideology toward financial regulation. To take one example, with the advice of Summers and former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton used the tax increase he passed in 1993, and the budget surpluses being generated, to pay down debt so that private markets could allocate more money, so that the market could work to improve welfare. He invested far less in infrastructure or education, his priority fueling the private markets.

Economics can be powerful and constructive. But free-market economics, the prevailing view, has not led to social justice, and cannot on its own. Belief in such propositions enabled the Wall Street crisis, as unfettered finance capitalism led to speculative bubbles and misdirected capital. Government stepped back under Clinton and Bush and Greenspan. In many respects, it has become the era of economic theory, the narrow but widely advocated version of which served the plutocracy well. Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin refused to allow derivatives, those low-down-payment securities based on other securities that were the heart of the financial crisis, to be regulated. They were essentially traded in secret with no government demands for capital to back up the promises of traders. Free-market competition would weed out the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, Summers and his allies in the Clinton administration argued. Bankers made vast personal fortunes.

Consider what has happened as the Friedman-Summers model ascended. Wages have generally stagnated for most workers as corporate profits have soared. Inequality is breathtakingly high. Poverty rates are as high as they were in the mid-1960s before the war on poverty was fully implemented. The quality of education and the adequacy of infrastructure are frightfully deteriorated. Unemployment rates will not return to acceptable levels for many years. Some twenty-five million Americans cannot find a full-time job. Some twenty million full-time workers earn poverty wages. A higher proportion of Americans earn less than two-thirds of the median income than in any other rich nation.

The young, in particular, have high unemployment levels and low starting salaries, and are saddled with enormous debt taken on to pay unjustifiably expensive university tuitions. And in terms of cost, and increasingly in terms of delivery of services, health care in America is a tragedy whose most painful future consequences remain mostly neglected, even if Obama’s health program is not reversed.

Small wonder that a right-wing populist movement like the Tea Party takes hold. Small wonder that anti-immigrant policies are so much a part of Republican presidential campaigns. Small wonder that some are trying to restrict the voting of those they disagree with.

I imagine two circles. One is the circle of free-market economics, the Friedman circle, in which both prosperity and social justice are optimized. The other is the circle of community, government, and fellow feeling, of social programs, fair taxes, and a commitment to equality. This is the Hessel-Morin circle.

The Friedman circle grew bigger in the last forty years, the Hessel-Morin circle smaller, especially in America. Friedman believed that self-reliance and competition would produce more secure retirement, better jobs, and lower unemployment if the other circle did not get in the way.

In the twentieth century, America worked best when these circles were roughly the same size, and when they overlapped. Perhaps the Hessel-Morin circle should be larger than the Friedman circle. But each circle should tolerate the other, work with the other—as I say, overlap.

I am not sure that Hessel and Morin want the circles to overlap. They leave some room for capitalism—perhaps not enough room. Equality is a beautiful idea, as is universal human rights. These rights, however, should also include the right of a man and woman to start a business, to wake up one morning with a new idea for a product and pursue it with vigor and optimism. This, too, is beautiful. I doubt Hessel and Morin would disagree. But that power has gone too far the wrong way. Hessel and Morin have seen too much destruction of their values. They have been around. They have seen undiluted, cruel fascism and faced it down. They see the potential for it to rise again. They want large-scale change. So, I think, do many of America’s occupiers. Hessel and Morin call for “a broad insurrection of conscience.” That is a lovely description of Occupy Wall Street, as well. But, maybe most important, they are concerned with life. They want a new politics “based on a yearning to live and restore life.” For this, they need a return of community, not the atomization of unregulated capitalism. I’d say, again, an overlapping of the circles. Even some economists are beginning to think in such broader terms. Alas, not enough of them.

Marcianne Blevis

Would Valentine’s Day be less glorious if jealousy were eradicated from the book of human emotions? We assume that jealousy is a necessary evil, the collateral damage of love; given a choice we prefer to do without it. Jealousy hurts. It creeps in without warning, crashing the party, leaving us clueless and stunned. Our attempts to express ourselves in the face of jealousy, frailty, or rage usually backfire. We become either apoplectic or silent, but always irrational. “Jealousy lives upon doubts,” said the eighteenth-century moralist Francois de La Rochefoucault. When we are jealous we invent scenarios on the basis of the slightest hint: a phone call hung up too quickly, a conversation at a party that seemed to last a little too long. “It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty,” added La Rochefoucault.

But what exactly do we doubt? I have a friend who claimed to be immune to jealousy. He had an open marriage. But his free-above-it-all spirit turned out to be a self-protective device. This man’s self-loathing was so immense that he couldn’t even imagine competing with a rival. When he felt the first twinges of jealousy, he did not know what hit him. With the help of his analyst he was eventually able to celebrate it as a victory, an affirmation. Now he could face the risk of falling in love, of being loved, or possibly, rejected.

Jealousy is not a lamentable by-product of love but a life force that needs to be confronted on its own terms. In our psychologically minded culture, keen to give us permission to “get in touch with our feelings,” to embrace our anger, our sadness, or even our shame, jealousy is shunned. It would do us well to remember that all human emotions are born of necessity. They exist to help us figure out who we are in the world, and jealousy is no exception. It is a resource we call upon when we feel at risk, when our sense of self is put in jeopardy. When we are jealous we are in fact in the grip of an identity crisis. Its lethal sting points to a paradox that has been lying dormant within us.

To negotiate the world we rely on an image of ourselves, one we have constructed over the years through the love we have received, the challenges we have faced, the disappointments we have endured. But this image does not fully represent us. We may, for example, ignore some of our strengths and exaggerate our vulnerabilities. When jealousy hits, we lose our bearings. Its target—the person who has provoked our jealousy—sucks up the air around us, and we feel erased from view, our self-regard shattered. From our rival radiates an aura that we analyze in vain. What are these magical attributes that he or she possesses and we don’t? What is happening is that jealousy is acting both for us and against us. It signals our wish to reconfigure who we are, but it trumps us with the wrong image. After closer scrutiny, we often realize we don’t even desire the attributes we assigned to our rival. What we envy rather is something unrealized in ourselves. We may be faced with a reminder of a road not taken or a stifling fear. It is part of the curse of being human to feel jealous every time we feel displaced from our comfort zone and are pushed toward unexplored territories.

I am reminded of a young woman who never dared to pursue the career of her dreams. When she witnessed her boyfriend flirting with someone more accomplished than herself, she came to realize that her jealousy of her rival masked her craving for a part of herself she had ignored for too long. She lost the boyfriend but went back to school. To think of jealousy as the tension between our fears and our most obscure and intimate ambitions may finally give this uncomfortable yet necessary emotion the legitimacy it deserves. Jealousy is not love’s decoy. It is a welcome signal that something in our lives is amiss and needs attention. But keep in mind that if jealousy is the precursor to change, there is no telling how our partners will respond. Some are very attached to their jealousy. They may prefer their comfort zones to risky adventures. Let’s hope that a new faith in the merits of jealousy will inspire them to look within. Valentine’s Day then may be cause for celebrating not only love, but also transformation.

Marcianne Blévis is a Paris-based psychoanalyst and the author of Jealousy: Love’s Favorite Decoy. Judith Gurewich is a psychoanalyst based in Cambridge, MA, and publisher of Other Press.

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This article originally appeared in the February 2012 issue of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In advance of Super Bowl XLVI, which will see the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in Indianapolis on Sunday, New York-based publisher Other Press is pleased to announce a promotion in cooperation with Boston-based Beacon Press: a wager that stakes each press to the fate of their hometown team.

Terrie Akers, Manager of Online Publicity and Social Media for Other Press, says of the wager, “I’m thrilled to be working with our friends at Beacon Press on this promotion. It’s always rewarding to collaborate with other independent presses, and to have a bit of fun at the same time. And it’s particularly rewarding when it’s so painfully obvious that the other team is going to lose.”

If the Giants win on Sunday, Beacon Press agrees to promote two Other Press titles for the following week, utilizing their website, newsletter, and social media channels. In honor of the victor, both presses will promote a giveaway of those two titles, with winners to be selected at random at the end of the week.

“I think it’s great that Beacon is basically volunteering to do my job for me for a week,” says Akers, adding, “Maybe I’ll take a vacation.”

If hell freezes over and the Patriots win, the terms would be reversed.

The wager was born at a dinner during the Digital Book World Conference last month, where Other Press Associate Publisher Paul Kozlowski engaged in some healthy banter about the Big Game with Beacon’s Tom Hallock and Alyssa Hassan. They decided to make things interesting.

Since the internal announcement earlier this week, the Other Press office has been abuzz with talk of the match up. Marketers have become stat analysts. Instead of calling agents and authors, editors are haunting the phone lines of sports talk radio call-in shows. From the production office, chants of “You can’t spell ELITE without ELI!” can be heard. In fact, the publicity team was too busy poring over the latest updates on Rob Gronkowski’s health to write this press release—it was composed by Linda from the insurance office next door. (Ed. note—Thanks, Linda!)

“I thought it was just a friendly bet,” says Kozlowski. “I thought we would maybe wager a cup of chowder, Manhattan vs. New England. The whole thing has spiraled out of control.”

Details of the giveaway will be posted online after the game. In the meantime, follow the conversation on Twitter (with the hashtag #pubbowl) and Facebook.

Other Press is an independent publisher of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from America and around the world—non-fiction and fiction—that explore how psychic, cultural, historical, and literary shifts inform our vision of the world and of each other. Find us on Twitter (@otherpress) and Facebook (facebook.com/otherpress).

Beacon Press is an independent publisher of serious non-fiction and fiction, emphasizing religion, history, current affairs, political science, gay/lesbian/gender studies, education, African-American studies, women’s studies, child and family issues and nature and the environment. Find them on Twitter (@beaconpressbks) and Facebook (facebook.com/beaconpress).

There are many marvelous things about being a novelist. You can daydream all day long and call it a profession. You only need a pen and a piece of paper to work. You can do it wherever you want: in bed, on the beach, in a bar (in my case: mostly in my office at home).

For me, though, one of the best things about being a novelist has been the opportunity to meet some of the most wonderful and interesting people I have ever encountered. These people, like novelists, are dreamers―because they believe in the magical power of the written word.

They are people who work very long hours. People who work very long hours and never complain. People who work very long hours, never complain, and don’t make much money. They have various reasons for being in their line of business. Becoming rich is not one of them.

They are salespeople who care so much about what they sell that they don’t sell everything to everybody. They are salespeople who have a healthy distrust toward things that sell too well.

They travel a lot and rarely leave their hometown. They can talk for hours about characters and places, which only exist in their minds. They can get lost in letters. In letters!

They are booksellers.

I am a writer who does a lot of reading tours in Germany and Switzerland; therefore I have had the privilege of meeting a lot of independent booksellers who have kindly invited me to their stores.

Usually we have wonderful evenings together. They spread the word and thanks to their work, dozens―and sometimes hundreds―of customers come and listen to me instead of staying home. Sometimes the booksellers get caught up in a book so much that they organize a reading during vacation time and wonder why only a few people show up. Or they stage an event on the night of a major soccer game and are surprised and utterly disappointed when they spend the evening alone with the author. It has all happened to me―and I loved it. I have spent so many evenings in their company, had so many after-reading dinners and bottles of wine and enjoyed every second of it, because it doesn’t happen too often that you meet people who are humble but also so passionate about what they do.

As a reader and a book buyer myself, I find that there is something old fashioned and at the same time very reassuring about booksellers: they want you to come to their store, when you could stay home and order online. They want you to talk to them, when you could just press a button instead. They want you to pay the price a book is worth, when you could go and hunt for the deepest discount.

It is said that they are a dying breed. Threatened by extinction.

I don’t think so. Call me a romantic. Call me a dreamer. But I believe in the power of their passion and in the loyalty of their customers. I have met too many independent booksellers who are surviving, even thriving, in a niche they toiled to carve out and sustain.

Now that my book is being published in America, I must count my blessings once again. I look forward to meeting some very interesting people there.

That is one of the wonderful things about being a novelist.

Jan-Phillip Sendker is the author of the novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.

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This article originally appeared in the January 2012 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.