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Selling our selves has never paid so well - or cost so much. While profits soar and riches beckon, can you hold on to your soul? The November - December issue of Utne Reader considers the meaning of "selling out." Also, "mountaintop removal" in West Virginia; a new drug to combat "social phobia"; Terry Cole, who breaks world records (all sorts of them); an Iowa farmer takes on the biotech industry; Shana Furman finds peace in an unlikely place; The Unmaking of Modernism; Media Diet with Julia Butterfly Hill; and more.

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Seller's Market
Selling our selves has never paid so well. Or cost so much.
by Jeremiah Creedon, Utne Reader

It used to be said that America's young lacked a ritual to mark the start of their adult lives. They ought to be sent on vision quests or flogged with holy reeds, we declared - some gesture to symbolize that childhood was over. But thanks to the triumph of the market and all its values in recent years, this problem has been solved. Americans now have a new rite of passage: selling out.

For centuries after Judas took his silver pieces for betraying the better man, then hanged himself in shame, selling out was viewed as evil. People did it all the time, of course, but extolled a higher ideal - and were quick to vilify anyone else who fell short. With the economy on a mad run these days and most Americans feeling flush, attitudes have changed. The rewards are now so high it's often seen as foolish, even pathological, to resist. Dreaded no more, selling out has become the ultimate career goal, the universally desired destiny.

Or so it is packaged. Everywhere you look there's a story about the talented young, their minds and bodies honed by perfect diets and top-notch schools, eager to trade their assets to the highest bidder. If by chance you possess a gift that someone wants to buy - a head for figures, perhaps, or just your figure, period - the message is clear. By all means, child, sell!

The sale itself can be a spectacular thing, as in the case of spies and traitors. More often it's an insidious process that can leave us numb to the moral horrors we commit as calmly as we brush our teeth. By far the most common form of selling out is the quiet betrayal of our selves, the squelching of the inner voice that tells you what you want from life, along with what you will (and won't) do to get it. To betray yourself is to be nagged by the fear that the life you're living may actually be someone else's.

Which leads to the central paradox. Never before has there been such opportunity to seek one's true self - to "follow your bliss" as the mythologist Joseph Campbell famously put it. And yet never have so many been so reluctant to live by their own scripts. Today's tremendous wealth should be funding a time of great creativity and free expression, but that has yet to happen. Instead, this may be one of the great conformist eras, perhaps even more so than the 1950s. That decade had its lonely prophets warning about hollow "organization men" and advertising's "hidden persuaders." We have our prophets too; but their dire warnings, so often heard, are now ignored. And these days, the persuaders don't hide; they're cultural heroes. The only thing left invisible to us is our conformity itself.

From Herman Melville's Billy Budd to the brutal novels of urban initiation written more recently by Richard Price, the process by which a man's ideals were drained or beaten out of him has been one of the culture's enduring literary themes. If there's a curious modern twist to the story, it's the growing role of women in it. Tutored from birth about the trap posed by what Betty Friedan labeled the "feminine mystique," many young female entrepreneurs are learning how wildly it sells. Take Genevieve Field, co-founder of Nerve.com, a Web site for connoisseurs of "literate smut." Or American soccer star Brandi Chastain, who bared her sports bra in the Rose Bowl and soon was endorsing it for Nike - a gesture that revealed not her own body, which is hers to flaunt, but rather another layer of branding worn like a second skin.

Sellouts? Your call. But given the culture's tolerance for cashing in, even our celebration of it, what happens when the consequences are really serious? Last summer, for instance, Michael Phillips, a scientist heading an important study on the safety of genetically engineered crops, suddenly switched sides, taking a job with a biotech trade group - and shocking the study's sponsor, the National Academy of Sciences. Despite the obvious ethical breach, the Academy insisted that the study results, due this fall, would be objective. But to take them at their word wouldn't be very scientific, would it?

As for those who do show integrity, they're more apt to lose a job than walk away with a better one. Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, resigned his job earlier this year after resisting plans by the Massachusetts Medical Society to build a publishing empire around their famous publication's good name. Other medical journal editors have also been driven out, as huge revenues from drug company ads during the 1990s have led to expanded marketing efforts - and less editorial freedom.

Oddly enough, these people are the victims of good times, not bad. Once again, the true nature of our mania reveals itself. The real price of our current wealth may lie in how hard it has become to see beyond it. It's worth noting that Joseph Campbell really began to follow his own bliss when the Great Depression hit in 1929. He spent five years reading and writing, living close to the bone - liberated from larger social expectations by economic collapse.

Artists are often praised for having the inner resources to stay true to themselves. But this idealization is problematic. Since ancient times, many (not all) artists have been cozy with power, often using their gifts to disguise and embroider its abuses. As early as 3,000 years ago, the Egyptian tomb painters were trading their talents for fish from the Nile and beer, and life was pretty good. For most artists throughout time, that's probably been the norm, more so than the solitary heroism of a Solzhenitsyn. In other words, artists are a lot like everyone else.

Where then lies the modern path to an authentic life? The quickest, steepest route is still flat-out renunciation. St. Francis of Assisi pulled it off with flair, ripping off his fancy clothes one day and trading them for a beggar's rags. John Chapman, alias Johnny Appleseed, gave the mendicant's way a peculiarly American spin, wandering the frontier sowing orchards. But for all but a few, dropping out may be more dangerous in spiritual and psychological terms than mindfully wading in. Consider the bitterness that so often grips those who choose to remain pure, compared to the relative happiness of those who take a (slightly) lower road.

It may be that there isn't much clean money in the world, and few inherently noble callings - only noble people. There's no shame in staying in the game, if you do your subversive best to humanize it. Almost everyone has to live with a certain amount of selling out, given the basic proposition of civilization - that we trade our minds and bodies for what amounts to fish and beer.

To read related articles, visit Utne Reader Online's Spirit section.

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The Pharma Sutra
For Prozac Nation, is dosage dictating desire?
by Miriam Karmel Feldman, Utne Reader

One pill makes you taller, another makes you small. Or put more prosaically: Have we reached the point where our most intimate activities are governed not by our emotions but by the contents of our medicine cabinets?

With recent surveys indicating that more than half of those taking Prozac and its relatives, Paxil and Zoloft, lack interest in sex, have difficulty reaching orgasm, and are unable to maintain an erection, depressed Americans are reaching for antidotes to their antidotes, causing some observers to question our new commitment to pharmacological sexuality.

"We want the quick pill. This is America," says Dr. Domeena Renshaw, author of Seven Weeks to Better Sex (Random House, 1995) and director of Loyola University's Sexual Dysfunction Clinic in Chicago. But the problem doesn't stop at our borders. It exists in all industrialized nations, where the clock and calendar have become tyrants, she says. In our hurry-up society, sex becomes a low priority. So we search for a quick, convenient, synthetic stimulant to give us performance on demand. Women are even taking their partners' Viagra, she notes.

When Prozac hit the market back in 1987, it spelled salvation for millions of Americans battling clinical depression. Psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer in his best-seller Listening to Prozac (Viking, 1993) called the little pill a restorer of self; it bestows feelings of greater self-worth, boosts confidence, and improves job productivity. Today, Prozac is among the top five prescribed drugs in the country.

But just as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft may make shy people more comfortable in the boardroom, these selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may have an altogether different effect in the bedroom.

"When Prozac first came on the market, the medical profession didn't have a clue about how vital serotonin was to sexual pleasure and responsiveness," writes Dr. Valerie Davis Raskin in Family Therapy Networker. As she explains it, anti-depressants target neurotransmitters like serotonin inside and outside the brain, and may reduce genital sensation as a mild anesthetic would do. "What used to feel great feels good, what used to feel good feels OK, and what used to feel OK doesn't even register now." Remedies for these side effects include Viagra, Wellbutrin, and gingko, she notes. And if that doesn't do it, there's always Asian ginseng, oats, or wild yam, as Michael Castleman points out in Herbs for Health.

"I definitely think we're on the edge of sexual pharmacology," says Davis Raskin, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago and author of When Words Are Not Enough: The Women's Prescription for Depression and Anxiety (Broadway, 1997)--especially with regard to Viagra, which, like Prozac, is being widely used to fine-tune sexual response rather than address chronic ills. Still, painting a picture of a soma-crazed brave new world doesn't give consumers enough credit. "I don't think middle America is that gullible," she says. There's always a flurry of interest in a new drug, she explains, but it typically dies down when people realize there are no quick fixes.

"We're backing off of Prozac," she adds, and predicts the same will happen with Viagra, because people don't do well with taking drugs long-term. "They're expensive. They forget them. You get a flurry. There's a pill for erectile dysfunction. Everybody tries it," she says. "We're a long way from reducing human suffering or human sexual relationships to a pill."

Ann B. Tracy, director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in Salt Lake City, is less sanguine. "We are in the middle of the worst drug problem this world's ever seen," says Tracy, author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? (Cassia Publications, 1994). "For anything that ails us, we reach for another drug."

Tracy, who tracks disturbing cases in which individuals have become suicidal or homicidal on prescription drugs, insists that we could do away with medications if only we took better care of ourselves. "We don't want to do everything we're supposed to do to be healthy," she says. "We need to learn to rest. We need to learn to quit pushing ourselves."

And, adds Davis Raskin, sometimes we need to understand that sex has as much to do with the mind as with the mechanics. Talking openly about our needs and fears can be every bit as powerful as the latest pharmaceutical or herbal antidote to sexual malaise, she says. "That takes a lot more openness and trust than taking a pill together."

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