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GEKKOMANIA ALIVE AND WELL
By Dr. Stephen JuanTwo decades ago we called it “Geckkomania” and today the name sticks.*
Gekkomania is the sickness of the criminally rich. Financial scandals of greed: S&Ls, Barings, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, World Com, and in Australia HIH Insurance among scores of others all exhibit symptoms of the illness.
Once we were told greed was good. Now it is pathological.
Gekkomania was first described by New York psychologist Dr. Steven Berglas in his visionary THE SUCCESS SYNDROME: HITTING BOTTOM WHEN YOU REACH THE TOP (Plenum Publishers, 1986). His was a scathing attack on the psychological dangers of greed gone wild. Dr. Berglas still argues that although “excellence, love of challenge, success, and attainment of wealth are admirable traits, there is a chilling undercurrent of pathology in the lives of some who seek them.” The prime case is the fictitious Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in Oliver Stone's film, “Wall Street” (1987). But real life cases include Wall Street swindlers Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Martin Siegel, Dennis Levine, and now the biggest single financial swindler in corporate history, Bernie Madoff. As James Stewart writes in DEN OF THIEVES (Simon & Schuster, 1991), they create “a series of security scams that made other financial hustles look like amateur night.”
In IN SEARCH OF EXCESS: THE OVERCOMPENSATION OF AMERICAN EXECUTIVES (Norton, 1992), author Graef Crystal demonstrated nearly two decades ago that U.S. corporate heads will often boost their own salaries while sacking others in the company in so-called economy moves. Furthermore, as we have seen in recent years corporate chiefs allow their companies to go bankrupt rather than take personal cuts in salary. Corporations are run for the benefit of their executives as everyone else including shareholders have to look out for themselves. As in the case of General Motors, against advice, they lose their own jobs, the jobs of everyone else, and take their companies down with them. It is not stupidity. It is the illness of the criminally rich. Why this pathology? Why this self-destructive behaviour? Why Gekkomania?
Dr. Berglas put it this way: Why do some people who already have everything still feel compelled to push beyond the bounds of ethical, rational, and legal calculation---eventually ending in ruin? He answers that “many of the criminally rich suffer from extreme narcissism. These people have not really developed an ego or a sense of self-esteem.” Narcissists, as described in psychiatry, are grossly ego-centric individuals who are overly self-absorbed. To themselves, they are the most important person in the world---in fact, the only person deserving of their attention. Dr. Berglas adds that the criminally rich narcissist “acts out, attempting to gain attention through outrageous success and equally outrageous behaviour. If everyone else is making $10 million a year, the criminally rich narcissist has to make twice that, three times, even more--it never stops. The whole point is differentiation. The need to stand out, to tote up the highest numbers on the money scorecard, has helped to foster a thoroughgoing obsession with money in the tight little subculture of high finance.”
Dr. Berglas cites Ivan Boesky as his classic real life Gekkomaniac. He observes, “for Ivan Boesky, money came ahead of sleeping and eating. He had few interests besides making money. He was never rich enough. He needed more money about as much as a junkie needs his next fix.”
Bernie Madoff has equal credentials as the top Gekkomaniac. The son of a New York plumber turned stock broker, Madoff was ignored as a child. He turned to making money as compensation for a completely empty life. Money making became such a sole obsession that he ignored his own children as he was ignored as a child.Madoff is the last of a long list of Gekkomaniacs that plagued Wall Street. The first Wall Street rogue was arguably Ivan Kreuger. Whereas Madoff swindled via the Ponzi scheme, as Frank Partnoy describes in THE MATCH KING: THE FINANCIAL GENIUS BEHIND A CENTURY OF WALL STREET SCANDALS (Public Affairs, 2009), Kreuger sold naive investors shares in commodity monopolies involving match sticks. The next Gekkomaniac in this long and nfamous tradition is no doubt busy doing their worst at this moment.
As with all psychopathology, the origins of the narcissism of the criminally rich lie in early childhood. There are two theories about what goes wrong. In the first, in the early years of life an individual believes that they are somehow unworthy of the advantages and successes they attain. This is the case in those who inherit wealth and build upon it. They must continually prove themselves “worthy”, hence their financial empire must get bigger, bigger, and still bigger---unendingly. As Dr. Berglas puts it, “those who self-destruct, or self-deny, in the midst of plenty may do so because they believe they have not earned their good fortune. To enjoy success, a person must feel a sense of accomplishment.”
In the second, from the preschool years onwards, an individual develops and carries into adulthood an obsessive fear of impoverishment---of never being secure enough. This is the case in those who are self-made. They often starting with nothing and know how it feels to have nothing. They fear having nothing again.
It is suggested that both types may suffer early on from emotional impoverishment, regardless of their level of material wealth. Perhaps it uncaring parents, maybe a father who never expressed approval, love, or gives the child reason for self-esteem. Hence, they never have enough, never get enough, and always want more. Ironically, such individuals grow up to believe that, even if they themselves are unworthy or unimportant--their ever-larger wealth makes them so.
Laurence Shames, author of THE HUNGER FOR MORE: SEARCHING FOR VALUES IN AN AGE OF GREED (Random House, 1991) points out that greed is actually an addiction. Furthermore, he claims that “one of the sad ironies is that those people who get hooked on money tend to consider themselves very smart, cool-headed, and rational. These are people who are very well-educated in the ways of money, but beyond a certain point, they are no longer behaving rationally at all.”
These and other Gekkomanics are the last people we would normally think of as being mentally ill.
But indeed they are.
*“The Mind of the Money Mad” THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 21 April 1993, p. 13.
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