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Affluenza, a coinage combining influenza and affluence, originally described the greed and resulting malaise of consumerism. Indeed, much depression and anxiety can be usefully considered as reactions to recent developments and as comparisons to relative standards. You lose face saying the wrong thing at a social event and fail to consider the event in the context of the arc of your life. This is like having to vacation in Dillon because you can’t afford Aspen, and instead of enjoying Dillon, the whole trip is ruined by the comparison. Always wanting more of everything is a consequence of our ability to imagine more; losing perspective on it is a function of consumerism and other alienating perspectives. Upgrading your phone when your current phone works well is analogous to feeling bad about your body because you look good but not gorgeous. Much psychotherapy works by developing an autobiographical narrative that puts setbacks and disappointments in context.
Lately, affluenza has referred to a legal defense strategy in which a sixteen-year-old boy argued (through his lawyer) that his privileged childhood was responsible for his drunken joyride that killed four people and injured several others. The boy received 10 years of probation, and rather than confine him to a detention center for rehabilitation, the judge allowed the parents to buy him a spot in a private facility. Recently, his mother apparently helped him skip probation and flee to Mexico, although it is far from clear at this point whether that is true. Some people are so privileged that they do not recognize the authority of the judicial system to tell them what to do.
The cultural meaning of this defense is more interesting than the actual case. The judge, in fact, made clear that she did not accept the affluenza argument, and that her sentence was based on the defendant’s age and the reckless (versus purposeful) nature of the crime. Indeed, the reason we have a juvenile justice system is because we recognize that teenagers are often impulsive, egocentric jerks who care at best only about their friends. When rich people get preferential treatment in the justice system, what’s really annoying is that poor people don’t get the same treatment. Poor black boys who steal booze and cars and recklessly kill people should be treated like the rich white boy, not vice versa. That’s why we need judges who are capable of empathizing with the people in their courtrooms.
The cultural meaning of the defense is that privilege blinds us to the needs and even to the reality of other people, and the claim is that this should provide an excuse at law, further privileging the privileged. Not coincidentally, Dickens depicted the motive for revolution as an aristocrat taking no responsibility for running over a child. Still, spoiled children can hardly be expected to relate to the rights of others. Kids raised in hateful subcultures will hate, and those raised to treat others as unimportant will do so. But that is the basic problem of psychology and law: If science is right about the causes of behavior, then moral responsibility is impossible.
The psychological response to the impossibility of moral responsibility is that we impose a system of contingencies not to implement our sense of moral outrage but to affect behavior. We arrange for spoiled children’s undesirable actions to have aversive effects. Psychologically, there is not much difference between “taking responsibility for one’s actions” and “not doing things that others disapprove of.”
The legal response is that the criminal justice system does not exist to provide justice. In his masterpiece, The Common Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes proved (at least to my satisfaction) that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to deter people from doing things that society disapproves of and to replace vigilante vengeance. Sentencing is often framed around moral culpability, but its purpose is to dissuade others from doing what the criminal did. I don’t know if teenage boys, with their burgeoning impulses and immature frontal lobes, are capable of being dissuaded from performing certain actions. I am, however, convinced that an excuse based on wealth will do the opposite, and so it should be illegal. As for vigilante vengeance, friends and family of victims are undoubtedly more likely to take the law into their own hands when the perpetrator is rich and spoiled than poor and pitiable, and that goes double when the rich perpetrator argues that his wealth is an excuse. So on that score as well, the judge did well to reject the affluenza argument.
This post was originally published in The Colorado Psychologist.
