Capitalism
owes its resilience to its ability to devise novel tactics to
deflect, distort, and deflate mass resistance. Even with the
casualties of global capitalism mounting, capitalism’s fixers have
channeled public dissatisfaction and disappointment into private
diminished self-worth and self-destructiveness.
London
Review of Books reviewer, Katrina Forrester, aptly captures this
insidious ploy: when faced with oppression and exploitation “Don’t
join a union, pop a pill.” In her perceptive review of William
Davies’ The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big
Business Sold Us Wellbeing (22 October 2015) she exposes the wide
spread practice of defining rebellious behavior or negative attitudes
as psychological disorders. “...if you’re not happy, wish things
were different, or find it hard to adapt to the conditions of modern
life, you may be diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness.”
More
and more often, academics and therapists have accepted the notion
that depression or dysfunctional behavior is a mark of mental
problems regardless of the causes of the behavior or attitude.
They “…think of unhappiness as a pathology, a psychological
or mental state amenable to behavioral and medical intervention. This
is the logic that underpins the growth of the ‘happiness
industry.’” Thus, for example, when an Iraqi mother loses two
sons fighting a foreign occupier, when her personal security is
constantly threatened, and living conditions continue to deteriorate,
her unhappiness is pathological. It is not the horrid conditions of
her life (conditions which could have been avoided or can be
altered), but her “negative” feelings that must be changed.
As
Forrester points out, “Many people are unhappy for good reasons,
which the new therapeutic practices of the happiness industry largely
ignore.”
She
goes on:
Where once the
solution to unhappiness at work was social reform and collective
action, now it’s individual uplift and “resilience”; when we
want to resist, we don’t join a union but call in sick. If you lose
your job and feel demoralized at the prospect of looking for a new
one, that too might be a diagnosable condition.
Forrester
reports that in the UK some have taken to rebranding unemployment as
a psychological disorder with claimants’ “attitude to work”
used as a determinant of benefit worthiness.
While
appreciative of the book under review, Forrester faults the author
for his weak answer to the happiness industry. Rather than
recognizing that happiness-obsession serves capitalism by
trivializing capital’s destructive nature, William Davies sees it
as somehow a threat to democracy. By touting “democratizing” the
work place, Davies joins all social democrats in assiduously avoiding
placing capitalism’s pathologies at capitalism’s doorsteps. And
Forrester sees this flaw clearly: “Happiness and depression are
tied up with capital in ways far more concrete than Davies allows.”
Pathological
Blowback
It
is no secret that whites have often been the most socially compliant
demographic group. Middle-aged white people are today inclined to
cling to the dominant ideological narrative, to support the ruling
class “verities.” But they are paying a heavy price for the trust
that they have placed in wealth and power.
A recent study, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, shows that whites, especially less educated whites, between the ages of 45 to 54 have suffered a dramatic increase in mortality since 1999. The authors, Professors Case and Deaton, argue that much of this increase is caused by an over four-fold increase of drug and alcohol overdoses, an over 50% increase in suicides, and an over 25% increase of chronic liver disease. Further, they have related this abuse to mental-health problems and problems in handling personal difficulties, especially economic stresses.
Case
and Deaton speculate that increased mortality may have caused 488,500
deaths that could have been avoided between 1999 and 2013—what the
anti-Soviet Kremlinologists of the Cold War era would label
“unnecessary deaths.”
While
there is much alarm in the mainstream academic and social work
community, there are few theories about how such mass “unhappiness”
could occur and about how to arrest it.
But
is it really that difficult to discern the causes of this mental
health epidemic?
Should
it be a surprise that white people who came of age during and after
the Reagan era of fanatical US boosterism, who experienced the period
where all social questions were settled with the mantra “Are YOU
better off now?”, and who endured a time when personal “success”
trumped social relations and social responsibilities, would now find
disappointment, even despair in the unrelenting crises of the
twenty-first century?
Capitalism
fostered an ever-present trend of alienation, isolation, and
subjectivism that accelerated dramatically over the last forty years.
Extreme competitiveness for jobs, status, and power nurtured the
virus of selfishness and insensitivity. In the Hobbesian State of
Nature that ensued, many were consumed by ruthless competition—the
struggle for success. Those who were “losers”—and there must be
losers, if there are winners—were stripped of their self-worth.
With
the promise of boundless prosperity and the ideology of
self-advancement rocked by two devastating economic crises in the
first decade of the twenty-first century, those most committed to
this faith were devastated. Harsh realities caught up with the fairy
tales spun by capitalism’s apologists. For those seeing no options,
alcohol, drugs, and suicide became an answer.
But
causes of this epidemic are not found in the soul or mind, but in
capitalism. And solutions are not found on the therapist’s couch,
in self-help sessions, the drug store or the bottle, but in creating
a world where everyone has a welcoming, useful, and satisfying place.
That place will never be found where capitalism reigns.
Zoltan
Zigedy
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