The Happiness Industry Page 25

  Psychology is afflicted by the same error, time and time again, of being modelled on physiology or biology, either by force of metaphor or by a more literal reductionism. Of course, this attempt to either reduce psychology to the physical, or at least base it on mechanical or biological metaphors, is one of the main strategies of power and control offered by the various theorists explored over the course of this book. For Jevons, the mind was best understood as a mechanical balancing device; for Watson, it was nothing but observable behaviour; for Selye, it could be discovered in the body; for Moreno, it was manifest in measurable social networks; marketers now like to attribute our decisions and moods to our brains; and so on.

  And yet we needn’t (and mustn’t) return to the dualism of Fechner or Wundt either. To assert the subjective, transcendent, intangible nature of the mind, in opposition to the physical body, is to keep flipping the same dualism on its head, like preaching a mindfulness doctrine that is one half neuroscience and the other half Buddhism. To return to a vision of the mental realm as entirely private and invisible to the outside world is to remain trapped in a state of affairs where we keep asking ourselves neurotic and paranoid questions, such as ‘What am I really feeling?’ or ‘I wonder if he is truly happy’. It is in this sort of confused philosophical territory that the owner of the brain scanner can promise to resolve all moral and political questions, once and for all.18

  At its most fundamental, the choice between Bentham and Wittgenstein is a question of what it means to be human. Bentham posited the human condition as one of mute physical pain, to be expertly relieved through carefully designed interventions. This is an ethic of empathy, which is extrapolated to a society of scientific surveillance. It also views the division between humans and animals as philosophically insignificant. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, there is nothing prior to language. Humans are animals which speak, and their language is one that other humans understand. Pleasure and pain lose their privileged position, and cannot treated as matters of scientific fact. ‘You learned the concept “pain” when you learned language’, but it is fruitless to search for some reality of consciousness outside of the words we have to express ourselves.19 If people are qualified to speak for themselves, the constant need to anticipate – or to try and measure – how they are feeling suddenly disappears. So, potentially, does the need for ubiquitous psychosomatic surveillance technologies.

  How else to know people?

  Psychology and social science are perfectly possible under the sorts of conditions described by Wittgenstein; indeed they are much more straight-forward. Systematic efforts to understand other people, through their behaviour and speech, are entirely worthwhile. But they are not so different from the forms of understanding that we all make of one another in everyday life. As the social psychologist Rom Harré argues, we all face the occasional problem of not being sure what other people mean or intend but have ways of overcoming this. ‘The only possible solution’, he argues, ‘is to use our understanding of ourselves as the basis for the understanding of others, and our understanding of others of our species to further our understanding of ourselves’.20

  One implication of this, when it comes to acquiring psychological knowledge, is that we have to take what people say far more seriously. Not only that, but we have to assume that for the most part, they meant what they said, unless we can identify some reason why they didn’t. Where behaviourism always attempts to get around people’s ‘reports’ of what they’re feeling, in search of the underlying emotional reality, an interpretative social psychology insists that feeling and speaking cannot be ultimately disentangled from each other. Part of what it means to understand the feelings of another is to hear and understand what they mean when they use the word ‘feeling’.

  Techniques such as surveys may have a valuable role to play in fostering mutual understanding across large and diverse societies. But again, there is too much misunderstanding as to what is going on when a survey takes place. Surveys can never be instruments which represent some set of quasi-natural, objective facts; rather they are useful and interesting ways of engaging with people, probing them for answers. As the critical psychologist John Cromby has argued with respect to happiness surveys:

  Happiness does not exert a determinate force that always makes all human participants tick the boxes on a … scale in a particular way. There is not the law-like relation between happiness and questionnaire response that exists between, say, the volume of a quantity of mercury and its temperature.21

  This doesn’t mean that a happiness survey doesn’t communicate anything. But what it conveys cannot be disentangled from the social interaction between the surveyor and the surveyed. The ideal of discovering something more objective than this, through stripping out the self-awareness of the respondent (for instance, analysing Twitter sentiment instead) is a chimera. It also involves forms of trickery and manipulation which open up a breach between the researcher and everybody else.

  Another way of understanding this argument is that psychology, clearly understood, is a door through which we pass on the way to political dialogue. This is in contrast to the Benthamite and behaviourist traditions explored in this book, which view psychology as a step towards physiology and/or economics, precisely so as to shut the door on politics. Unless something goes wrong, the core questions of psychology are relatively simple. ‘What is that person doing?’ ‘What is that person feeling right now?’ For the most part, the answers to these questions are relatively unproblematic, and the first and most important ‘methodology’ for answering them is one that we all use every day: just ask them.

  That this methodology is not taken more seriously by managerial elites is scarcely surprising. It requires processes of deliberation. It credits people with their own legitimate interpretations and critiques of their own circumstances. It also requires skills to listen, which become submerged in societies that have privileged the power to observe and visualize. Management and government are more secure with the notion of brains ‘lighting up’ or thinking being ‘no less observable than baseball’, than they are with the prospect of people intentionally expressing their emotions and judgements. For various reasons, making our minds visible seems safer than making them audible. Entire organizational structures would need to change if the behaviourist vision of an automated, silent mind were abandoned in favour of an intelligent, speaking one.

  In a society organized around objective psychological measurement, the power to listen is a potentially iconoclastic one. There is something radical about privileging the sensory power of the ear in a political system designed around that of the eye. The clinical psychologist Richard Bentall argues that even quite severe forms of ‘mental illness’, which are routinely treated with drugs in the West today, can be alleviated through a patient, careful form of engagement with the sufferer and their life history. He suggests that:

  If psychiatric services are to become more genuinely therapeutic, and if they are to help people rather than merely ‘manage’ their difficulties, it will be necessary to rediscover the art of relating to patients with warmth, kindness and empathy.22

  Listening and talking will not ‘cure’ them, because they are not ‘treatments’ in the first place. But behind the symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia there are stories and emotional injuries which only a good listener will discover.

  The rediscovery of listening is a priority that permeates other fields of social science. The sociologist Les Back argues that ‘listening to the world is not an automatic faculty but a skill that needs to be trained’, noting it is this which gets lost in a society of ‘abstracted and intrusive empiricism’ of endless data, exposés, facts and figures.23 To know others is to engage with their stories and how they tell them. In the past, critiques of ‘ideology’ have proposed that most people labour under a ‘false consciousness’, not knowing what their real interests are. There is a certain irony, in the age of ‘nudges’ and clandestine Facebook experiments, that it may now
be more radical to highlight precisely the ways in which ordinary people do know what they’re doing, can make sense of their lives, are clear about their interests. For this, researchers need to learn some humility.

  Among all of this, one of the most important human capacities rediscovered by the sociological psychologist is the ability of the speaker to offer a critical judgement. To describe a critique or a complaint as a form of ‘unhappiness’ or ‘displeasure’ is to bluntly misunderstand what those terms mean, or what it means to experience and exercise them. ‘Critique’ will not show up in the brain, which is not to say that nothing happens at a neurological level when we exercise critical judgement. The attempt to drag all forms of negativity under a single neural or mental definition of unhappiness (often classed as depression) is perhaps the most pernicious of the political consequences of utilitarianism generally.

  If we understand concepts such as ‘critique’ and ‘complaint’ properly, we will recognize that they involve a particular form of negative orientation towards the world, that both the critic herself and her audience are aware of. As Harré puts it, ‘To complain verbally is a part of being discontented, because part of what is ascribed to a person who is described as “discontented” is a tendency to complain’.24 Notions such as ‘critique’ and ‘complaint’ mean nothing without also appreciating that people have the unique power to interpret and narrate their own lives. Where the ‘sentiment analyst’, mining reams of Twitter data, is looking for evidence of psychological emotion which people have emitted by accident, to listen to someone explain the rights and wrongs of his own life is to grant him the human dignity of both understanding and articulation.

  Recognizing that people get angry, critical, resistant and frustrated is to understand that they have reasons to feel or act in these ways. People express themselves in different ways and with different levels of confidence, but there are good reasons to accept the narratives that people offer about their own lives. If someone is invited to express her feeling (rather than instructed to correctly name or quantify it), she makes it into a social phenomenon. Once people are critical or angry, they can also be critical or angry about something which is external to themselves. Whether or not they are considered an articulate or expert person is scarcely relevant. This is already a less lonely, less depressive, less narcissistic state of affairs than one in which people wonder how their minds or brains are behaving, and what they should do to improve them.

  Against psychological control

  Imagine if just a small proportion of the political will and financial capital that pushes the behaviourist and happiness agendas were diverted elsewhere. What if just a chunk of the tens of billions of dollars that are currently spent monitoring, predicting, treating, visualizing, anticipating the smallest vagaries of our minds, feelings and brains were spent instead on designing and implementing alternative forms of political–economic organization? The laughter which this would no doubt be met with in the higher echelons of business, university management and government is a sign of how politically important the techniques of psychological control have now become.

  Would an enlightened mental health practitioner or social epidemiologist find it equally funny? I suspect not. Many psychiatrists and clinical psychologists are entirely aware that the problems they are paid to deal with do not start within the mind or body of a solitary individual, or even necessarily within the family. They start with some broader social, political or economic breakdown. Delimiting psychology and psychiatry within the realms of medicine (or some quasi-economic behavioural science) is a way of neutering the critical potential of these professions. But what would they and we demand, given the chance?

  The demand that misery be de-medicalized, in explicit opposition to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry (and its representatives within the American Psychiatric Association) is one that is gathering momentum.25 Even Robert Spitzer, the chief architect of the DSM-III in 1980, has argued that the extension of medical diagnosis to ordinary everyday troubles has now gone too far. The phenomenon of ‘social prescribing’ is one of the possible borderlands between medicalization and efforts to build alternative social and economic institutions. This could of course go either way: while it could mean seeking different models of social and economic co-operation, for mutual benefit, it can also unleash even greater medicalization of social relations, where both work and leisure are evaluated in terms of their private physiological or neurological utility.

  Businesses which are organized around a principle of dialogue and co-operative control would be another starting point for a critical mind turned outwards upon the world, and not inwards upon itself. One of the advantages of employee-owned businesses is that they are far less reliant on the forms of psychological control that managers of corporations have relied on since the 1920s. There is no need for somewhat ironic HR rhetoric about the ‘staff being the number one asset’ in firms where that is constitutionally recognized. It is only under conditions of ownership and management which render most people expendable that so much ‘soft’ rhetorical effort has to be undertaken to reassure them that they are not.

  Any faintly realistic account of organizations must recognize that there is an optimal amount of dialogue and consultation, between zero at one end (the Frederick Taylor position) and constant deliberation. Arguing for democratic business structures cannot plausibly mean the democratization of every single decision, at every moment in time. But it is not clear that the case for management autarchy still works either, even on its own terms. If the argument for hierarchies is that they are efficient, that they cut costs, that they get things done, a more nuanced reading of much of the research on unhappiness, stress, depression and absence in the workplace would suggest that current organizational structures are failing even in this limited aim.

  If unhappiness is costing the US economy half a trillion a year in lost productivity and lost tax receipts, as Gallup calculates, who is to say that, on the spectrum between ‘Taylor’ and ‘constant deliberation’, the economically optimal amount of co-operation and dialogue in the workplace isn’t considerably closer to the latter of those two poles? Consultation or dialogue which is purely there to make employees feel valued is useless and repeats the same error yet again. The goal is not to make employees feel valued, but to rearrange power relations such that they are valued, a state of affairs that will most likely influence how they feel as a side effect.

  Organizational structures which privilege deliberation are very difficult to get right, but this is largely due to lack of practice, professional advice and experimentation. Writing in 1961, the cultural critic Raymond Williams suggested that the practice of democratic dialogue was something people may need help learning so it could be imported into the management of businesses and local communities. ‘This is the real power of institutions,’ he wrote, ‘that they actively teach particular ways of feeling, and it is at once evident that we have not nearly enough institutions which practically teach democracy’.26 Examples of successful co-operatives confirm the truth in Williams’s insight: over time, members become more skilled in deliberating about the collective and less likely to use democratic structures as a vent for their private grievances and unhappiness. But they need to be supported in this learning curve.27 It is a telling indicator of how our political culture has changed in the past half century, that the contemporary equivalent of Williams’s suggestion is that we teach resilience and mindfulness: silent relationships to the self, rather than vocal relationships to each other.

  Stress can be viewed as a medical problem, or it can be viewed as a political one. Those who have studied it in its broader social context are well aware that it arises in circumstances where individuals have lost control over their working lives, which ought to throw the policy spotlight on precarious work and autarchic management, not on physical bodies or medical therapies. In 2014, John Ashton, the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, argued that Britain should gradually move t
owards a four-day week, to alleviate the combined problems of over-work and under-work, both of which are stress factors.28

  At the frontier of utilitarian measurement and management today is a gradual joining up of economics and medicine, into a single science of well-being, accompanied by a monistic fantasy of a single measure of human optimality. Measurements which target the body are becoming commensurable with those geared towards productivity and profit. This is an important area of critique and of resistance. As a point of principle, we might state that the pursuit of health and the pursuit of money should remain in entirely separate evaluative spheres.29 Extrapolating from this principle yields various paths of action, from the defence of public healthcare, to opposition to workplace well-being surveillance, to rejection of apps and devices which seek to translate fitness behaviours into monetary rewards.

  Markets are not necessarily the problem; indeed they can be part of an escape from pervasive psychological control. Traditional paid work has a transparency around it which makes additional psychological and somatic management unnecessary. In contrast, workfare and internship arrangements which are offered as ways of making people feel more optimistic or raising their self-esteem replace exchange with further psychological control, often coupled to barely concealed exploitation. As Chapter 5 argued, neoliberalism’s respect for ‘free’ markets has, in any case, always been exaggerated. Marketing, which seeks to reduce business uncertainty, has long been far more attractive to corporations than markets. Suspicion of services offered for free, such as most social media platforms, is a symptom of a more general anxiety regarding technologies of psychological control, which is not simply reducible to traditional concerns about privacy.

  Advertising is among the most powerful techniques of mass behavioural manipulation, since it first became ‘scientific’ at the dawn of the twentieth century. On this issue, advertisers have a vested interest in contradicting themselves. The customer is sovereign and cannot be conned; the advertisement is simply a vehicle for the product. On the other hand, spending on advertising continues to rise, and efforts to inhibit the power of brands and marketing agencies to flood the media, public space, sports and public institutions with imagery are vigorously attacked. If advertising is so innocent, then why is there so much of it around?