You can’t please everybody…….
“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.” Barbara Ehrenreich
“The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility; if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly in the inevitability of your success.” Barbara Ehrenreich
“Interiority is no place where we want to build and spend our lives. It is not the place where we will be able to achieve any significant social change, either. We do not want to be controlled by dubious promises of self-transformation or to live obsessed with our thoughts, feelings and expectations of self-improvement”. (Terry Eagleton, cited in Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz)
“We’re not very good at having conversations about struggle, these are very vulnerable conversations, they require that we drop that mask, that we come forward as an authentic and whole person, including the parts of us that we’re not so happy with or that we don’t think are necessarily fit for public consumption, but ironically, that kind of vulnerable self-expression is often what helps people really feel included by others.”Rick and Forrest Hanson
Today’s post is also a mix of different things and it reflects some of what I’ve been reading, doing and engaging with. There are new pictures I’ve made with a common thematic thread running through them, an exercise from last week’s mediation-talk [25/05/2023] by Rick Hanson, a link to a recent episode from Dr Rick and Forrest’s weekly podcast, and finally, a presentation of the book, Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives by Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz.
ARTWORK
A. To begin with, in their episode at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu1y3aHgmTs, Dr. Rick Hanson and his son Forrest explore the so called “imposter syndrome”, the common experience of self-doubt and anxiety about our capabilities and worth, perfectionism and cultural forces that invalidate the worth of people systemically, and feeling like a fraud, which they say “disproportionately affects high achieving people”, and women in particular. They discuss what Rick Hanson calls “construct or syndrome creep”, which is basically the tendency to pathologize and medicalize common, normal human experiences. “Imposter syndrome” is an example of this. Forrest describes the stages of this cycle from anxiety over beginning something to the stage of relief once the task or goal has been completed or accomplished. He notes it’s “like receiving a stay of execution”. They refer to at least one reason why this occurs like the worldwide media machine that is like a beast insatiable for content and new shiny objects.
They explore why accomplished or capable people can also experience this and ways to break free from self-doubt and comparison, to believe in oneself and have healthy self-confidence, the importance of finding support from allies, and recognizing the locus of our motivation. Rick Hanson says: “…. if our fundamental root of motivation is about pleasing others, or propitiating them, appeasing them, trying to win the approval war every day, oh, oh, oh, I just feel sad saying it, my own personal sadness, and mainly sadness for tons of other people. And at the end of the day, what’s the line from the song? “Ya can’t please everybody, so ya got to please yourself.”
B.The exercise I mentioned above, in a nutshell, involves bringing to mind our younger selves, beginning from birth, moving on to when we were ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and in my case, fifty and the recent sixty, in order to allow ourselves to see and feel what it was / is like, and to then [in our imagination] step in as our older self to embrace, soothe, accept, nurture and praise that self. A kind of summary of the ambience, major events, goals and priorities, efforts and achievements, challenges and losses, common threads, of each decade came to the foreground of my awareness along with accompanying emotions. My experience of the activity – which was not exactly new for me – was emotionally moving and integrative. I was also somewhat surprised by the amount of living that has actually occurred. Finally, I can assume that my meditation and mindfulness practice, with its earlier challenges and later gains over the last decade, shaped the nature or the outcome of the practice. There was probably more presence and depth than if I had tried to engage with the process for the first time or prior to my meditation journey.
C. In relation to the book I’m presenting today, Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives, to some extent it is related to a book I wrote about a while ago by Dana Becker. [The book has been translated into Greek: ΕΥΤΥΧΙΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ: ΠΩΣ Η ΒΙΟΜΗΧΑΝΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΕΥΤΥΧΙΑΣ ΚΥΒΕΡΝΑ ΤΗ ΖΩΗ ΜΑΣ] Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz write that the book aims to contribute to the lively debate on happiness from a critical sociological perspective, and that the term ‘happycracy’ – the title of the original edition was coined to emphasize the particular interest of the book in showing the new coercive strategies, political decisions, management styles, and consumption patterns that, together with a new notion of citizenship, have emerged in the age of happiness. The book is worth a read because the arguments and facts presented bring the underlying politics and dynamics of the global happiness and wellness political trends and industries to the foreground, which helps make us more discerning as consumers of information, books, products, courses and services, and can give us back some of our agency as citizens. The book also manages to cover a lot of ground, thus, giving us a glimpse of a much bigger picture, which is good to at least bear in mind even as we purchase or embark on things.
Before I go on, I’d also like to clarify that I believe that within whatever circumstances and larger socio-political contexts we may be embedded in, seeking ways to grow strengths and develop psychological maturation, helping others and ourselves to be more peaceful, content and joyful are all worthy and good. Seeking therapeutic support for trauma and ways to overcome adversity is also essential. It is also important to be informed of what good therapy is. We need to know that often “….. psychologists have been unwilling to admit their complicity with specific sociopolitical arrangements, for to do so would undermine a credibility forged on value neutrality presumed to be ensured by scientific objectivity and moral indifference to its subject matter. Consequently, as the historical record attests, in the main, psychologists have served primarily as ‘architects of adjustment’ in preserving the status quo and not as agents of change.” (Jeff Sugarman) Psychotherapeutic interventions and tools should be safe and should also aim at increasing our knowledge of our micro and macro reality. Finally, interiority is not a place we want to build and spend our lives because it is not sufficient in terms of achieving any significant personal or social change.
The authors of the book state at the beginning that the book is not against happiness, but against the reductionist view that the science of happiness preaches. They write that helping people feel better is a commendable intention. They write; “We honestly believe that the science of happiness helps some individuals, that some of its advice and methods do make people feel better ….. [but] in its current form and usages, happiness is a powerful tool for organizations and institutions to build more obedient workers, soldiers and citizens. The figure of obedience in our times takes the form of a work on and maximization of the self. In the 18th and 19th centuries the claim to individual happiness had a transgressive flavour. But through an ironic detour of history, happiness is now smoothly woven into the fabric of contemporary power.”
Specifically, their reservations are based on four critical concerns: epistemological, sociological, phenomenological and moral.
They are firstly concerned with the legitimacy of the science of happiness as science, and of its concept of happiness as scientific and objective. This is not a new criticism. They suggest that the science of happiness relies on several unfounded assumptions, theoretical inconsistencies, methodological shortfalls, unproven results, and ethnocentric and exaggerated generalizations.
The second concern is sociological. They examine which social agents find this notion of happiness useful, what and whose interests and ideological assumptions it serves, and what the economic and political consequences of its broad social implementation are. They note that the scientific approach to happiness and the happiness industry that emerges and expands around it contribute significantly to legitimizing the assumption that wealth and poverty, success and failure, health and illness are of our own making, which lends legitimacy to the idea that there are no structural problems but only psychological shortages. They refer to the economists, who, from the 1950s onwards, convinced the world that the individual search for happiness was the only realistic substitute for the search for the collective good; however, the pursuit of happiness as devised by happiness scientists epitomizes the triumph of the personal society (therapeutic, individualist, atomized) over the collectivist one.
Their third concern, which might be called phenomenological, relates to the fact that too often happiness science breeds many unacknowledged, undesirable outcomes because the science of happiness builds its proposal of well-being and personal fulfillment upon the very same therapeutic narratives of deficiency, in-authenticity and un-self-realization for which it promises solutions. It also produces a new variety of ‘happiness seekers’ continuously preoccupied with correcting their psychological flaws and personal betterment, which makes happiness a perfect commodity for a market that thrives on normalizing our obsession with mental and physical health, but can turn against the very same people who pin their hopes on happiness products, services and therapies.
In chapter 4 they argue that happiness has become a series of ‘emodities’ like services and products that promise emotional transformation. They write that these emodities follow a circuitous route. For instance, they may start as theories in university departments, but quickly follow different markets, such as corporations, research funds or consumer lifestyles. Emotional self-management, authenticity and flourishing are not only ways of making the self constantly produce itself, but ways for various institutions to make emotional commodities (or emodities) circulate in the social body. Cabanas and Illouz write: that these “happiness ‘emodities’ successfully recast the pursuit of happiness into a lifestyle, a habit of mind and soul, and ultimately, a model of selfhood that turns citizens of neoliberal societies into psytizens.
Finally, the fourth concern is moral and involves the relationship between happiness and suffering. They write: “In identifying happiness and positivity with productivity, functionality, goodness and even normality – and unhappiness with the exact opposite – the science of happiness places us at the major crossroads of a choice between suffering and well-being. This assumes one always has a choice – positivity and negativity are two diametrically opposed poles – as well as the possibility of ridding our lives of suffering once and for all. To be sure, tragedies are unavoidable, but happiness science insists on suffering and happiness as a matter of personal choice.” For instance, in chapter 5 they first analyse the strong divide that happiness scientists posit between what they consider positive and negative emotions, which they draw upon when revisiting the notion of the ‘average person’. They challenge this division by highlighting some of its pitfalls from a sociological perspective. They also argue that the scientific discourse of happiness is progressively establishing itself as the yardstick to measure what is considered healthy, adaptive and even normal.
They note that in recent years, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, journalists and historians have published an abundance of works dealing with happiness from a critical perspective. Their own book has been inspired by the works of Barbara Ehrenreich and Barbara Held on the tyranny of positive thinking, Sam Binkley and William Davies’ analyses of the relationships between happiness and the market, Carl Cederström and André Spicer’s exploration of wellness as ideology, and many others.
They examine the many substantial critiques that have been leveled against the field, and some critics have argued against the field’s foundational assumptions like its de-contextualized and ethnocentric claims; theoretical oversimplifications and contradictions; methodological shortcomings and serious replicability problems; over- generalizations; intellectual deficits and scientific underachievement; therapeutic efficacy; the ideological agenda of many of those who fund, promote and implement happiness in organizations, health institutions, the entertainment business, public policy, the army, and schools.
Cabanas and Illouz remind us that happiness should not be seen as an innocuous, well-meant abstraction for wellness and satisfaction and devoid of cultural, moral and anthropological biases and assumptions. They pose the question: “…..why happiness and not any other value – e.g., justice, prudence, solidarity or loyalty – has come to play such a prominent role in advanced capitalist societies…..” They argue it has proven a very useful concept for rekindling, legitimizing and re-institutionalizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through science’s neutral and authoritative discourse because neutral discourses appealing to the natural properties of human beings are always more persuasive and easy to institutionalize.
Throughout the book they provide extracts from Martin Seligman’s [the father of positive psychology] papers and books, as well as, his connections with ultra-conservative institutions, which endowed him with large amounts of funding. They write that through cherry-picking from evolutionary, psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical claims and concepts, the rubric of positive psychology was rather eclectic and poorly delineated. They trace the funding history of the field and how the field expanded to unprecedented levels in a very short time, creating a broad and global institutional network. Even companies like Coca-Cola invested in positive psychology with the objective of finding out cheaper and more efficient methods to increase productivity, reduce stress and anxiety at work, and promote workers’ engagement in corporate culture.
They track the history of positive psychology. They write that as it grew, it strengthened its alliances with its professional, non-academic counterparts and the happiness economists. After the global economic meltdown in 2008, more and more countries taking advice from psychologists and the happiness economists thought that they could well use happiness indicators to check whether, despite the continuing decline of objective indexes of quality of life and equality, people were still nonetheless feeling well, because they asserted that “If people claimed to be happy, then there was nothing much to worry about – after all, wasn’t happiness the real and ultimate objective of politics, a priority over justice or equality?” The idea was to introduce the concept of Gross Happiness Product (GHP) as an indicator that went beyond Gross National Product (GNP) to measure political efficiency and national progress.
Challenging the traditional economic approach, where once costs and benefits were measured in money units, it was suggested that benefits should now be measured in units of happiness instead. Cabanas and Illouz claim that once happiness was turned into a value-free and objective number able to cross cultural borders and operate within mass-scale cost– benefit calculations, it was postulated as one of the chief economic, political and moral compasses in neoliberal societies. However, they write many happiness measures “lack the consistency needed for them to be used as the basis for international comparisons.”
Concerns have been expressed over the excessive individual orientation of these measures, and also, the fact that it is not clear that happiness measurements are comparable between individuals. For instance, how can we know that someone’s score of X out of 10 in a happiness questionnaire is equivalent to someone else’s score of X out 10 or whether a score of X from someone in one country is higher or lower than someone else’s score in other places. Also, quantitative self-assessments neglect important social issues in the way people assess their lives, including particular and specific circumstances, and generally limit the range of responses that people can provide when assessing their own happiness. This is important because close format responses may favour researchers’ biases and they may disregard important information to make political decisions. Another implication of happiness measurement is that it allows political and economic issues to be settled in a seemingly non-ideological and purely technocratic manner.
In addition to methodological problems the book raises concerns on whether happiness-based policies might often function as strategies to side-line and deflect attention from complex socio-economic indicators of welfare and the good life, such as income, material inequalities, social segregation, gender inequity, democratic health, corruption and transparency, objective vs perceived opportunities, social aids or unemployment rates. They may also facilitate the displacement of the burden of market uncertainty, scarce employment, and increased work competition onto workers / employees themselves. Concern can also be expressed when countries characterized by widespread poverty, constant human rights violations, high rates of malnutrition, infant mortality and suicide, have resolved to adopt happiness measures to assess the impact of their national policies. Interesting examples of different countries that have joined the initiative are provided in the book.
They write about ‘the second individualistic revolution’, a cultural process of individualization and psychologization which deeply transformed the political and social orders of accountability within advanced capitalist societies. This revolution allowed the structural deficits, contradictions and paradoxes of these societies to be rendered in terms of psychological features and individual responsibilities. They write: “Aspects such as work became progressively understood as a matter of personal projects, creativity and entrepreneurship; education a matter of individual competences and talents; health a matter of habits and lifestyle; love a matter of interpersonal likeness and compatibility; identity a matter of choice and personality; social progress a matter of individual growth and thriving; and so on. The consequence was a widespread collapse of the social in favour of the psychological, with Politics being gradually replaced by therapeutic politics, and with the discourse of happiness progressively replacing the discourse of individualism in the definition of the neoliberal model of citizenship”.
They also alert us to issues pertinent to democracy. They refer to William Davies who has suggested that a problem for technocratic approaches is democracy itself; perhaps because the reach of democracy has extended beyond manageable boundaries, and concepts such as happiness, which are amenable to quantification, able to homogenize judgments and beliefs, have become a useful strategy for offering crumbs of democracy, but without having to deal with the political challenges that real democratic decisions would involve.
The book also explores other topics like mass-scale data mining in terms not of what it can say about happiness, but how this data can be used to influence the way we understand happiness and the relationship with ourselves and the world through it, without us being aware of the process. They write that by digging into what we do and like, when and how often, institutions and corporations possess information that in turn allows them to affect what we consume: the news we read, the advertisements we watch, the music we might like to listen to, the advice on health and lifestyle that we should see. They get to influence the social collective by shaping what should or should not be valued as contributing to our happiness, and so on.
I will end this article here even though the book touches upon many more important issues that are at least worth considering.