The Happiness Industry by William Davies review why capitali...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/03/the-happiness-i...

The Happiness Industry by William Davies

review why capitalism has turned us into
narcissists
Our age is characterised by tender self-obsession: what matters is not what you think or
do but how you feel
Terry Eagleton
Wednesday 3 August 2016 07.30BST

here is no doubt that what everybody wants is happiness. The only problem is
what being happy consists in, an issue that moral thinkers have never been able
to agree on and probably never will. Is happiness a purely subjective feeling, or
can it be somehow measured? Can you be happy without knowing it? Can you
only be happy without knowing it? Could someone be thoroughly miserable yet be
convinced they were in ecstasy?
In our own time, the concept of happiness has moved from the private sphere to the
public one. As William Davies reports in this fascinating study, a growing number of
corporations employ chief happiness ocers, while Google has a jolly good fellow to
keep the companys spirits up. Maybe the Bank of England should consider hiring a
jester. Specialist happiness consultants advise those who have been forcibly displaced
from their homes on how to move on emotionally. Two years ago, British Airways
trialled a happiness blanket, which turns from red to blue as the passenger becomes
more relaxed so that your level of contentment is visible to the ight attendants. A new
drug, Wellbutrin, promises to alleviate major depressive symptoms occurring after the
loss of a loved one. It is supposed to work so eectively that the American Psychiatric
Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of
another human being can be considered amental illness. Bereavement is a risk toones
psychological wellbeing.
It is no wonder that the notion of happiness has been taken into public ownership, given
the remarkable spread of spiritual malaise around the globe. Around a third of American
adults and close to half in Britain believe that they are sometimes depressed. Even so,
more than half a century after the discovery of antidepressants, nobody really knows
how they function. Work over which individuals have little control can heighten the risk
of heart disease. (Co-operatives, by contrast, are apparently good for your health.)
So-called austerity has made people sicker and driven some to death. Vastly unequal
nations such as the UK and the US breedmental health problems far more than more
egalitarian ones such as Sweden. Illness, absenteeism and presenteeism (coming into
work purely to be physically present) are estimated to cost theUS economy as much as
$550bn (417bn) a year.

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There is evidence that a competitive ethos can trigger mental illness among the winners
as well as the losers, not least in the case of sport stars. Despite the living disproof
known as Donald Trump, the more you chase after money, status and power, the lower
your sense of worth is likely to be. Giventheir pathologically upbeat culture, Americans
tend to downplay their dejectedness, while the French, with their suspicion that
happiness is unsophisticated, are more likely to under-report it. It is the kind of thing
that cavorts at the end of piers wearing a striped jacket and red plastic nose.
Happiness is excellent for business. A cheerful worker is as much as 12% more
productive. A science of human sentiments what Davies calls the surveillance,
management and government of our feelings is thus one of the fastest growing forms
of manipulative knowledge. So is market research into shopping, which now uses
extensive face-scanning programmes in order to reveal customers emotional states. The
more bright-eyed neuroscientists claim they are close to discovering abuy button in
the brain.
Psychology is a well-attested way of displacing attention from social causes. After the
economic crash of 2008, some psychologists concluded that the problem was not the
banks but the brain. Wall Street had been aicted by the wrong kind of neurochemicals.
There was too much testosterone among traders, and too many bankers were high on
cocaine. A drug was accordingly developed based on brain scans oftraders that
promised better decision-making. What matters in the narcissistic world of late
capitalism is not what you think or do but how you feel. And since how you feel cant be
argued against, it is conveniently insulated from all debate. Men and women can now
stroll around in continuous self-monitoring mode, using apps to track their changes of
mood. The brutal, domineering ego of an older style of capitalism has given way to the
tender self-obsession of the new. One of the few pieces of good news is that mindfulness
can apparently drive you mad.
What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own
critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion feeling, friendship, creativity,
moral responsibility have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising prots.
One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away free, so as to form a
closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay
increases they give to their sta as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus
greater eort from them. It seems that there is nothing that cant be instrumentalised.
Yet the whole point of happiness is that it is anend in itself, rather than a means
topower, wealth and status. For a tradition of ethical thought from Aristotle and
Aquinas to Hegel and Marx, human self-fullment springs from the practice of virtue,
and this happens purely for its own sake. How tobe happy is the chief issue that ethics
addresses, but Why be happy? is not a question it can answer.
The same tradition of thought refuses to divorce happiness from the material
circumstances in which it is set. Men and women can only ourish in certain social
conditions. Happiness is bound up with our activity, rather than being a private mental
state. We are practical agents, not walking states of consciousness. A slave who is
regularly beaten black and blue may claim that he is blissfully content, but this is
probably because he knows of no other situation. In this sense, happiness is not an
entirely subjective aair. You can believe that you are happy but be the victim of
self-deception. Neither, however, is it objective in the sense of being a patch of stu in

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the brain, as some neuroscientists seem to imagine. What they forget, as Davies asserts,
is that mental processes are bound up with the actions of human beings embedded in
social relations, guided by purposes and intentions which need to be interpreted.
Happiness for the market researchers and corporate psychologists is a matter of feeling
good. But it seems that millions of individuals dont feel good at all, and are unlikely to
be persuaded to buck up by technologies of mind control that induce them to work
harder or consume more. You cant really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or
exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when
Aristotle speaks of ascience of well-being, he gives it the name of politics. The point is of
little interest to the neuroscientists, advertising gurus or mindfulness mongers, which is
why so much of their work is spectacularly beside the point.
To order The Happiness Industry for 13.93 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call
0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of
1.99.

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