The Promise of Misery | Becca Rothfeld

Becca Rothfeld is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard.

22-28 minutes

We are not shocked by naked women. Skinny women. Women forced to field
abuses in the bedroom or advances in the workplace, women who have
undergone operations to whittle their waists into fine points. But an unhappy
woman appalls us, especially if she does not collude in regarding herself as
deficient. All happy women are alike, but each unhappy woman jolts us in her
own defiant way. Each woman sulking in the back of the photograph, ignoring
injunctions to smile. Each woman insisting that she isn’t angry, or at least, she
wasn’t angry before she was asked if she was angry, which made her angry, and
with reason.

But an unhappy woman, consensus has it, is unreasonable or unwell. Her

unhappiness is an illness she’s obliged to remedy, either by sequestering herself
in therapy sessions or by diligently annotating self-help manuals in her domestic
prison—in any case, in private, where her discomfort cannot discomfit. And so in
the poem “How to Be Perfect,” we find ourselves implicitly situated inside, in the
house, where the writer Ron Padgett instructs,

Don’t stay angry about anything for more than a week,

but don’t
forget what made you angry. Hold your anger at arm’s length
and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball collection.

He writes,

As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal

ones.
Look at that bird over there.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Calm down! Perfection is within your reach if you will only consent to be happy—
if you will only agree to shelve your discontent. “Don’t be afraid,” Padgett advises,
“of anything beyond your control. Don’t be afraid, for instance, that the building
will collapse as you sleep, or that someone you love will suddenly drop dead.”
Don’t fret about mortality or meaninglessness. Don’t lament the fragility of your
body, which breathes with frightening contingency as you scale the slow slope of
4 a.m. Instead, calm down—and don’t forget to scrub those after-dinner dishes.

It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with calm, or with washing the
dishes, or with the meditation techniques and modes of positive self-address that
so many people (most of them male) have recommended (mostly without
prompting of any kind). And it’s not that I begrudge anyone any curative measure
that works, whether or not it’s a nostrum. It’s just that the cultists of therapy and
self-help impose uneven obligations, demanding the most conspicuous
happiness from people with the greatest reason to be unhappy and the fewest
resources for becoming happier. The feel-good mantras and fuzzy exhortations
to optimism that are rapidly becoming ubiquitous shift the burden of reform away
from society, away from a whole culture of men smirking and asking if you’re
angry, away from the civility chorus smugly intoning Calm Down! in the face of
every human pang, and onto those too uncalm to alchemize their anger into cool
glass balls.

Men Against Misery

Self-help—the enemy of the uncalm—is, unsurprisingly, an American

phenomenon. It evinces a sensibility well suited to a country where the self has
always been the most relevant unit. One of its earliest practitioners was none
other than Benjamin Franklin, whose 1758 get-rich-quick manual, The Way to
Wealth, frames labor as a cure for poverty and acumen as a cure for destitution.
“Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always
bright,” he writes. “When you have got the philosopher’s stone, sure you will no
longer complain of bad times, or the difficulty of paying taxes.” Franklin’s advice
was as false as it was appealing—who wouldn’t prefer to pay taxes in the
inexhaustible currency of self-improvement?—and it reinforced a myth that blue-
collar Americans would find difficult to relinquish or escape.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Protestant working classes had developed
a robust appetite for books with names like Pushing to the Front and The Way to
Win, which counseled that a strong character was the key to a healthy fortune.
These Gilded Age exercises in self-aggrandizement blazed a trail for the treatises
on winning that began to emerge in the late sixties and early seventies, when
self-help as we know it began to flourish in earnest. Born to Win (1971), Winners
and Losers (1973), Winning through Intimidation (1974), and The Winner’s
Notebook(1967) promised to distinguish the wealthy wheat from the indigent
chaff—and thereby set the stage for Trump’s oeuvre, in which winners reign
supreme. In Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007), which rose
briefly to the top of Amazon’s personal finance bestsellers in 2015 but which
nonetheless proclaims itself the preserve of a vanishingly small elite, Trump’s
ghostwriter reflects,

to be successful you have to separate yourself from 98 percent of the rest of the
world. Sure, you can get into that special 2 percent at the top, and it is not just by
being smart, working hard, and investing wisely. There is a formula, a recipe for
success that the top 2 percent live by and you too can follow.

If the remaining 98 percent of people follow the formula, will they somehow come
to comprise only 2 percent of the population? What are such patent mathematical
impossibilities doing in a guide to business savvy, anyway?
Like many books in the self-help tradition, Think Big combines the promise of
universal efficacy with a flatteringly individual appeal. It claims both that anyone—
ergo, you, so don’t be daunted!—can become a winner, but that some people—
ergo, you, so savor your singularity!—are special in ways that others aren’t. This
confusion about self and other, about who is to be helped and who is to do the
helping, is not unique to Trump’s garbled efforts. As the comedian George Carlin
so aptly put it, “if you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.” The
central premise of Think Big is that you, or at least the you yet to be elevated by
Trump’s sage financial instruction, are inadequate. Only with the aid of the
product in question are you able to help yourself.

Self-help—the enemy of the uncalm—is, unsurprisingly, an American

phenomenon.

The closest self-help came to acknowledging its covertly altruistic nature was in
the early sixties, when it was appropriated by New Age gurus who organized
“encounter groups” for people with common insecurities. At this early stage in the
genre’s development, soon-to-be- classic feminist works like The Feminine
Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves so thoroughly mystified everyone that they
were routinely regarded as works of self-help. The help on offer—call it other-
help—linked solitary selves, promoting solidarity, a virtue anathema to
publishing’s marketing departments today.

But by the late seventies and early eighties, self-help had reverted to its ruthlessly
individualistic origins—and expanded to target a new market of theretofore
underserved selves. The sententious tracts of the Gilded Age had always been
aimed at breadwinners and would-be financiers, which is to say, at men. What’s
more, their authors had often directly equated masculinity with success. As Judy
Hilkey writes in Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded
Age America, “the idea of manliness, ‘manhood’ or ‘true manhood,’ represented
the solution to the problem of achieving victory in a dangerous new industrial age.
‘Manhood,’ in a word, summarized the individual virtues, character, and willpower
that made for success.”

The assertiveness literature that emerged as the seventies gave way to the
money-manic eighties addressed itself to women desperately struggling to fit into
hostile workplaces.

The assertiveness literature that emerged as the seventies gave way to the
money-manic eighties addressed itself to women desperately struggling to fit into
hostile workplaces—but it didn’t break with the pernicious tradition of conflating
manliness and accomplishment. Instead, it encouraged women to act more like
men. Books like Jean Baer’s classic How to Be an Assertive (Not Aggressive)
Woman in Life, in Love, and on the Job (1976) argued that “women don’t think of
themselves as equal to men so they don’t act equal; consequently men,
employers, relatives, society do not treat them as equals.” In other words, it’s not
men’s fault for undermining women: it’s women’s fault for taking a cue from men
and undermining themselves. If women only asked for equality, as men do, they’d
get it. After dinner, wash the dishes. Winners and Losers counsels, “if men are
better off in any area of divorce, it’s because they choose to be better off; if
women are worse off, it’s because they’ve chosen to be worse off.” Calm down!

While popular accounts of selfhood have shifted, the staunchly American premise
that the self can transcend its circumstances persists. In The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People, one of the best-selling self-help books in history, Stephen
Covey emphasizes that success is a choice. He recounts that a woman who
worked as a caretaker to a cranky, tyrannical man initially expressed skepticism
at one of his talks. “[F]or you to have the gall to stand up there and suggest that
nothing can hurt me, that no one can hurt me without my consent, and that I have
chosen my own emotional life of being miserable—well, there was just no way I
could buy into that,” she objected. Calm down, he might have been thinking. But
then she had her highly effective epiphany:

I kept thinking about it. I really went inside myself and began to ask, “Do I have
the power to choose my response?” When I finally realized that I do have that
power, when I swallowed that bitter pill and realized that I had chosen to be
miserable, I also realized that I could choose not to be miserable. At that moment
I stood up. I felt as though I was being let out of San Quentin. I wanted to yell to
the whole world, “I am free! I am let out of prison! No longer am I going to be
controlled by the treatment of some person.”

But wasn’t she? Wasn’t she now controlled by the treatment of a man who dared
to tell someone who cared for other people for a living that she should help
herself—that the real issue was not the man abusing her but rather her negative
attitude? And wasn’t she slated to remain financially dependent on someone who
would no doubt continue to degrade her? And wasn’t she additionally degraded,
now that she’d been talked into degrading herself whenever she allowed her
degradation to make her just a little bit unhappy?

Perhaps the purpose of this whole song and dance is to convince the
marginalized that they are to blame for their own marginalization—to prevent ill-
treated female caretakers (and of course the bulk of caretakers are female and
many of them are ill-treated) from comparing notes. Or perhaps self-help is
supposed to insulate men from the unseemly display of female frustration. “It is
often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful,” writes
philosopher Marilyn Frye. “Anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to
being perceived as mean, bitter, angry, or dangerous.” Whether it is designed to
sabotage sad women or console uncomfortable men, the happiness industry has
gone a long way toward stigmatizing public admissions of suffering. The self isn’t
even the one that self-help is helping: it merits its name only insofar as it
perpetuates the illusion that social problems are located at the level of the
individual—only insofar as it isolates the marginalized, sealing them off from the
social body.

The Isolation Chamber

Therapy isn’t always continuous with self-help—some of it, anyway, is backed by

science, though for a time I saw a psychoanalyst who made me lie on a fainting
sofa outfitted with a tiny rug for my feet—but all too often, it can play a similarly
splintering role. Therapy and self-help may have different content and drastically
different credentials, but they’re both the provinces of exiles, the places where
we quarantine people whose complaints we’re eager to debunk and reluctant to
resolve.

Perhaps sensing the need to secure their longevity, both self-help and therapy
have taken measures to ensure that displays of unhappiness remain safely
segregated from life. To fail to fix yourself by yourself is precisely to fail by the
lights of Stephen Covey and other devotees of radical responsibility.
“Transactional Analysis,” an early self-help fad popularized by Thomas Harris,
author of the hit monograph I’m OK—You’re OK, has it that “the patient . . . is
responsible for what happens in the future no matter what has happened in the
past”: no matter how insurmountable the material or cultural obstacles he’s faced,
no matter how violently or viciously he’s been victimized. If divorce laws are unfair
to women, if your employer paws at you beneath your desk, well, it’s all your fault.
(A consistent theory would have it that the caretaker’s vitriolic employer was
likewise wholly responsible for his behavior—so I guess Covey and Harris believe
that harassment is entirely the harasser’s fault, but, somehow, entirely the victim’s
fault, too.) To seek help from others, even in the modest form of encouragement
or support, is to demonstrate the kind of reliance that smacks of weakness and
excuse-making, of undue abdication. The only alternative that Thomas and
Covey sanction is to shut up and “choose success.”

If therapy itself does not take matters any further, we wrench it one step forward
when we afford it such an elaborately confessional quality. “I’m not her therapist,”
an acquaintance will snap, implying that anguish has no place in polite
conversation. The suggestion is that pain belongs in therapy, fortified by the
anodyne paintings and muted by the padded walls. The therapist’s office is as
ritualistically private as the priest’s stall, but the penance it prescribes is not
prayer but silence. It’s inconspicuous, camouflaged in a respectable building lined
with other doctors’ offices. If you ever encountered anyone you knew in the foyer
or the hallway, you could claim you were on your way to the dentist or the
cardiologist. You almost wish you were. It would be less embarrassing to need
bypass surgery or a thousand root canals.

That unhappiness is never public is the mechanism of its pathologization, for

isolation is discrediting. I have a desperate fear of flying, and when the ground
drops out from beneath the plane, I watch the passengers around me, who are
fumbling with knotted headphones or already falling asleep. No one else looks
nervous, so I conclude that my panic must be ill-founded. But this principle cuts
both ways. You look around and no one else is flailing, crying in public, so you
conclude that you’re crazy. If your reaction were rational, wouldn’t everyone else
give some indication of feeling the same way?

The secret is: they do. In fact there are thousands of them not actually having
bypass surgery or root canals but instead sitting on fainting couches behind
closed doors with their feet perched on tiny carpets, all of them stifling the
sobbing, all of them feeling the same way. They do! And perhaps they should.
Perhaps their anger and anxiousness aren’t character flaws or symptoms of some
illness but rather appropriate, rational, sane responses to a warped and wretched
world. As Audre Lorde writes in The Cancer Journals,

Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism

used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might
prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. . . . The acceptance of illusion
and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine
the realities of our lives. Let us seek “joy” rather than real food and clean air and
a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the
results of profit-madness.

. . . In this disastrous time, when little girls are still being stitched shut between
their legs, when victims of cancer are urged to court more cancer in order to be
attractive to men, when twelve-year-old Black boys are shot down in the street at
random by uniformed men who are cleared of any wrongdoing, when ancient and
honorable citizens scavenge for food in garbage pails, and the growing answer
to all this is media hype or surgical lobotomy; when daily gruesome murders of
women from coast to coast no longer warrant mention in the New York Times,
when grants to teach retarded children are cut in favor of more billion dollar
airplanes, when nine hundred people commit mass suicide rather than face life
in America, and we are told it is the job of the poor to stem inflation; what
depraved monster could possibly be always happy?

Lorde was suffering from breast cancer, and as she rightly notes, she had many
causes for complaint: she was a victim of institutionalized racism; a victim of her
own body, which was bad enough; a victim of the misguided belief, an unfortunate
Judeo-Christian holdover, that sickness is evidence of wrongdoing or sin; and a
victim, no doubt, of the medical establishment’s pernicious tendency to dismiss
expressions of female pain as exaggerations. (Men who arrive at the ER with
stomach pain wait an average of forty-nine minutes to receive painkillers, while
women wait an average of sixty-five.) It isn’t just that therapy and self-help
separate women from other women: they also keep all marginalized groups, all
of whom are stereotyped as different kinds of crazy (“angry” black women,
“neurotic” Jews), from coming together and commiserating.

I’m not okay—you’re not okay. Maybe someday we won’t be okay together.

Misery Loves Solidarity

Here’s another way of understanding why the “self” belongs in self-help. Self-help
concerns the self because it excludes others—because it actively discourages
acts of intervention or compassion. Self-help is for selves because it is selfish on
the giving end (that is, the not-giving end) and lonely on the receiving end (that
is, the not-receiving end). It isn’t hard to see that the shame that attends female
unhappiness compounds the initial unhappiness, which might have been
bearable. It was bad to fear planes tilting up the steep sky, bad to ascend the
uphill days, but it was worse when men told me to jettison my anxiety. Then I was
anxious about being anxious in addition to just being anxious. Then my
unhappiness wasn’t just unpleasant but also unspeakable, and I had to choke on
it whenever I tried to gulp it back.
I don’t object to happiness, whatever happiness even amounts to, as if any of us
had any idea, but I cannot stomach its fetishization: the way it’s foisted on “crazy”
women and “angry” people of color, the way it’s used to discredit anything uttered
in a spirit of dissatisfaction. Happiness is a law that’s rigidly enforced, and any
deviation from absolute unmitigated joy is supposed to remain a disgraceful
secret.

If divorce laws are unfair

to women, if your employer paws at you beneath your desk, well, it’s all your fault.

Just think of the classic literature of womanhood: Mrs. Rochester festered in the
attic, and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” had no one but the furniture to
confirm her suspicions. Her sickroom was so airless that she had to animate its
trappings, just for company. The confinement of women, it emerges, is usually
solitary. If we let them out of the attic or off of the psychoanalyst’s sofa, we’d risk
a collective reckoning. People might start to notice that they had difficulties in
common. And if they started to identify the struggles they shared—if they started
to say not just “me” but “me too”—they might also start to realize that the problems
they faced weren’t personal.

Lydia Davis, a shrewd chronicler of female unhappiness, frees misery from its
strictures. In “Negative Emotions,” a story so short and so apt that it’s worth
quoting in its near entirety, she indulges a fantasy of public, communal revenge.
One day, “A well-meaning teacher” sends a quote from a Buddhist monk to his
colleagues at the school:

Emotion, said the monk, is like a storm: it stays for a while and then it goes. Upon
perceiving the emotion (like a coming storm), one should put oneself in a stable
position. One should sit or lie down. One should focus on one’s abdomen. One
should focus, specifically, on the area just below one’s navel, and practice mindful
breathing. If one can identify the emotion as an emotion, it may then be easier to
handle.

The other teachers are offended. They “thought he was accusing them of having
negative emotions and needing advice about how to handle them. Some of them
were, in fact, angry,” and justifiably so. In the end, they decide to follow the
opposite of the Buddhist monk’s advice:

The teachers did not choose to regard their anger as a coming storm. They did
not focus on their abdomens. They did not focus on the area just below their
navels. Instead, they wrote back immediately, declaring that because they did not
understand why he had sent it, his message had filled them with negative
emotions. They told him that it would take a lot of practice for them to get over
the negative emotions caused by his message. But, they went on, they did not
intend to do this practice. Far from being troubled by their negative emotions, they
said, they in fact liked having negative emotions, particularly about him and his
message.

In the introduction to her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, the philosopher
Sara Ahmed writes that “happiness is used to redescribe social norms as social
goods.” Feminism has therefore “struggled against rather than for happiness.” In
other words, the spectacle of female anguish can be revelatory. I find it rapturous,
because I am an unhappy woman: a woman whose misery has often been
characterized, by irritated interlocutors, as willful. I have been what is sometimes
called “depressed.” What this means is that I have shed tears in public when it
was not appropriate to do so. Have had difficulty heaving from the bed to the
bathroom or facing a refrigerator whose sparse contents I knew were rotting. And
some days the bare act of existing without any embellishment or pretense of
achievement winced like a freshly skinned knee.

You know what’s actually therapeutic? Screaming where people can hear you.
Weeping on the train.

In 1937 the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran described “the voluptuousness of

suffering,” a phenomenon so universally recognizable and ubiquitously salient
that the novelist Machado de Assis, writing in Brazil fifty years earlier, eulogized
“the voluptuousness of misery.” (“Memorize this phrase,” he urges, “if you do not
succeed in understanding it, you may conclude that you have missed one of the
most subtle emotions of which man is capable.”) Maybe it is willful. Maybe there
is something ever so slightly ecstatic about the perversity of it all.

You know what’s actually therapeutic—more therapeutic than staring at the

ceiling desperately inventing a string of “free” associations, more therapeutic than
reading a book with a vested interest in establishing your insufficiency so that you
will have to purchase its string of accoutrements and sequels? Screaming where
people can hear you. Weeping on the train. Indulging in the intimacy of jointly
cultivated resentment. Seeing your suspicions that you aren’t a self-pitying
maniac confirmed.

So shatter the dishes. Dismantle the glass ball museum. Never meditate. Say no
as often as possible. Pour weed killer on the flowers. And above all, do not calm
down. Let the loathing simmer until you can boil the apostles of positivity alive,
like so many wriggling lobsters. And while you are seasoning your fury, while they
are engaging in positive self-talk to no obvious avail, while you are lowering the
knife toward their necks, ask them if they are happy. Let the highly effective
wonder why it’s suddenly so difficult for them to choose success.

America and Its Discontents | Gary Greenberg

Aaron Timms

19-24 minutes

It will be left to future historians, if there are any, to explain to their contemporaries
why a profession came into existence in the twentieth century whose well paid
practitioners sat in an office while people otherwise unknown to them talked about
their unhappiness, one after the other, an hour at a time. I’ve been a therapist for
thirty-five years, and I still don’t really understand it. I don’t speak in Delphic
tongues or offer holy absolution or perform shamanic hocus pocus; I really don’t
do much of anything but sit there, listen, and try to tell the truth. Not that it’s easy;
it’s taxing to spend your days immersed in other people’s misery, and whatever
is wrong with me that prompted me to do this with my life, and left me able to
withstand it, is not improved by the exercise. Still, I’m grateful to the marketplace
for providing me with such an improbable way to make a living.

I suppose those historians will also note the inexhaustible genius of a political
economy that created this marketplace, and ensured a robust supply of the
pathologies for which renting a rapt audience by the hour was the cure. Still more
impressive, in retrospect, will be the imposing professional infrastructure—
offices, licenses, the monetizable unit of time—for legitimizing the listening caste.

I envy these future investigators the opportunity to make of psychotherapy a

specimen in the autopsy of consumer capitalism, or even a leading indicator of
its collapse: if paid listeners are what we came to, they will probably say, then the
rot must have been deep. In the meantime, stuck as we are in our own time, it is
enough to note the profession’s presence, and its weirdness, and to say that there
are moments when the seams that stitch it into daily life are suddenly visible. At
such intervals, honest therapists realize that they are not only incapable of doing
much about the suffering they are witnessing; they are part of the problem.

Trumpschmerz

I refer you to November 9, 2016, the day after the most recent day that will live in
infamy. I’ve been at this job through many public catastrophes, and I’ve been
struck, for better and worse, by the therapeutic dyad’s ability to shut the door on
the world even when it is actively burning, to note (or not) that the towers
collapsed or a school got shot up, and then return to our private concerns. So
when on that Wednesday, no matter how much they (and I) might have wanted
to get back to their intimate dramas, if only as a refuge, we found ourselves
unable to speak of anything else but the ascension of Trump. It seemed
remarkable, an inversion of business as usual. The political had become personal
in the most literal fashion.

Each afflicted person was afflicted in his or her own way, but underneath all their
reactions ran a common current, one that transcended the categories into which
my colleagues and I generally sort our clients. The stoics and the obsessives, the
anxious and the depressed, the dissolute and the uptight: they all seemed
stunned and downcast and, since many of them had awakened in the wee hours
to check the news, exhausted. It was as if overnight each person had experienced
an unexpected death in the family and had come to me in the early stages of
mourning.

If psychotherapy, as Sigmund Freud supposedly said, is a cure through love, and

if love, as Milan Kundera definitely said, is constant interrogation, I was not curing
anyone that day. I was not interrogating their sadness. At the time, it seemed
beyond question, self-evident, which is what happens when a therapist is feeling
the same thing as a client—a less than reliable way to judge what is beyond
question, I admit. It wasn’t until the intensity subsided over the next weeks and
its muted version took up residency in the post-election world, that the oddness
of the reaction struck me. Why were we all so sad?

November 9, 2016: It was as if overnight each person had experienced an

unexpected death in the family and had come to me in the early stages of
mourning.

I can’t really ask anymore—the whole premise of therapy, upheld sometimes

more than others, is that it’s about you and not me—so unless someone
volunteers the question, I’m left to guess. But if that happens, I’m ready with an
answer: there’s nothing to make you feel helpless like watching 63 million of your
neighbors converge upon something so foolish and dangerous as to elect a carny
barker, and not a very good one at that, to the presidency. The election ends,
and, good democrats that we are, we must accept its outcome just as surely as
we must accept a death. There are no do-overs. Flail about all you like—when
the cause is lost, it’s lost. You watch a loved one decline and expire, your dog
gets hit by a car, your lover leaves you for the last time, and there’s nothing you
can do about it. Helplessness is the gateway to grief, and to grieve—at a wake,
during shivah, in a chance encounter at the store—is to talk, to bear witness to
the loss until you’ve absorbed it.

But what exactly had been lost? After all, the day after the election the country
remained intact, the economy hummed along, there weren’t troops in the street
or militias in the woods (or not very many, at least). Had I asked, I probably would
have heard that for some it was team pride, for others the sense that something
precious to them—reproductive rights, racial tolerance, gender equality—was
suddenly threatened, for others still the narcissistic injury of having such a
repellent man embody the country in which they had been trained to take pride. I
might even have found in their private histories the template for their response.

But it’s possible the sadness has its source in a deeper unconscious than the
personal one, and I don’t mean Jung’s quasi-mystical collective one. I mean the
historical unconscious, the one that turns us, before we know it, into people who,
with certain expectations of ourselves and our world, do things like go to therapy
to confess our sadness; people who think that the past can somehow redeem the
present and make the desired future possible, if only we can understand it.

Mourning in America

That may be hardest when it comes to loss, which almost always, at least
temporarily, throws the future into question. No one understands this, or much of
anything else about grief, not even the experts. My industry nearly shook itself
apart a few years ago over the question of how to distinguish normal mourning
from clinical depression. The squabble was too stupid to be worth recounting, but
something important got lost in its noise: that no argument like this is possible
unless we assume there is such a thing as normal mourning.

We’d like to think so, of course. We’d like to believe natural selection has
endowed us with a mechanism that reliably cleans up the wreckage of loss, and,
after a decent interval, restores our faith that whatever we love will remain with
us forever. But natural selection doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our sorrow. And
besides, if you suffer (or witness) enough loss, you’ll likely come to doubt, to
distrust, and finally to discard this confidence, and to recognize that the capacity
to soldier on in the face of the inevitable, let alone to venture love, is inexplicable.
You’ll then perhaps see that bereavement is infinitely more complicated than any
other wound and that healing from it, whatever that may mean, is a miracle.

But if there is any standard for sorting normal from pathological grief, it is that
normally we know for whom or what we grieve. Sigmund Freud
distinguished melancholia from mourning on exactly these grounds, arguing that
grief becomes pathological when it is prolonged so far past any actual loss that
its object can no longer be identified. Melancholics hold onto a loved one in order
to stave off the feeling of loss. Their condition, Freud indicated, will not remit until
melancholia is transformed into normal mourning, at which point the loss can
recede into the past.

But while Freud, and all of us talking-cure practitioners who have come after him,
looked to the family as the source of the response to loss, he also recognized a
mourning that was neither the persistence of memory or the shock of recent
bereavement. His case study was not a patient but himself, and the traumatic
circumstance was not incest or domestic violence but a catastrophe
unprecedented in its scope and horror: World War I. The outbreak of war, he
wrote in 1915,

shattered our pride at the accomplishments of our civilization, our respect for so
many thinkers and artists, our hopes of finally overcoming the differences among
peoples and races. . . . It unleashed within us the evil spirits that we thought had
been tamed by centuries of education on the part of our most noble men. It made
our fatherland small again. . . . In this way, it robbed us of so much that we had
loved and showed us the fragility of so much that we had considered stable.

“Transience,” as Freud called this short essay, is not well known, nor does it tell
us what is to be done when “that which is precious has not proved to be enduring.”
Within a year, he had turned his attentions back to domestic and personal
misfortunes, the kind most suited to his treatment. The rosy forecast that ends
the paper—“once mourning is overcome . . . we will once again build up
everything that the war has destroyed, perhaps on firmer foundations and more
lastingly than before”—would be virtually his last word on the subject until the
much darker Civilization and its Discontents, written as the Nazis were gaining
power in Germany. It’s a pity Freud dropped the subject so quickly, not because
he might have offered solutions, but because, in the fifteen years between the
essays, something far more decisive for the future of psychoanalysis—and
maybe for the future of democracy—had occurred: psychoanalysis came to
America.

The Happy Republic

Actually, Freud had brought it to America in 1909. But he hated his time here,
and the feeling was largely mutual, so as E.L. Doctorow put it in Ragtime, “at least
a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his
ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.” Freud may have made us more
honest about our urges and more cognizant of how they manifested in daily life,
but he also yanked away a shroud that gave sex its mystery, the shadows that
deepened it even as they obscured it.

I’m not complaining, either as a civilian or a therapist; it turns out that honesty
and ecstasy can indeed inform and augment each other. But in insisting that we
repress the instinctual life epitomized by sex at our own peril, Freud was not
suggesting we cast off all restraint in favor of our emotional lives. To the contrary,
our job as civilized people was to find (presumably through psychoanalysis) what
it is about ourselves that we have to protect one another from, and then to muster
the self-control to do that—and all without ever pretending that we have
vanquished the beast within. In return for replacing unconscious repression with
conscious renunciation, we get a civilization, and all its bounty—stability, a sense
of purpose, the fulfillments of culture.

What we don’t get out of this contract, however, is happiness; instead, we get, as
Freud famously put it, “common unhappiness” rather than “neurotic misery.”
That’s probably the real reason that it took a while—much longer than a decade,
really—for psychoanalysis to find its footing in America: it’s one thing to ruin sex
and quite another to ruin the pursuit of happiness by declaring tragic resignation
to be our proper destiny.

Still, it was only a matter of time before the marketplace offered a solution, a way
to use the analytic accoutrements—the couch, the legitimacy, the hour—to serve
that prospect. By the time I got to therapy school in the mid-1980s, Freud’s interior
landscape had been transvalued—the source no longer of trouble, but of wisdom.
No one ever said it out loud, and I didn’t realize it until much later, but the purpose
of psychotherapy had become finding what it is in ourselves that we need to
protect from the world. The safe space of the therapy office was not only a refuge
but a model, a foretaste of the way the world ought to be: full of interlocutors
whose job was to love us unconditionally and to help us to love ourselves the
same way, so that we could be all that we can be.

The World and I

The Freudian imperative to seek fearlessly for the traces of instinctual life still
reigned, though not with suspicion or an eye toward restraint. Instead, Freud’s
doctrines, once fully transmitted to the New World, took on a peculiarly American
coloration: steeped in personal affirmation, the therapeutic faith rested here on a
conviction that in instinct, and especially in the emotions, lay wisdom. And a
corollary to this faith was the bedrock belief that in psychological pain lay not the
evidence that we had failed to surrender instinct to civilization but rather that
civilization had failed to protect us from injury. Therapists would help people
become virtuosi of their psyches, exquisitely tuned to each fine gradation of inner
suffering, managing their emotional lives to protect themselves against incursion.
We set about, in short, asking not what we can do for country but how we can
stop country from doing to us.
This therapist-led decoupling of the personal from the political has been much
noted, and mostly lamented, by scolds from the right and other schoolmarms,
and I don’t wish to follow in their path. Rather, I would just point out that behind
both the affirmative and the dour views of our interior life lurks a question that has
been haunting us since the Enlightenment: now that God is dead and priests are
just men spouting superstition, now that we’ve taken matters into our own hands,
just how are we supposed to live with one another? Now that everything is
permitted, now that rules are whatever we make them to be, how can we tame
those evil spirits ourselves? Implicit in the therapeutic answer is a bet—the same
bet that lies behind science and democracy and free market capitalism: that we
are self-limiting creatures, that given freedom and self-knowledge and the
opportunity to express them, we will be able to ride the long arc of history toward
progress.

But, as Dr. Phil might ask, how’s that working out for you? Not so well, it seems,
at least not if you are living in Trumpistan, where those Enlightenment virtues
look like political correctness and globalism and the elitism of the effete, where
the invisible hand gives you its back and reason tells you that your moral
standards are only so much prejudice and science insists that the car in which
you drive to your shitty, low-paying job is making the ice caps melt. In this blighted
province, even if you have never set foot in a therapist’s office, even if you see
the profession as a vast snowflake factory, you have absorbed the truth of the
therapeutic: that grievance is always justified, that the victim always has the high
moral ground, and that if you are frustrated or worried or despairing or otherwise
discomfited, then that means you have been robbed of your birthright. Because
you were put on this earth, or at least in this country, to pursue happiness; if you
can’t even dream of that anymore, then you are entitled to redress. And if the
channels through which redress is achieved are closed off to you, then perhaps
you should hitch your wagon to a bulldozer intent on carving out a new one.

Forward Into the Past

“You cannot exaggerate the intensity of man’s inner irresolution and craving for
authority,” Freud told a congress of psychoanalysts in 1910. That yearning is part
of what he called elsewhere an “archaic heritage” that, when awakened, seeks
“a paramount and dangerous personality, towards whom only a passive-
masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will must be surrendered.” A
century ago, that probably wasn’t as cheap a shot as it is now that victim-
blaming has become a thing, and while it points to the impatience of an elite man
with those craven people, it does not explain the sadness that came into my office
that day and that I think still has not worn off. It does, however, get at one of our
more melancholy emotions, one that Donald Trump has mined unrelentingly:
nostalgia. Like all nostalgia, the yearning to make America great again is a
yearning for the never-was, and it tells us more about what is missing from the
present than what was present in the past.

But in the Freudian view, the success of the Trumpian con should point us to our
archaic heritage—and indeed the past to which Trumpism aspires lies much
deeper than the mid-twentieth century, or whatever period those red hats are
referring to. Trump promises more than the restoration of white men to their
rightful place at the top of the org chart. He promises to make the world
comprehensible again without the intercession of pointy-headed elites and the
nagging of social justice warriors. He urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds
of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render
truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions
written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts,
aspirations to justice. We then, at last, will be restored to the primordial American
state of nature—free to consume, to pillage, to destroy, to wall out our neighbors,
and to hate people for living in shitholes.

Trump indeed does more than promise: with his profligate lies, his proud
immorality, his sneering disdain for fairness, his disregard for consistency or any
other kind of integrity, he embodies those promises. He is the anti-Aufklärer, and
his deepest appeal lies in an unspoken promise that lies behind the others: to
undo the Enlightenment, to free us from the burdens of living rationally in a world
where nothing is settled and where everything—economic well-being, national
borders, gender identities, domestic arrangements—is up for grabs, let the
strongest prevail.

That’s probably the reason that it took a while for psychoanalysis to find its footing
in America: it’s one thing to ruin sex, and quite another to turn the pursuit of
happiness into tragic resignation.

If the machine guns and mustard gas of World War I revealed to Freud the fragility
of what had seemed solid, the election of Trump reveals its decrepitude, if not its
collapse. Without a single shot, with hardly any sort of sustained violent break at
all, in a collective ejaculation of rage and resentment, a near-majority of the
electorate went with its gut and rejected not a candidate or a party but an ethos
shaped over five centuries, of which Freud was an acolyte and the odd profession
he spawned an apotheosis. They rose up against the demand imposed by
modernity—that we use reason to figure things out for ourselves—and replaced
it not with the old rules, but with impulse itself, with the vengeance and cruelty
and rage that Trump so brilliantly embodies. Freud’s answer—that we find our
limits only when we recognize just how badly we need them—was insufficient,
and its transvalued version even more so. As John Adams recognized in noting
the way that democracy “wastes, exhausts, and murders itself,” individuals may
conquer themselves but “nations and large bodies of men, never.”

Still, the problem may lie not in our answers but in the question itself: it may be
that life on earth is too complex and chaotic for humans to manage, that our
randomly acquired strengths and flaws did not evolve to meet that challenge, and
that the idea that we can fashion an order that lasts is merely a conceit that
reached its peak with the Enlightenment. Another of those conceits is that
progress is inevitable, and it is possible that on the other side of the long darkness
upon which we are now embarking is an understanding of ourselves and the
world just as unimaginable to us as democracy was to a Lascaux cave artist, and
that will not contain within it the seeds of its own destruction.

But that’s far from certain, and here is where my profession and all it has taught
us about the value of the interior landscape will come in handy. For we have only
just begun to grieve the passing of this great experiment, of the idea that we will
find in ourselves the ability to run our own show, and as we watch ourselves
decline, we will have to get very good at mourning. My colleagues and I stand
ready to assist.

Diversity for What? | Russell Jacoby

Josh Fruhlinger

23-29 minutes

How should we approach diversity as an ideology? To begin with, we can

examine the gap between its status as rhetoric and as lived reality. But today’s
relentless celebration of diversity overwhelms any skeptics. To posit a decline of
diversity seems obviously false. Yet evidence of this fall is everywhere. That it is
not more noticed bespeaks both the allure of the diversity ideology and the
damage of the wider intellectual division of labor that governs the discussion of
this vital issue. The appeal of the ideology taps into a venerable liberal ethos of
fraternity captured, for instance, by the wildly successful 1955 “The Family of
Man” photographic exhibition—and book based on it. Culling photographs from
across the globe, the exhibition accented the unity in the diversity of peoples—
the sense we are all different but all together. It commemorated a liberal spirit
that continues to touch a deep chord. If anything, “the family of man” ethos
resonates today more widely than ever. In the absence of a distinct program,
liberals and leftists redouble their commitment to variegated fraternity. It is their
sole calling card.

The damage caused by intellectual fragmentation is tricky to appraise; and,

indeed, part of my project here is to retrieve a story that is known, but has not
registered with the diversity exponents. The decline of diversity is well established
in several domains; it is a raison d’etre for numerous scholars and associations.
For instance, specialists, conferences, and entire fields have taken up the cause
of declining biodiversity. This means a reduction of environmental diversity and
with it the demise of many species. “I cannot imagine,” writes Edward O. Wilson
in The Diversity of Life, a problem of greater urgency for humanity than “the
ongoing loss of biological diversity.” “Biodiversity loss” has accelerated
“massively” in recent decades, observe some experts. “Up to 30 percent of all
mammal, bird and amphibian species will be threatened with extinction this
century,” they declare. “The loss of biodiversity” leads to greater risks of diseases
and disturbances as individual species decline. Other scholars draw a direct line
between the decline of biodiversity and the general health of humanity. “The
global loss of biodiversity may lead—directly or indirectly, in the short or long
term—to massive loss of health for humankind,” state two specialists. They
continue, “The alarm bells are ringing throughout the world among ecologists and
also among eco-epidemiologists.”

Yet the bells that ring to alert us to the threat to biodiversity also ring to celebrate
human diversity. Is it possible that humans diversify as the environment
homogenizes? That even as the oceans become polluted, the land paved, forests
razed, and species eliminated human variety enlarges? That industrial
monoculture stimulates human polyculture? To be sure, one might argue no
relationship exists between biodiversity and human diversity; and even as the
former wanes the latter waxes. To make this point, one could suggest a category
error is at work. “Diversity” in the environment and “diversity” in human culture
refer to two distinct realms. That suggests a dwindling environmental variety has
no impact on human diversity. However, this seems unlikely. The categories
might be separate, but they overlap. After all, the whole point of ecology—and
eco-everything—is the interrelationship of the human and natural domains.

Childhood’s End

Diversity is a reality: that is obvious. The first sentences of the first chapter of
Darwin’s Origin of Species marvels at “the vast diversity of the plants and
animals” across the ages and regions. But diversity is also an ideology; and like
any ideology it can mislead and distort. The ideology can blind us to a reality that
countermands diversity. To understand this process more clearly, we might
examine any number of spheres in which rhetorical diversity tends to crowd out
the experiential kind, but here I’ll confine myself to the shifting character of
childhood. The experiential platform of diversity is childhood. How we play and
imagine informs about ability to experience the world as adults. What if the
unplanned elements of childhood diminish? What if the activities of our children
become more and more alike?

Diversity is not simply a political or ethnic category. The way we experience the
world depends on our orientation to it; diversity is subjective as well as objective.
It relies on an experiential openness. What constitutes this openness? It resides
largely in a mixture of spontaneity and creativity. Travel, for instance, hardly leads
to new experience if the traveler cannot culturally leave home. This is not exactly
a new notion.

Without openness to experience, diversity is a dead letter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did a fair amount of traveling, criticized it as a “fool’s
paradise.” “I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe” for
art or study, he wrote. But he wondered if travel led to individual growth. “I pack
my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples;
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I
fled from.” A lighter, updated version of this idea can be found in a >New
Yorkercartoon in which one woman recounts her travels—not Naples this time,
but Tuscany. “Florence was fabulous!” she is saying to an acquaintance. “Wi-Fi
to die for!”

Experiential openness is more than an individual quality or virtue; it depends on

who we are, how we were raised, what constituted our childhood; and this
changes over time for society. I broach we are witnessing the closing of
experiential diversity, itself based on the eclipse of childhood. To get at this, I turn
to Weimar critic Walter Benjamin, who was much interested in childhood, and
wrote the autobiographical Berlin Childhood around 1900. Benjamin elsewhere
introduced the notion of the “impoverishment of experience.” He wondered
whether the dimensions of experience—he was writing in the 1930s—were
flattening out. He wondered if we are losing the ability to experience and to
recount our experience. The two conjoin. In an essay called “The Storyteller,”
Benjamin asked if storytelling declined because we lacked a certain patience or
tranquility. “The art of storytelling is coming to an end.” Fewer and fewer people
can tell a story or want to hear one.

The storyteller for Benjamin belonged to a pre-industrial age. Rapid shifts

subverted the storyteller and what might be called first-person experience.
“Experience has fallen in value,” Benjamin glumly noted. Newspapers and
information overwhelm the narrator with his quiet tale and its moral. People lived
one way before World War I and lived another after. Automobiles, radios,
telephones and film entered everyday life. Society had been overturned. The
individual cannot keep up and turns silent: “A generation that had gone to school
on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in
which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds.”

The Play’s the Thing

To put it in terms I’m using here, the faculty to experience diversity atrophies.
Continuous assault on the individual, which begins in childhood, leads not to
volubility, but the reverse. The individual contracts or withdraws. If this seems
arcane, consider: Forty-four years after Benjamin’s essay, near the juncture of
Texas State Highway 79 and Texas State Highway 25, and some five thousand
miles from the café where “The Storyteller” was commissioned, another writer
contemplated the fate of the storyteller. The circumstances of Benjamin, a
German-Jewish refugee subsisting in Paris as war threatened Europe, and Larry
McMurtry, a successful American novelist and screen-writer residing in a North
Texas town—population under 2000—in which he was born, could not be more
different.

Worlds apart, this American man of letters asked the same question and
witnessed the same phenomenon. In 1980, McMurtry sat down at his local Dairy
Queen in Archer City, Texas, and revisited Benjamin’s essay. In his
autobiographical reflections, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry
came to conclusions close to Benjamin’s. The day of the storyteller was over, he
granted—and that meant that something about how we experience and how we
recount it has altered. “It was startling to sit in that Dairy Queen, reading the words
of a cosmopolitan European, a man of Berlin, Moscow, Paris, and realize that
what he was describing with a clear sad eye was more or less exactly what had
happened in my own small dusty county in my lifetime.”

The point is: without openness to experience diversity is a dead letter. This
openness, the opposite of “the impoverishment of experience,” rests on
imagination and spontaneity that are themselves grounded in childhood—its
rhythms, contours, and play. The universe of childhood is where diversity gets
exercise, where it flexes its psychic muscles. Putting aside all the usual
qualifications—not everywhere, not all kids—childhood is under siege. The
structure of childhood has been dramatically shifting in the last decades. The
space, the place, the typical activities of children have been transformed.
Impulsive play in the outdoors dwindles as children hurry home to computers or
to organized activities. Playgrounds seem to be emptying out. Play is changing.

Kids in Captivity

“I live in a neighborhood of several hundred families,” writes Joe L. Frost in his

essential 2009 book, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments. “It is
close to a lovely park with a playground and a clear flowing stream,” but he finds
that children do not go there except on special occasions accompanied by adults.
“In fact, they do not play outside. When they exit the school bus in mid-afternoon,
they go directly into the house.” He notes that in the dozen years he lived there
“I have seen as many as three children playing in the yards or streets only one
time, and I have never seen an unattended child in the beautifully wooded
neighborhood park.”

The consequences of these depopulated playscapes are apparent everywhere:

in measurably declining children’s health, for one thing—but also in the ability to
imagine and experience diversity. What happens when video entertainment that
is designed by adults occupies the time and minds of the young? When the
unorganized dimension of childhood fades? What are the implications of the
hollowing out of the psychic and physical space of childhood?

To be sure, the issue of threats to childhood is not new. Elegies for lost childhood
mark the modern period. Perhaps the classic of the post–World War II years
remains Robert Paul Smith’s 1957 Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do?
Nothing, which for the United States captured the moment when unstructured
childhood devolved into activities organized by parents. Smith compared his own
childhood of the 1920s with that of his offspring of the suburban 1950s, and was
stunned to realize that his kids and their friends no longer could play by
themselves. We kicked cans, he recalls of his childhood; we skipped and hopped
and tied ropes. “We sat in boxes; we sat under porches; we sat on roofs; we sat
on limbs of trees.” In short “we did a lot of nothing.” Those days were ending, as
Smith saw it. Children no longer played by themselves or with each other.

Social thinkers joined in. Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood dates
from 1982, but that the issue has been raised before hardly invalidates it. The
refashioning of childhood pastimes, and indeed adult activities, might be
accelerating. The warp and woof of experience does not stand outside of history;
and as this experience shifts so does the capacity to experience diversity.

The daily rhythms are altering, not just of infants, but toddlers, children, pre-
teens—and everyone else. People are plugged in—and left out. My students text
in my classes when I’m ten feet away and staring them in the face. To gauge how
experiential openness has contracted across time, choreograph two typically
nervous gestures of adults: the once familiar reaching for a pack of cigarettes,
pulling out one, lighting, inhaling and looking up and around; and the now familiar
reaching for a cell phone, tapping a code, reading messages, sending messages,
reading messages—with head down.
The latter marks progress in health, in the decline of lung cancer, but perhaps
regression in openness toward the world. And even the progress of health could
be qualified—or, at least, the uptick in pedestrian deaths reveals how people are
increasingly encased in themselves and closed off to the world. They walk into
cars as they check their messages—or are run over as drivers check theirs. I
sometimes greet people with a comment when taking a walk or bicycling. More
and more I am met with blank looks. They hear nothing since they are plugged
into earphones. The graininess of daily life constitutes the bedrock for the
experiential diversity. If we close it out, we are left, as Emerson put it, with the
unrelenting, identical “sad self.”

Commissars of Constraint

To argue that the jargon of diversity masks its decline hardly means we live in a
world without differences. Nor do I want my criticism of diversity to be
misunderstood in a period of political regression. All individuals merit respect. All
groups deserve representation. Ending discrimination in any domain is
exemplary. But to halt discrimination under the guise of diversity muddies the
waters. The demand for equality or justice does not need cultural enhancements.
Yet if the choice is between the KKK’s white supremacy and Bank of America’s
diversity, I stand with the Bank of America. I see no gain, however, in stuffing
black Americans into the box of diversity, where they become just another group.
In any event, the choice is not between a virulent racism and an anodyne
diversity; and even if it were, criticism of the latter should not cease. To abridge
thinking in the name of the emergencies that today are permanent reduces it to
slogans, perpetual cheerleading or nay-saying. The notion that liberals cannot
criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a bankrupt
tradition. My object in any event is not to criticize the cult of diversity for something
worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological
is to understand what devitalizes it—an endeavor that seeks to realize, not junk
it.

On the campuses, shadow-boxing has become a new sport for the politically
challenged. Befogged leftist dons, who learned from their mentors that everything
is text, can no longer distinguish a truncheon from a pencil or a rock from an
insult. It’s all the same. “Words can be like rape—they can destroy you,” declares
a retired Berkeley professor. The logic of this position is clear; first speech, then
teaching and writing fall under suspicion. In a strange transmogrification, campus
leftists, who once championed free speech, now oppose it. They seek to cancel
speakers and censor articles they find upsetting. Out-of-work commissars cheer
up as they anticipate openings in the new All-Campus Politburo of Intelligence.

“We support robust debate,” declare these nabobs without conviction as they
called for the university to stop a speech by a right-wing provocateur. “But we
cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation and hate speech.” The
university had to remind its distressed faculty of something called the First
Amendment—to no avail. The First Amendment no longer cuts it. “The Supreme
Court is behind the times,” opines Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an ahead-of-the-
times Berkeley professor. “The First Amendment deserves to be re-looked at.”
Why? Because hate speech “can harm the central nervous system.”
Real politics shrinks to arguments as to whether the welfare state should be
bigger or smaller.

The incontrovertible evidence for this assertion can be found in the publications
of Professor Scheper-Hughes and her colleagues, which sadly civil libertarians
have not read. “The First Amendment,” declaims this cutting-edge prof, “is
ignorant of the vast research on these topics by medical anthropologists, clinical
psychologists, and neurological scientists.” In Professor Scheper-Hughes’s
stomping ground, the First Amendment has metamorphosed into a person, a rube
disdainful of campus research, and words into daggers. Don’t fret, though: Highly
trained specialists tap vast research to rehone the First Amendment for the
twenty-first century. The First Amendment 2.0 allows free speech as calibrated
by its effect on the central nervous system. The newly hired commissars can’t
wait to begin—in fact they are already at work.

Unpassionate Intensity

Elsewhere, real politics shrinks to arguments as to whether the welfare state

should be bigger or smaller. Within this framework, passionate and critical
differences arise—about health care, environment, education, jobs. These are
decisive issues, but all unfold within the structure of the state and economy that
everyone accepts. In this sense, fortunately or otherwise, the best political
thinkers got it right—a fulfilled prophecy for which they have been roundly
criticized. Over an arc of thirty years—from Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology to
Francis Fukuyama in The End of History—they announced that liberal capitalism
had triumphed with no alternatives in sight.

“The old passions are spent,” announced Bell at the end of the 1950s in the wake
of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which chastened the last Soviet apologists.
“The old politico-economic radicalism . . . has lost its meaning.” The only
possibilities are limited social reforms. Sweeping changes are off the agenda.
“Politics offers little excitement,” declared Bell. At the end of the 1980s in the
wake of the dissolution of Soviet Union and its allied regimes, Fukuyama
reaffirmed the message. The end of the Soviet regimes signified the “death” of
Marxism “as a living ideology of world historical significance.” And like Bell, he
lamented the loss. Now we can only tinker with the welfare state. Politics has
become boring. “The worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring,
courage, imagination and idealism” is over.

Of course, this is not exactly true. Islamic radicalism has reawakened an

ideological struggle. Yet Islamic fundamentalism has not offered any alternative
to modernization, except to dismantle it. No matter its numerical strength, radical
Islam appeals only to Islamic zealots. The name of the West African radical
Islamists, “Boko Haram” or, as it is usually translated, “Western Education is
Forbidden” requires little commentary. Is there any future without Western
science or knowledge? The ability of Islamic regimes such as Iran or Saudi Arabia
and, increasingly, Turkey, to balance religious traditions and Western modernity
is still unclear; or, at least, the story is ongoing.

The Monoculture of Want

Meanwhile another quite crucial type of difference increases, but can hardly be
apprehended by the idiom of diversity. Economic inequality and its consequences
intensify, but here the vocabulary of diversity illuminates little. The half-fictional
exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway addresses the
subject and cannot be bettered. To Fitzgerald’s remark that “The rich are different
from you and me,” Hemingway supposedly responded, “Yes, they have more
money.” This gets it exactly—and can be inversed. “The poor differ from you and
me.” “Yes, they have less money.”

Poverty does not spell diversity, but exclusion. The unemployed, the badly
employed, and the unemployable suffer from a lack of money—and everything
that goes with it, good housing, health, and education. A venerable belief posits
outsiders as fundamentally different—and often superior. But outsiders may just
be insiders without credit cards and nice cars. The poor differ by a shortage of
resources.

Of late the accelerating economic inequalities across the world garner much
attention—for good reason. But the usual categories of poverty, income and
wealth are revealing. They suggest ameliorating the system, not transforming it.
For instance, Thomas Piketty’s surprise best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First
Century forcefully takes up economic inequality under rubrics such as “The
Capital/Income Ratio” or “Inequality and Concentration.” But for him the old
working or laboring class hardly exists; the talk is of economic inequalities, not
classes. The entry in Piketty’s index for “Labor” reads “See Capital-labor split.”
This makes sense because economic inequalities interest him, to the exclusion
of all other categories of experience. The solutions follow from the approach. To
alleviate inequalities, Piketty proposes new tax schemes.

Diversity is not simply a political or ethnic category.

His concerns generally reflect those today indignant at the obscene disparities of
wealth: they want to flatten out the polarities. The goal is enviable, but diversity
is not pertinent. The egalitarians seek to enlarge the mainstream. They ask, how
we can get more people to escape poverty and join a decent middle class? There
is nothing wrong with this scheme, but let us be clear-eyed on what it means. The
object is to incorporate more people into the establishment.

To the degree the impoverished outsiders are upset, they feel denied what is
available to others. But this does not turn them into agents of history, as Japanese
organizational theorist Kenichi Ohmae supposes. He blasts Fukuyama in his
own The End of the Nation State. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he
declares of Fukuyama’s “the end of history.” Ohmae highlights peoples across
the globe who aggressively want to “participate in history” to gain “a decent life
for themselves and a better life for their children.” A generation ago they were
“voiceless and invisible.” Now they have “entered history with a vengeance.”

Yes, but under what banner or cause? No one doubts that the globe cries out
with unhappy peoples—refugees, the impoverished, the dispossessed. The
numbers are daunting. But they have no goal except, understandably, to escape
and improve their lives. Do the desperate who flee Africa or the Middle East have
even a limited political program? Evidently not; even if numerous, they act as
individuals, not as subjects of history with a subversive—or any—intent. They do
not enter history “with a vengeance.” They seek to slip into history without notice.
They do not want to overturn, but to get a turn.

The Stifling Consensus

One need not be a follower of Hegel to concur that history is a “slaughter bench”
in which the happiness of states and individuals has been sacrificed, as he stated
in his Philosophy of History. “Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful
account of the miseries” that nations and people suffer, he declared, gives rise to
“the most hopeless sadness.” Nor must one be a Hegelian to second the question
he poses. “To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous
sacrifices been offered?” But here we can diverge from the Berlin sage, who
believed he glimpsed reason in history’s machinations. He may have been
looking in the mirror, not through the window. It is less reason and more its
absence that is visible in history today.

The point here is simple. Once upon a time a specter haunted the world, “the
working class,” which represented not inequality or poverty, but a different
political system. I do not raise this in the name of lost causes, but simply to get a
sense of the narrow political diversity of the world we now live in. Marx was hardly
interested in inequality or poverty and indeed frequently lampooned the demand
for equality. The working class was not poorer than the peasants: that was never
the crux. It was a class with “radical chains” that would refashion the world. The
working class may have always been more than a little mythological, yet in
principle it sought not a place at the table, but a new setting.

Today the specter is a specter of itself, and political diversity turns ghostly.
Evidently political differences exist, but the register has narrowed. The hope that
a Third World would be an alternative to advanced capitalism and Soviet
communism has long since died. Marxism has retreated to graduate seminars
where professors serve gluten-free gibberish to aspiring professors. The best
academic Marxists no longer even pretend to believe in an alternative; they study
the vocabulary of state power. Outside the campuses a feeble liberalism
confronts a rising authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and religious fanaticism.
Meanwhile the diversity cheerleaders schedule another celebration. “Don’t wait
to be hunted to hide,” counseled Samuel Beckett. Herbert Marcuse cited these
words more than fifty years ago in his dark conclusion to One Dimensional Man.
The advice still rings true.

Tell Me It’s Going to be OK | Miya Tokumitsu

Juno Mac, Molly Smith

16-21 minutes
Siegfried Kracauer, one of the eloquent theorists of pop-culture associated with
the Frankfurt School, frowned upon the cinema with its velvet drapes and plush
seats, calling it “distraction raised to the level of culture.” In his dour view of things,
the urban working masses were lulled into sitting in the dark and gawping at
mesmeric light projections while sinister forces shifted the world under their feet.
“In the streets of Berlin, one is struck by the momentary insight that someday all
this will suddenly burst apart,” he portended in 1926. The cinema still offers
mental vacations from our existence of exploited labor, but capitalism’s more
evolved form, neoliberalism, has delivered another, more pernicious sedative to
take the edge off: medicinal jargon. The language of self-improvement has shifted
its focus slightly but notably from motivation (“Just Do It.”) to amelioration (“radical
empathy”). From the peppy Queer Eye reboot to Jordan B. Peterson’s
angry Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos—the subtitle speaks
volumes—the parlance of reassurance is a flourishing industry. An array of Virgils
to suit various tastes stands ready to talk us through the many circles of neoliberal
capitalism.

It makes sense that hyped-up “you’re OK” language circulates frantically at a time
when the marketization of every aspect of our lives has pitted us against the rest
of humanity—whether we’re interviewing, at age four, for a spot in an élite
preschool or trying to pick the best mutual funds for our retirement portfolios. And
yet, this so-called logic of the free market runs counter to what we comprehend
of human nature.

Belonging is an essential human need. (Fascists understand this basic fact;

neoliberals don’t.)

We crave hearing that we’re alright, we’re not alone, we’re accepted in spite of
our flaws. Belonging is an essential human need. (Fascists understand this basic
fact; neoliberals don’t.) Loneliness, it turns out, negatively affects not only our
psychological well-being, but also our physical health. And yet we have
apparently chosen, via liberal democracy, to live according to a system of social
organization that requires us to be jumpy paranoids, suspicious of everyone and
terrified of our own potential mistakes. Believers in capitalist liberal democracies
may cluck at the over-the-top Maoist inquisitions devoted to revolutionary self-
criticism, but our society encourages us to practice the same extravagant self-
loathing, only privately. That’s why America’s vast therapeutic brain trust has
steadily eradicated the language of solidarity and class consciousness, honed
through collective struggle, and replaced it with exhortations to “do what you love”
and “live your best life.” Both aphorisms imply that what we’re currently doing is
not enough.

Given that we spend most of our waking hours in an alienated, desperate grind
to obtain or maintain a life-sustaining job, blaming ourselves for every snag along
the way, gospels of reassurance and self-care are precious cargo. We are denied
the ability to seek comfort from colleagues, neighbors, or—heaven forbid—
comrades, because neoliberalism has turned them into our competition. Instead,
disaffected souls are relentlessly steered back into the thrall of a marketplace
where we can access, individually, little hits of succor.
The American Jitters

The individual under neoliberalism is atomized, competitive, and above all,

anxious. Indeed, as David Beer and others have pointed out, it’s precisely the
gnawing and ever-present sense of anxiety that serves as the neoliberal social
order’s psychic motive force. Only when we humans hold each other in paranoid
suspicion does the so-called free market work. Only when we’re constantly trying
to scoop up each Postmates order or increase our average star rating (on Uber,
Goodreads, it doesn’t matter), does the all-important market function properly.

The star rating is a particularly ingenious means of sowing this anxiety. As we all
learned in primary school, amounts are nonsense without units. Six, one half,
eighty-seven thousand—these numbers do not mean anything unless we know
what mutually agreed-upon unit they attach to: fortnights, teaspoons, furlongs,
etc. But what is a star? Nobody knows. The star rating average is only meaningful
in relative terms: it’s higher or lower than the star ratings other striving workers
earn. In other words, user reviews situate our performance not according to some
stable benchmark—such as increased production per hour worked—but within
an ever-fluctuating hierarchy comprised of our peers.

This all-too-public, shifting performance grid represents but one of many tools
that keep the flow of anxiety humming along under neoliberalism. Others abound,
and are now such a familiar feature of our working and emotional lives that we
scarcely notice how routinely they derange our basic sense of self: there’s the
rollback of ongoing employment through the gig economy, the explosion of
applications (LinkedIn, for instance, turns its users—even the employed ones—
into constant job applicants), zero-sum performance assessments such as
Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, just-in-time shift scheduling, entrepreneurial
kindergartens, and many more. All of these systems encourage us to view others’
achievements as our own setbacks, to individualize completely all successes and
disappointments.

America’s vast therapeutic brain trust has steadily eradicated the language of
solidarity and class consciousness, honed through collective struggle, and
replaced it with exhortations to “do what you love” and “live your best life.”

We are terrified to make even one tiny mistake, yet at the same time we are faced
with a ruling class that makes little effort to hide its flagrant misdeeds: graft,
corruption, and perhaps most appalling in our age of so-called meritocracy, sheer
incompetence. Miss one parole meeting or court date and your life is plunged into
an unending hell of punitive bureaucracy and inescapable debt. CIA deputy
director Gina Haspel, on the other hand, violates the Constitution by running a
secret torture cell, only to be rewarded with a promotion. Despite Hillary Clinton
running a ham-fisted and bewilderingly tone-deaf campaign, we had the phrase
“most qualified presidential candidate” practically shoved down our gullets. And,
of course, Donald Trump is president.

As an individual office worker, you might be terrified that you mishandled one
client account. You might spend sleepless nights agonizing that you might have
bungled some bureaucratic subroutine that causes your client to complain to your
boss. Should such a gruesome fate upend you, you’ll lose your job, then your
home, then you and your kids will be living out of your car, and they’ll be
condemned to a life of poverty. And it will have been all your fault. Then there’s
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan, who helped to preside over the deliberately
fraudulent creation of 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit cards with
virtually zero consequences. Sure, he’s publicly hated, but he’s laughing all the
way to the, ahem, bank. What’s the board of Wells Fargo going to do, fire him?
After it already paid him untold millions of dollars? Actually, they gave him a raise.

Well, so what? We all know that those at the top play by different rules, and that
for most people, consequences can be wildly out of proportion to their blunders.
At least under feudalism, this discrepancy was out in the open. Yes, it was unjust,
but it also couldn’t be denied. What’s special about capitalism, and its neoliberal
version in particular, is how most of us must accept that each and any of our
individual missteps justifies all calamity that befalls us, no matter how ruinous.
The location of all social problems onto individuals has now reached
preposterous proportions. It used to be that people’s hardships owed to their not
studying hard enough or having a rap sheet for smoking weed in the 7-Eleven
parking lot. Now, ordering avocado toast at brunch is the vice that justifiably
closes someone out of the housing market forever. Meanwhile, today’s glorified
feudal lords continue committing fraud and torture—or just go on lying and
bumbling their way into greater wealth and political glory.

Pabulum for Sale

But here’s the truly wonderful thing about neoliberalism—as it turns us all into
paranoid, jealous schemers, it offers to sell us bromides to ameliorate the very
bad feelings of self-doubt and alienation it conjures in our dark nights of the soul.
Neoliberalism has not only given us crippling anxiety, but also its apparent
remedy. It is no coincidence that as we become more nervous, “wellness” and
“self-care” have become mainstream industries. Over the last few decades,
workplaces have become ever more oppressive, intensely tracking workers’
bodies, demanding longer hours, and weakening workers’ bargaining rights while
also instituting wellness and mentoring programs on an ever greater scale.

Occasionally, the contradiction of punitive, intrusive “wellness” becomes too

ridiculous to bear and cracks under its own weight. One oft-mentioned catalyst
for the recent teacher strike in West Virginia was a proposal to mandate the
monitoring of teachers’ bodily movement via Fitbit just as the state government
moved to limit pay raises and school funding. Capitalism will deplete you, while
letting you think you have the means to improve your lot. Indeed, it will attempt to
force its therapy on you. In the case of West Virginia’s top-down Taylorist
wellness crusade, the state authorities clearly overplayed their hand; far more
common are employer-sponsored initiatives, whether packaged as mindfulness
training or meditation classes, that have been inserted into our working lives to
help us talk ourselves down. Mindfulness—a state of hyper-awareness tempered
with disciplined calm—has become the corporate mantra du jour. By encouraging
increasingly put-upon employees to assume tree poses or retreat into an om in
the face of frustration, corporate overlords mean to head off any mutinous
stirrings before they have a chance to gain momentum. Even if CEOs themselves
occasionally adopt these regimes with apparent sincerity, mindfulness serves the
companies’ bottom lines first and foremost because it is fundamentally anti-
revolutionary. “It’s hard not to notice how often corporate mindfulness aligns
seamlessly with layoffs,” Laura Marsh writes. “Employees need a sense of calm
too when their employer is flailing. Those productivity gains—an extra sixty-nine
minutes of focus per employee per month—count for more when the ranks are
thinning.”

This mode of psychic self-instruction presents a revealing complement to the anti-

union propaganda films that employers may—and frequently do—require
workers to view. Silly as all this instructional media may seem, those who
circulate it understand that it is worth the investment. They know that language
matters. Nothing cuts off self-determination more efficiently than eradicating its
language. Replacing it with misdirecting prattle that locates all blame as well as
the possible redemption from it back onto the individual is a magnificent coup for
those who would like to keep us wary of one another. Corporate feel-goodism
has a sick way of twisting the grimmest instances of exploitation and desperation
into tales of individual triumph. In 2016, Lyft elevated a nine-months pregnant
driver and mentor into a position of corporate celebrity for accepting a fare during
labor. Asking for similar “exciting” stories, Lyft cast its employee’s story as one of
positive enterprise. Like any other company, Lyft knows that workers brimming
with good feelings are rarely motivated to organize and demand working
conditions that don’t require employees who are about to give birth to drive
strangers around town.

It’s also no coincidence that the politician who presided over the final triumph of
neoliberalism as American social and economic common sense was Bill “I Feel
Your Pain” Clinton. Clinton threw poor single mothers off of public assistance, but
any cost-cutting pol can do that. Clinton’s gift was that he could make even self-
identified left-liberals feel good about such punitive policy shifts, by making it
appear that they were in fact helping these women help themselves. In many
ways, Clinton’s sleight of hand encapsulates neatly the narcissistic feedback loop
of neoliberal positivity, which focuses on what feels good, rather than what is
gracious and just.

Condition Blue

Such withdrawal into the self was on display by the Clinton political project just
after Hillary’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump. As the careening emergency that is the
Trump presidency was set into motion, Hillary Clinton embarked on a self-care
regimen of walks in the woods and alternate nostril breathing. Still, dwelling on
her alone leads us into the very trap of individualizing social problems that we
should avoid—Hillary was hardly the only person who felt the impulse to check
out and focus on personal recovery after the election. All variety of people
pledged to abandon all news media and leave the country in order to nurse their
wounds and turn their attention toward self-discovery. Particularly revealing are
the remarks of one voluntary exile from Trump’s America traveling across Asia
with her family: “I try not to engage . . . We’re here to be students, and not talk
about terrible things.” Such reactions are perhaps sympathetic, but politically,
yoga retreats, news blackouts, and glasses of chardonnay only deliver would-be
reformers into dead ends.

Two decades after the Clinton White House’s neoliberal reign, the same navel-
gazing dynamic operates deep within our social media feeds. The main benefit
of social media, according to Mark Zuckerberg, is that it provides the
infrastructure to “bring the world closer together.” Through platforms like
Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, we can interact more often with more
people, and across greater geographical distances than ever before.
Nevertheless, thanks to the atomistic social arrangements that dominate the rest
of our lives, people tend to dwell mostly within their own little cliques, reinforcing
their previously held notions of good politics, taste, etc.

More alarming however, is what might be termed the paradox of neoliberal social
retreat: although people gravitate to social media in order to feel connected,
social media, and Instagram in particular, has a tendency to make people feel
worse about themselves. Instagram’s genius in distributing bad feelings across a
vast social network is particularly revealing, as Instagram is typically considered
to be the most upbeat social-media venue on offer—not the platform of massive
owns and pile-ons. Indeed, the Instagram platform is host to a large crew of wildly
popular posters of positive and reassuring content, such as pretty food and easily
digestible poetry.

Neoliberalism has not only given us crippling anxiety, but also its apparent
remedy.

However, it turns out that this kind of content tends to make viewers feel
alienated—by the ever-competitive logic of capitalist emotional display, even the
feel-good content featured on Instagram breeds a perverse sort of invidious
malaise, with each new post about an excellent meal leaving a powerful residual
sense that the onlookers’ own lives are acutely lacking in the material to generate
similarly celebratory posts. And yet, in another brilliant stroke of cloistral
neoliberal mood marketing, the feelings of insufficiency that Instagram fosters in
many of its users are exactly what make Instagram positivity all the more
appealing to them. Feeling blue? Why not scroll through some non-challenging
four-line poems and a pleasing table setting?

Anxiety, and especially depression, as the late social critic Mark Fisher noted,
often have social causes, but we are led to believe that we suffer individually and
must struggle alone. Fisher’s point is that we are prevented from even
considering such conditions as social. The treatments on offer, the most common
ways to discuss recovery—therapy and pharmaceuticals—are essentially solo
journeys that patients undertake. Against this hyper-individualist vision of psychic
healing, we do well to highlight Fisher’s core insight that the tools we are given
skew how we understand the world and our place in it. Language, typically the
most essential method by which we articulate our affective life, can be a most
insidious means of our own oppression if co-opted by those who would exploit
us.
There is a reason why re-emergent words and phrases like “solidarity,” “class
consciousness,” “mass movement,” “organize,” and “collective struggle,” sound
old-fashioned and in need of a good dusting-off. They didn’t simply fall out of
vogue; they were aggressively obsolesced in our everyday lives by a variety of
interests—employers, corporations hungrily eyeing public assets—determined to
alienate us from each other in the interest in marketizing our souls for their own
benefit. In return, they bestowed to us a self-oriented language of supposed care,
that was never really meant to liberate us from the sources of our anxiety and
depression. It’s only there to blunt the pain temporarily—long enough to enable
us to move on to the next TaskRabbit assignment, Uber client, or briskly managed
election cycle.