The Happiness Industry (29 page)

Advertising and marketing play a crucial role in sustaining these negative spirals; indeed they (and their paymasters) have a clear economic interest in doing so. If consumption and materialism remain both cause and effect of individualistic, unhappy cultures, then the vicious circle is a profitable one for those involved in marketing. The precise role of advertising in the propagation of materialist values is disputed, although research does at the very least confirm that the two have risen in tandem with one another.
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None of the research cited here is especially surprising, and much of it has attracted a great deal of discussion in the mainstream media. What it all ultimately comes down to is the question of how power is distributed in society and in the economy. Where individuals feel buffeted by forces over which they have no influence – be that managerial discretion, financial
insecurity, images of bodily perfection, relentless performance measures, the constant experiments of social media platforms, the diktats of well-being gurus – they will not only find it harder to achieve contentment in their lives, but they will also be at much greater risk of suffering some more drastic breakdown. As Muntaner's research has shown, those at the bottom of the income scale are most vulnerable in this respect. Trying to maintain a stable family while income is unpredictable and work is insecure is among the most stressful things a person can do. No politician should be permitted to stand up and talk about mental health or stress, without also clarifying where they stand on the issue of economic precariousness of the most vulnerable people in society.

If we know most of this, why does this critical discourse not achieve more political bite? If we want to live in a way that is socially and psychologically prosperous, and not simply highly competitive, lonely and materialistic, there is a great deal of evidence from clinical psychology, social epidemiology, occupational health, sociology and community psychology regarding what is currently obstructing this possibility. The problem is that, in the long history of scientifically analysing the relationship between subjective feelings and external circumstances, there is always the tendency to see the former as more easily changeable than the latter. As many positive psychologists now enthusiastically encourage people to do, if you can't change the cause of your distress, try and alter the way you react and feel instead. This is also how critical politics has been neutralized.

This is not to say that altering social and economic structures is easy. It is frustrating, unpredictable and often deeply disappointing. What is hard to deny, however, is that it becomes virtually impossible to do in any legitimate way once institutions
and individuals themselves have become so preoccupied by measuring and manipulating individual feelings and choices. If there are to be social and political solutions to the problems which cause misery, then the first step must be to stop viewing those problems in purely psychological terms. And yet the utilitarian and behaviourist visions of an individual as predictable, malleable and controllable (so long as there is sufficient surveillance) have not triumphed merely due to the collapse of collectivist alternatives. It has been repeatedly pushed by specific elites, for specific political and economic purposes, and is experiencing another major political push right now.

Scientific tramlines

Since the 1980s, there has been a succession of ‘decades of the brain'. George Bush Snr announced that the 1990s would be the ‘decade of the brain'. The European Commission launched its own equivalent ‘decade' in 1992. In 2013, the Obama administration announced a new decade-long programme of investment in neuroscience. Each of these has ratcheted up the amount of public investment in brain research to an ever-higher level. The Obama BRAIN Initiative, as it is known, is projected to cost $3 billion by the time it has run its course. The European Commission's ‘FP7' research funding round saw nearly €2 billion invested in neuroscientific projects between 2007–13.

The ‘military industrial complex', as President Eisenhower named it in 1961, has been the major driver of the neurosciences in the United States. The Pentagon sees new opportunities to influence enemy combatants and produce more ‘resilient' US soldiers. The neuroscientist Paul Zak, whose work has focused
on the social and economic importance of oxytocin, includes the Pentagon among his various consultancy clients. In that case, the interest is in how US soldiers can behave in ways more likely to win trust from civilians in countries they've invaded. Zak offers advice on the neural underpinnings of moral engagement on the ground.

That industry is heavily invested in brain research is unsurprising. The pharmaceutical industry has some very obvious incentives to push the boundaries of science in this area, while neuromarketers maintain the hope that the brain's ‘buy button' will eventually be identified once and for all. It is then only a question of working out how such a button might be pushed by advertising. The implications of neuroscience for anyone seeking to influence and control people – be they employees, delinquents, soldiers, ‘problem families', addicts or whatever – are quite obvious, even if they are occasionally exaggerated. Crudely causal explanations of why an individual took decision x, as opposed to y, and how to alter this in future, have a lucrative market among the powerful.

The political focus upon the brain as an individual organ may only date back to the early 1990s, but it is in keeping with a much longer-standing tradition which has been producing alliances among university researchers, governments and businesses since the late nineteenth century. It is well known that a great deal of research investment in behavioural science and ‘decision research' during the 1950s was driven by military imperatives of the Cold War.
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The University of Michigan, which has been a leading centre of this research since World War Two, and occupies a central place in the evolution of behavioural economics, is a regular recipient of defence-related research contracts, to better understand teamwork and decision-making in combat situations.

The science of ‘social contagion', to which the 2014 Facebook mood manipulation experiment contributed, also has links to US defence interests. The Pentagon's Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 to gather social scientific knowledge on issues and regions of strategic importance to the United States.
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This included a contract with Cornell University to investigate how civil unrest spreads as a social contagion. One of the recipients of Minerva funding at Cornell was communications professor Jeffrey Hancock, who was also one of the researchers on the Facebook study. This is not to imply ‘guilt by association' but simply to point out that certain types of knowledge are useful to certain types of agency, with particular strategic interests.

Pop behaviourism, offering to reveal the secrets of social influence, has become a booming area of non-fiction publishing, making minor celebrities of psychologists such as Dan Ariely and Robert Cialdini and behavioural economists such as Richard Thaler. Speaking fees for these academics range between $50,000–$75,000 a day, giving an indication of the types of network that their knowledge is fed into.
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The circuit of behavioural expertise feeds directly into the marketing and advertising industries, as it has done pretty much ever since the American visitors to Wilhem Wundt's laboratory returned home at the end of the nineteenth century.

Few of these examples are concerned with happiness or well-being as such, although neuroscientists now profess to ‘see' emotions, affect, depression and happiness as embodied and behavioural phenomena. In that respect, happiness is being finally emptied of its subjective dimension once and for all, and becoming rendered an objective, behavioural event, to be inspected by experts. Whether or not the concern is explicitly Benthamite, in the sense of maximizing a positive emotion within
the individual, what all of these traditions share is a certain political co-option of psychological science, in which human activities and feelings are studied so as to better understand how they might be predicted and controlled.

Utilitarian, biological and behaviourist representations of human life have acquired a near-monopoly on plausibility in the West today. But this is because the greatest sources of power and wealth in human history have been mobilized towards ensuring that this is the case. We might well describe this as ‘ideology'. But to bracket it in this way is to risk ignoring the ways in which a certain vision of individual freedom is theorized, developed, sustained and enforced, thanks to extensive technological and institutional apparatuses. This does not occur simply in some ghostly way thanks to the market or capitalism or neoliberalism. It requires a lot of work, power and money in order to be as successful as it is.

The greatest successes of behavioural and happiness science occur when individuals come to interpret and narrate their own lives according to this body of expertise. As laypeople, we come to attribute our failures and sadness to our brains or our troublesome minds. Operating with constantly split personalities, we train our selves to be more suspicious of our thoughts, or more tolerant of our feelings, with the encouragement of cognitive behavioural therapy. In ways that will baffle cultural historians a century from now, we even engage in quantified self-monitoring of our own accord, volunteering information on our behaviours, nutrition and moods to databases, maybe out of sheer desperation to be part of something larger than just ourselves. Once we are split down the middle in this way, a relationship – perhaps a friendship? – with oneself becomes possible, which when taken too literally breeds loneliness and/or narcissism.

Mystical seductions

What would an escape from this hard psychological science look like? If politics and organization have been excessively psychologized, reducing every social and economic problem to one of incentives, behaviour, happiness and the brain, what would it take for them to be de-psychologized? One answer is a constant temptation, but we should be wary of it. This is to flip the harsh, rationalist objective science of the mind (and brain) into its opposite, namely a romantic, subjective revelling in the mysteries of consciousness, freedom and sensation.

Confronted by a social world that has been reduced to quasi-mechanical natural forces of cause and effect, the lure of mysticism grows all the greater. In the face of the radical objectivism of neuroscience and behaviourism, which purport to render every inner feeling visible to the outside world, there is a commensurate appeal in radical subjectivism, which claims that what really matters is entirely private to the individual concerned. The problem is that these two philosophies are entirely compatible with one another; there is no friction between them, let alone conflict. This is a case of what Gustav Fechner described as ‘psychophysical parallelism'.

For evidence of this, see how the promotion of mindfulness (and many versions of positive psychology) slips seamlessly between offering scientific facts about what our brains or minds are ‘doing' and quasi-Buddhist injunctions to simply sit, be and ‘notice' events as they flow in and out of the consciousness. The limitation of the behavioural and neurosciences is that, while they purport to ignore subjective aspects of human freedom, they speak a language which is primarily meaningful to expert researchers in universities, governments and businesses. By
focusing on whatever can be rendered ‘objective', they leave a gap for a more ‘subjective' and passive discourse. New age mysticism plugs this gap.

Many happiness advocates, such as Richard Layard, work on both fronts simultaneously. They analyse official statistics, draw on the lessons of neuroscience, mine data and trace behaviours to produce their own objective view of what makes people happy. And then they push for new ‘secular religions', meditation practices and mindfulness, which will provide the narrative through which the non-scientist can master his own well-being. The result is that the powerful and the powerless are speaking different languages, with the latter's consequently incapable of troubling the former's. Nothing like a public denunciation or critique of the powerful is possible under these conditions.

The language and theories of expert elites are becoming more idiosyncratic and separate from those of the public. How ‘they' narrate human life and how ‘we' do so are pulling apart from each other, which undermines the very possibility of inclusive political deliberation. For example, positive psychology stresses that we should all stop comparing ourselves to each other and focus on feeling more grateful and empathetic instead. But isn't comparison precisely what happiness measurement is there to achieve? Doesn't giving one person a ‘seven' and another person a ‘six' work so as to render their differences comparable? The morality that is being offered by way of therapy is often entirely insulated from the logic of the science and technologies which underpin it.

This problem is exacerbated in the age of ubiquitous digital tracking and the big data that results. In his book
Infoglut
, the critical media theorist Mark Andrejevic looks at how the phenomenon of excessive information requires and facilitates new
ways of navigating knowledge. But, as he shows, these have extreme forms of inequality built into them. There are those who possess the power of algorithmic analysis and data mining to navigate a world in which there are too many pieces of data to be studied individually. These include market research agencies, social media platforms and the security services. But for the rest of us, impulse and emotion have become how we orientate and simplify our decisions. Hence the importance of fMRI and sentiment analysis in the digital age: tools which visualize, measure and codify our feelings become the main conduit between an esoteric, expert discourse of mathematics and facts, and a layperson's discourse of mood, mystical belief and feeling. ‘We' simply feel our way around, while ‘they' observe and algorithmically analyse the results. Two separate languages are at work.