The Happiness Industry (31 page)

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

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

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

Against psychological control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaigns for advertising-free spaces (against ‘visual pollution') have had a few notable successes in various cities around the world. The Brazilian city of São Paolo has no public billboards, following the ‘Clean City Law' introduced by the mayor in 2006. Other Brazilian cities have explored similar measures to reduce or ban the amount of advertising. Other campaigns have been more narrowly focused. In 2007, advertisements for luxury accommodation were removed in Beijing. The mayor explained that they ‘use exaggerated terms that encourage luxury and self-indulgence which are beyond the reach of low-income groups and are therefore not conducive to harmony in the capital'. A US organization, Commercial Alert, runs an annual ‘Ad Slam' contest, in which $5,000 is awarded to the school that has removed the most advertising from its common spaces.

Campaigns such as these are inevitably dependent on some quite traditional ideas of how to defend the public, and target some relatively old-fashioned techniques of psychological control. Product placement in ‘free' media and entertainment content is a different type of problem altogether, while the
internet enables marketing to monitor and target individuals in a far more subtle and individualized fashion. ‘Smart' infrastructures, which offer constant feedback loops between individuals and centralized data stores, are assumed to be the future of everything from advertising, to health care, to urban governance, to human resource management. The all-encompassing laboratory, explored in
Chapter 7
, is a frightening prospect, not least because it is difficult to see how it might ever be reversed, should that be desired in future. But there is no reason to assume that practices such as facial scanning in public places must remain legal.

What would the critique of smartness look like? And what would resistance to it mean? Would it be a celebration of ‘dumbness'? Would we simply refuse to wear the health-tracking wristbands? Perhaps. Some aspects of the Benthamite utopia can seem almost impossible to duck out of – the sentiment analyser who discovers the happiest neighbourhood in the city, through mining the geo-data of tweets; the instructions from one's doctor to exercise more gratitude so as to improve both mood and reduce physical stress. But remembering the philosophical contradictions inherent in these ventures, and their historical and political origins, may at least offer a source of something which has no simple bodily or neural correlate, and involves a strange tinge of happiness in spite of unhappiness: hope.

My interest in economic psychology, broadly understood, originated in 2009 when I noticed, to my astonishment, that behavioural economics and neuroscience were being presented as credible explanations of the global financial crisis. I subsequently spent two years as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, which allowed me to start reading the burgeoning literature in behavioural economics, happiness economics and the policy applications of both. This research resulted in a couple of articles, ‘The Political Economy of Unhappiness',
New Left Review
, 71, Sept.–Oct. 2011, and ‘The Emerging Neocommunitarianism',
Political Quarterly
, 83: 4, Oct.–Dec. 2012 (the latter was subsequently awarded the Bernard Crick Prize for best article published that year in
Political Quarterly
).

I also edited a series of articles for openDemocracy's OurKingdom section on the topic of happiness over the course of 2011. In early 2012, I was invited to the Tavistock Clinic by Bernadette Wren to discuss my work, which resulted in various valuable social and intellectual connections, some of which have been crucial for this book. Sebastian Kraemer was particularly helpful and insightful. I am grateful to all of the colleagues,
discussants and editors who assisted me in my work over this period.

I began working on this book in late 2012, after fine-tuning the proposal with Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso. My colleagues at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, were always stimulating, and offered various ways of thinking critically about measurement and quantification. During the last months of working on the manuscript, I sent chapters to individuals who I knew were each far more expert on the given chapter topics than I was. All of them demonstrated admirable patience, even if they were not always sympathetic to the somewhat polemical style of the book. They were: Lydia Prior, Michael Quinn, Nick Taylor, Javier Lezaun, Rob Horning and John Cromby. I'm very grateful for the invaluable feedback I received from these readers. Julian Molina provided ample research assistance at a number of stages of the book's development, and I was lucky to have someone so enthusiastic and diligent to support me. There are numerous bits of the book which he influenced for the better.

Leo Hollis had a clear vision of this book throughout, including during those periods when I did not. Working with an editor like Leo was a remarkable learning experience for me, and I've no doubt it helped me to become a better writer. I'd like to thank him for all the tremendous energy and confidence he invested in this book.

I'd like to thank my family and friends, as ever, for all your support and interest in my work, especially to Richard Haines, one of my most reliable sources of happiness. Martha appeared joyfully and noisily in my life only a couple of months after signing the contract for this book with Verso, and there were days (or more often, nights) when I worried that she'd scuppered
the whole thing. She didn't, and I think she actually improved it in some mysterious ways. In the last month, she has started to tell us when she is ‘appy, confirming Wittgenstein's insight that ‘appiness is not something we can be factually right or wrong about, but which we either know how to express or don't.

Finally, to Lydia, who supported me throughout all of the above, from buying me a glass of champagne in the Ashmolean Museum the evening I learnt that the
New Left Review
had accepted my article on happiness in spring 2011, to the bottle of champagne we drank when I finally submitted the book manuscript in summer 2014, thank you for everything. Many of the themes explored in this book are ones which we've read about and discussed together, and which you'll no doubt develop far more imaginatively over the coming years than I've managed here. The book is dedicated to you.

October 2014