With the news that the Commonwealth Treasury has flipped the switch to looking after our wellbeing, it might be timely to take another look at the Affluenza crew. The “less is more” perspective, associated in this country with Clive Hamilton, has its international incarnations - and indeed it must be a deliberate choice to eschew the vulgarity of intellectual property in book publishing that accounts for so many titles being published with the name “Affluenza”. I was going to have a rant about this (and I was going to rant, among other things, about the irony of economists of all people - exponents of the “dismal science” - being in the business of calculating what makes us happy), but perhaps fortunately for LP readers, Brendan O’Neill of spiked.com got there first in a recent book review in the New Statesman - his text being Oliver James’ The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza.
Like O’Neill, I’m of that perhaps antiquated stamp of person who believes that the aim of the left should be to secure liberty through maximising equality in solidarity with one another. Call me an Enlightenment tragic, if you will, but the founders of the American constitution were quite right to describe “the pursuit of happiness” as a constituent principle of liberty - not state diktats about what will make us happy. Being on the left, I think that that pursuit is best pursued collectively, but some sort of quasi-Fabian and neo-puritan arbitration on individual choice should not be the core of the left’s purpose, still less the narrowing of the affective register in favour of a “therapy culture” and the creation of a brave new world of shiny, happy people. But, I appear to be ranting, so here’s O’Neill. (See also this review in spiked.)
No one can possibly believe that people in Britain today have harder emotional lives than those women in shawls who sold soap on misty bridges in Dickensian times, and who had a life expectancy of 46 if they were lucky. Perhaps it is simply that people are more likely to complain about mental hardship these days?James fails fully to interrogate one possible, simple explanation for why Americans, Canadians and Brits allegedly suffer, or rather claim to suffer, from higher levels of mental distress than others: the “therapy culture”. Over the past 30 years, precisely the period in which James says there has been an increase in levels of emotional distress, America has spawned a culture in which we are positively encouraged to discuss everyday problems, from overwork to sadness, as “illnesses” that require therapeutic intervention. In his brilliant Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, the American academic Christopher Lane painstakingly shows how the category of “mental disorder” has been expanded in recent decades, so that what were once considered normal emotions or everyday foibles - shyness, rebelliousness, aloofness, and so on - have been relabelled as phobias, disorders and syndromes. The influence of America’s therapy culture has been greater in other English-speaking nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) than it has been in China, for example. It’s not that their citizens are more distressed than, say, people struggling to make ends meet in Nigeria (where only 4.7 per cent of the population claim to have mental issues), but rather that they are more likely to understand and discuss their problems in these terms.
As you sift through James’s claims and data, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that what we have here is plain old prejudice - against garish consumerism, especially of a kind indulged in by the nouveaux riches - dressed up as a scientific study. At heart, this book is deeply conservative: it rehashes the age-old warning that riches will make you unhappy, so you’re better off living a simple, smiley life. Because they see overconsumption as the greatest evil, herbal-tea socialists such as James end up not offering solidarity to workers, but constantly warning them that their “greed” will come back to haunt them in the form of a mental disorder. They have rehabilitated the sin of gluttony in pseudo-scientific terms.
I say we should resist the attempts by James and others to relieve us of our “emotional distress”. Prickly emotions are frequently the triggers for change, making people strive for better and more meaningful ways of living. James, who advises the government on social policy, argues that “well-being should be a high governmental priority”. No, it should not; government-imposed “happiness” or “satisfaction” would only churn out an emotionally complacent populace trained to be satisfied by the simple life. We may all be on the edge - but some of us are looking over it, to see what will come next.
Lovely china, where id you find it?, oh in Glenferrie Road, do be a darling and give me the phone number… it’s worth maxing the plastic to be soothed in style
Nice piece Kim. Orwell would approve. How the whining neo- narcissism of therapy culture as gets sold as some progressive tendency is beyond me.
I go further though, cos I’m even more hardline: I’m against herbal tea, period. Am I the only person around who’s allergic to Chamomile?
Thats shit makes me agitated, sleepless, angry …. deranged! About as relaxing as PCP, or 36 hours on Ice with a crue of gun-totin bikies from western Sydney.
Great post!
Yeah, I think the tendency to buy stupid shit predates the 20th C a fair bit. Fact is, whenever people have had the money, they buy stupid shit - that’s the fun thing about having money!!
Kim, any thoughts on Botton’s (sp?) Status Anxiety, and where it fits in here?
I dunno, I feel like there are much bigger fish for the left to fry than people wanting to buy adidas trackies for $90. These guys all attack the overconsumers, but the line between consumption and overconsumption is most definitely an arbitrary one, and when both methods result in some rather shoddy ethical and environmental outcomes, it becomes even murkier still.
That’s the real cogent argument against consumerism, imho, not that it’s bad for us - but it’s bad for them: poor people in workhouses the world over. But even then it’s far, far from black and white; the dude making our ipods might only get 3 cents an hour, but that’s sometimes three cents more than he would otherwise be getting.
This is - very authoritarian of me - an area where I think governments really do have a role to play; it’s up to governments to legislate where appropriate because it’s obvious most people give sweet FA about the means of production behind the goods they purchase, until that is little Jimmy is retarded from the lead paint on his three dollar Tonka trucks and the tuna he ate four times a week.
But that’s a much bigger argument and scope than these guys typically go for, imho.
Top post, Kim.
And yes, since it is caffeine-free, herbal tea makes me very grumpy indeed.
All bullshit so far.As a person who could me much happier if,I had a worthwhile income,I cannot see the point in saying herbal tea,represents anything like some expensive therapies that only the University Educated can drone own about.Seeing that herbal tea can be useful to sustain work effort,as anything releases us from any type of pain,this criticism here ,just doesnt stand up as a intellectual quality that would sustain a perspiring workplace.Seeing herbal teas can come with ice to burn calories also..what are you lot about!?It became a obvious fact,in grapepicking areas,that one was better off with a hot tea,than cordial and ice.Normal tea is in fact itself a herb,under a different name,now white tea has become a leading choice.A mixture of hot teas can just lift ones attitude and thus output or,comfort in a work scenario.I have experienced this,from my twenties drinking dandelion tea,which wasnt completely herbal to later uses of Dandelion tea completely herbal.Picking apples in colder weather,and a half hour lunch break,certainly required something..good luck to you.
I think the attack on overconsumption is misdirected. We should be interested in what our workplaces are doing to us in terms of health. That is where government intervention needs to be directed. There is something straight out of stoicism in this.
Having worked in a high stress environment and recieved some “therapy and critical incident debriefs” I might throw my 2 bobs in.
Most peoples reactions are fairly predictable to extreme events, particularly if fatalities or serious injuries were involved. Therapy can be exremely useful particularly if it informs people not only of what they can expect to feel, but that those feelings are completely normal.
They will pass, there is no point in overanalising them.
Thats what I think is wrong with therapy in many cases, it “teaches” people to dwell on the feelings and treats each one as a seperate pschological problem to be dealt with rather than part of an overall process which is normal.
I attended a fatality for a chap I worked with a few months back, and was unsuccessful in the attempt to revive him (we worked on him for about an hour and a half), I know my warning signs for stress and breakdown, and thought I was fine, 2 days later I had a bad episode where simple fustration left me in tears.
I took a couple of days off, not because I was unable to function, but because I knew I was going through my normal critical incident process. Knowing the process meant I knew Id be sleepless, shaky, irritable, teary, angry, have nightmares then accept what had gone on.
Taking the couple of days just helped speed up the process.
To tie this back into the main thrust of the article, Id say people are being taught the processes of analisis (and how to recognise being unhappy) but not that all things are passing, misery to contentment, to happiness back through again.
“There is something straight out of stoicism in this.”
Or Buddhism, or any “simple pleasures = sublime and serene existence” JIVE. Gimme a break - if you want to analyse the acquisitive impulse, the love of novelty, convenience, comfort… go for it! This is just identifying something, picking out a feature you don’t like, and decrying it.
It actually reminds me of a lot of theorisin’ about looks. Yeah, sure, maybe it’s bad that people get judged on their looks. What are you going to DO about it? Stop finding people attractive? Good luck!
I doubt that O’Neill is arguing against therapy per se (though I take your point, Mole). What he’s referring to is the “therapy culture” where almost anything - shyness, disappointment, etc. is defined in terms of phobia or disorder.
The less-is-more ideology is one totally alien to the left. The assertion, notably from Marx, has always been that humanity is materially productive, the problem is when productivity gets skewed away from the common good and towards the production of the worthless shit constitutive of capitalism. As for the pursuit of happiness stuff, you’ve hit upon a fundamental contradiction within liberalism. The liberal state, and liberal culture, cannot make any value judgments about how one wants to pursue this happiness. So whilst you believe, as I do, that happiness is “best pursued collectively”, liberalism leaves us in no position to assert that this is preferable to, say, an atomised civilisation masturbating like monkeys in the dark.
It has, of course, been argued that more therapy, not less is the answer, in the context of shoehorning psychological issues into a medicalised and compartmentalised mindset, cf. a pill for everything, rather than a… cup of tea and a nice lie down.
So we pathologise these problems (and they can be problems) and attempt to treat them as pathologies, because it’s cheaper, faster, and more convenient for everyone concerned, albeit less effective.
That all said, if you ask some people/parents/children/etc if they preferred therapy to the ritalin/prozac/viagra/whatever, in my experience they have a variety of responses, and medication has indeed made a profound and positive impact to many people’s lives - where therapy could or did not - and to suggest to them that the problem has been blown up or is (a heh) all in their heads would frankly be kind of cruel and certainly igrnorant.
I don’t see overconsumerism + diagnoses for everything as necessarily connected at a deeper level. They both involve things you can buy, but so does a lot of stuff.
Spiked is a pretty dubious publication - they’re climate change denialists and are apparently corporately funded.
“Current and former spiked partners and sponsors include: Arts Council England, Bloomberg; the British Association for the Advancement of Science; the British Council; BT; Cadbury Schweppes; Cambridge University Press; the Cheltenham Science Festival; Colubris Networks; the City of London; Clarke Mulder Purdie; Continuum International Publishing Group; the Dana Centre; the European Commission research project RightsWatch; EuroScience; Hill and Knowlton; IBM; INFORM; the Institute for the International Education of Students; the Institute of Psychiatry; International Policy Network; Luther Pendragon; the Medical Research Council; the Mobile Operators Association; the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts; Natural Environment Research Council; Orange; O2; Pfizer; the Royal Institution of Great Britain; the Social Issues Research Centre; the Society of Chemical Industry; TechCentralStation; University of East London; the Wellcome Trust; and others.”
All true Barry; they’re not my (boom tish) cup of tea either, but play the man not the ball dude, there’s plenty of non-corporate partners in that list too.
Raj,
The problem is, as always, who gets to make those decisions - what is happiness, what is “shit”.
To me, the liberalism you deride tries to create the situation where as many as possible get to make that decision for themselves - resolving the “contradiction” you believe exists in a very simple way, that being that it is no business of the State to make that decision for anyone. The individual is, as much as possible, left to decide that for themselves.
The great curse of the Statist Left is that the collective gets to make that decision once for everyone. The problem is, of course, how does “the collective” make those decisions and how are they enforced? If it is wrong, how is it changed?
Politics as therapy, illustrates better than anything else, the logical conclusion of changing an invocation to politicise everyday life (the personal is the political) to a politics which eschews any object that is not trivial and personal and then to add insult to injury, pretends it is really radical to razz people about their consumption choices. Since we have all been told there is no point (because there is no alternative) to analysing the structures of production and reproduction and the social relations they sustain, what better object can be found than the the already constituted, imperfectly adjusted individual, who of course, should be nagged into adjustment because any other critique might be too hard, too dangerous, and ultimately, ‘irrational’ because it has been declared that there ‘can be no alternative’. Reactionary and timid, and a perfect illustration of the intellectual and political retreat of radical politics.
W*nkers, all of them..
true, but you gotta wonder about corporately funded pseudo-leftists railing against those who argue against rampant comsumerism, all in the name of Cadbury Schweppes and Hill and Knowlton.
Which Left? Like the Right the Left is an alliance of groups, Interests? Ethos collectives?
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Marxists etc certainly do no advocate the less is more POV. Marx praised Capitalism’s fecundity. The various New Left isms however were more ambivalent. One of those strands of ‘the Left’ is that tendency within bourgeois society that habitually rebels against the dominant ethos embodied by whatever social policies are advocated by conservative at any one time. This is manifested in the tussles over male hair length in the 60s. Twenty years previously a man would be labelled bohemian if he were habitually casually addressed sans tie as Orwell was. Orwell, however, was concerned about the iniquities of the class system and the grinding poverty of the working class. He wasn’t a Boho Lefty and despised the sandal-wearing fruit juice drinkers.
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And in fact there’s nothing about wearing sandals or drinking fruit juice that means one votes Labour not Tory.
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From the 2nd World War on this ‘consumer’ society has risen. All of us like some aspect of it, and many of us hate others. The rise of green politics gives a new opportunity for critics of Capitalism. Likewise this ‘Boho Left’ continue their habits of rejecting mainstream culture hence a new stoic aesthetic. The hybrid has precipitated a line whereby not only the structure of capitalism but its products are questioned.
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This is also sensible in the light of ecological economic impacts and the endless potential of modern technology to ask the when is enough enough question. However as Andrew says the answer might not be best answered by government. Much of the rhetoric, however, is not sensible because it attempts to assert the idea that abundance itself, is a bad thing.
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Naturally this is not a feature of the entire Left but a section thereof. Likewise the entire Right does not endorse Intelligent Design.
Surely there’s a trade-off though — I mean, can you think of one one example of (state) collectivism of any kind that doesn’t involve arbitration on individual choice? Even non-compulsory services involve the collective making decisions about the individual’s money, through tax. I think there is a deep tension between these two ideals.
*gasp!*
Tension between the individual and society?
NNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
My ideology was just two days from retirement!!!!!!
Motivation and outcome of motivation,and outcome as motivation.So say if I was in office the PM. and I saw from statistics and from my own anecdotal evidence,the big Australian family was an unhappy lot.And that unhappiness seemed to have as many outcomes as it has factors.And I thought,because,it seemed to me,I was in some sort of position that could attempt to apply government to the wheel ,on this subject,and I had some of evidences that end up as statistical differences when new factors replaced in individual lives,ended up as them saying they are happier now or such words, And I only found a number of critics who suggested on the basis of what they thought was the limitations to what government should do because of a definitional point associated with the traditional moment of the philosophical foundations of the Party, or some point about democracy.I then had to persuade myself in some manner that was accountable in an economic sense to allowing happiness to be a function of a general outcome of economic efficiences for the general outcome ,maybe called the general good.I wouldnt want to make the error of only my insight on happiness can be the only one,but, does that then suggest that the outcome would meet others expectations of!?.We have seen this group of unemployed singers getting heaps of publicity and seems to have changed their lives.Yet,I am similar in some ways,and I am both jealous and accepting,but, the obvious comparison,when I make it is quite disillusioning.When a certain number of young people were supported from Newcastle and now are elder spokespeople on assisted musicians,I was jealous and accepting ,but now I am completely insulted by them.If happiness,maybe a function of gaining others attention as well as what one does in gaining that attention,then there is certainly going to be a problem sometimes in assisting people to be productively happy.
You don’t say, FDB. That’s the way with those generic-model dilemmas—let the tension snap back too quickly and it’ll take your f’n eye out.
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I *love* Spiked, by the way. The authors transparently have so much fun writing stuff they certainly don’t believe, that it’s really difficult not to share the contrarian joy. It’s quite unlike the genuine decentist article which is like watching a hospital patient constantly tapping on a sore spot.
Let’s hear it for Spiked. Whadda we want? Booze and smokes! Whennawewannem? Let the State help the market decide!
Kim
What do “maximising equality in solidarity with one another” and ‘pursuing happiness collectively’ even mean?
Mod: comment disappeared.
Got spaminated. Now unspaminated.
HH, I find the meaning of those two phrases perfectly plain. Statements of broad political intent and political philosophy are by definition somewhat abstract in that they provide an end not a means. Would you find “life, liberty and happiness” equally obscure? Kim is making a fairly unproblematic and classic statement of the aims of social democracy - together we ought to maximise the chances that each of us can pursue our own goals through minimising inequality. You can debate whether that’s what ought to be a societal goal, but its meaning is crystal clear, I’d have thought.
Stimulating post, Kim.
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Commercial therapy options for Victims of Comfort*, an overview.
Field of Dreams: Build it and they will come, pay at the turnstiles, and afterwards, return home happy, chatty and collectively.
Couch of Bad Dreams: First define a dis-ease. Publicise it and they will lie on the couch, spill their guts, grasp their(Pfizer)prescriptions, pay “their therapist”, return home alone, and re-couch weekly till they either wise-up to the rort, or run out of what it takes to get along.
*Keb Mo
The pursuit of happiness “is best pursued collectively”.
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Is it?
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Given that it is linked by you to liberty let’s think about that: liberty is obviously best not always pursued collectively. Most of us want to be alone sometimes, to be free of certain persons sometimes, to be free of the judgement of others.
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That is a core aspect of liberty. The freedom to act and interact without necessary interferance or coercion.
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Likewise happiness. It mean different things to different people. Some people are happy attending heavy metal concerts. Their happiness will not be enhanced if they have to bring along people who hate metal. And these latter will certainly not be happy subjected to ‘headache’ music when they could be at home listening to Marvin Gaye or Schubert. So happiness, and the liberty to pursue it, we could agree is not always a collective endeavour.
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It’s not always individual either. One is not ‘free’ if compelled to spend most of the waking day as a slave to the money. And in jobs where the individual hasn’t much bargaining power, happiness is indeed pursued collectively.
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Happiness for the workers , that is.
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Such happiness comes at the expense of the employers who may indeed indulge in their own happines at the expense of their workers should there be no collective bargaining.
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These conflicts of liberty and happiness are commonplace. I can’t endorse the individual/collective dichotomy, like everything else it’s a negotiation that will never satisy everyone.
In the more libertarian strands of social democratic (and socialist) thinking, which I think it’s fair to say is where Kim and I and some other LPers are coming from, the aim is collective action to pursue the equality which is the absolute precondition of meaningful liberty and choice for as many people as possible regardless of their initial circumstances in life.
Individuals everywhere all rely on some collective somewhere to do turn up to work, pay their bills, have children and obey the law. Just ask Wall St how much those fat individually well earned bonuses running into the billions, now ultimately depend on that despised collective, the European, Japanese and Chinese taxpayers, the ultimate ‘guarantors’ of sovereign funds, who have cheerfully ‘pitched in’ courtesy of their Central Banks, to ease the pain of those fearless, brave, adventurous entrepreneurs, who now find themselves a bit like some CentreLink ne’er do well, reduced to relying on the kindness of others. But of course in the latter case, their impecunious state is no ones’ problem except theirs, and indeed that is the way it should be, since to treat it differently would lead to a sense of ‘entitlement’ in people that should know better . In the former, the temporary embarrassment, is suddenly a problem for ‘all of us’.
Funny that. Oh well, I guess the definition of ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ is after all, not just a matter of ‘quantity’, but includes an important and irreducible component of qualitative measurement as well.
And given that people’s liberty is probably inherently curbed the liberties of others (think peak hour traffic) it’s fair to say that when one person or group pursues liberty they will often do so at the expense of the liberties of others.
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How this works and who is speaking the truth at any given time will be effected by where you stand on issues like the extent to which the labour market should be regulated. Given that I’m currently attempting to look at these things anew by learning more about them, I’m currently not committed to any position.
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Neither a capitalist nor socialist be: ’cause capitalism necessitates loans and loseth friends and socialism dulleth husband’ry.
“To me, the liberalism you deride tries to create the situation where as many as possible get to make that decision for themselves - resolving the “contradictionâ€? you believe exists in a very simple way, that being that it is no business of the State to make that decision for anyone. The individual is, as much as possible, left to decide that for themselves.”
Education is crucial in this equation, specifically how to isolate a real decision from some interpelating bullshit.
Kim, perhaps the opening sentence of this post is meant to be flippant but I find it pretty strange. You seem to be equating that general philosophical proposition that governments should aim to promote the happiness of citizens, with a particular empirical claim about the extent to which material consumption determines well-being. Is that what you intended?
If you want to critique the ‘happiness project’, by the way, you’ve chosen a particularly soft target in Oliver James.
, says wikipedia.
Perfectly sensible theory to me. Can’t quite put me finger on the source of the evident LP animus here. Can’t see anything vaguely against the pursuit of happiness or liberty. In fact it seems to be considering the same goals - merely pointing out that many may be taking a blind alley by putting too much store by material success.
Can’t see any advocacy of stoicism much less for something as vile as camomile tea. And the “therapy culture” charge O’Neill brings is a fit up. James does not advocate we all go into therapy.
As one who has recently gawn part-time to redress “work/life” imbalance at home, I see great merit in this critique of overwork.
Oh dear, poor Clive. His heart is in the right place but he looks most times as if he goes home to a boiled boot for tea and a bed of nails. So much for green stoicism, or the art of letting Shrek gnaw your vitals on behalf of the planet.
Not just “therapy culture” either. I must admit I have a deep-seated and abiding hatred for lavender websites with chirruping midis attached subtly selling some snake oil or other and banging on about “healing”, with an attached forum where hundreds of seriously disturbed dually-diagnosed fat ladies from Alabama can testify to the intervention of Christ or some nature goddess in curing their tinea.
A slight diversion. The traditional representation of the political spectrum is linear, going from extreme Trotskyists, say, on the left to Nazism on the extreme right, with us somewhere slightly left of the middle I presume. I would like to submit that it is probably more like a circle or torque, and that the ends touch.
Making this point also is Andrew O’Hehir in this piece from Salon magazine
I posted that link to illustrate how the various political “isms” on the bar of the political torque almost always have philosophical or religious fellow travellers, like those oxpeckers on hippos.
For example there is the conflation of Neoconservatism with fundamentalist religion. As Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss’s most prominent critic, says, Strauss taught “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them”. Fundamentalist Christianity matched with millenial Zionism was the vehicle of choice for the Bush White House. The population was to be kept dumb and pious while the true elite ruled. Or to paraphrase Paul Keating “Dumb them down and feed them bullshit.”
Mark
What you have written makes even less sense. It reads like a spiel generated randomly by a Pol. Sci. 101 rhetoric generator. Also, I am a bit old fashioned, and think it is inappropriate for men to presume to speak on behalf of women. Let’s wait for Kim’s response.
Hermione, LP is a collective, thus we often speak for each other, because that way commentors receive a timely response from a collective member who is online rather than having to wait for the particular person who isn’t currently online to address their comment, at a time when the thread will have moved on.
I, as Mark, find Kim’s statement to be an unremarkable summary of a fairly standard liberal utilitarian position: collective pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number will provide the best base for individuals to seek their own happiness.
What tigtog said, and what Mark said.
HH, if you’re genuinely seeking clarification, I’d be inclined to respond. If you’re being snarky (which your tone indicates), I can’t be bothered.
James, I was being a bit flippant in the opening sentence, but I had in mind a comment from someone on the other thread about Ken Henry’s personal views.
Adrien, the key distinction here is negative liberty vs. positive liberty. “Freedom from” vs. “freedom to”. I suspect we’ve actually ended up with a distortion of the former (ie you’re not just free to do what you like if it causes no harm to others, you’re to be incited to restrict your impulses in various ways for your own good) and a forgetting of the latter - that you need a certain degree of social support to be able to maximise your own potential for living what you consider to be a good life. The collective dimension comes in when people choose together to create the preconditions for meaningful choice. I see feminism, for instance, as such a project.
And amused makes a very cogent argument at 29. There’s always the implication that “overconsumption” is the fault of all those uppity workers.
While I agree with the general intent of the argument I have some reservations about the way it is expressed.
In particular I note that the opening sentence of O’Neill that is quoted can - and is - used to cut the other way as well: “Even the poorest today live better material lives than quite well-off people from Dickensian times, so the poor should just stop complaining. Clearly capitalism is good for them.”
Kim
This is true. I’ve often wondered, considering the metahistorical tendency for democracies to decline because of the erosion of the ethos that underpin them (endlessly arguable), if ‘freedom’ can be maintained. The post 9/11 spectacle of patriotic vervor beat the collective chest: rah rah Western culture aren’t we so civilized, democratic and free. Simultaneously there was an alarming lack of questions about a very wide range of incursions on free speech, legal process, checks and balances and the separation powers particularly by the Bush administration. Our own government however was hardly blameless.
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It seems to me that if the ethos of democracy in the Anglosphere had been functional we wouldn’t have the reintroduction of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the extension of the surveillance society and mercenary corporations duplicating the military and exempt from legal penalty.
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These things should unthinkable.
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Likewise we have an explosion of legislation designed to prevent us from making mistakes. If something goes wrong; if there is tragedy or disaster, the impulse is to demand government action without considering whether or no it’s warranted or useful to do so. Shit happens, laws won’t change that.
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BTW I’m not opposed to collective action (feminism for example). I just wonder how useful the collective/individual dichotomy is. It seems they are sacrosanct objects of the left and right respectively each sovereign and mutually hostile even tho’ neither can exist without the other.
spiked.
Meh.
A bunch of failed middle-class Trotskyite hacks, who took on the all-too transparent cover of rationalist science-based free-marketeer libertarians, coz the Trotskyite schtick wasn’t selling. But still the same bunch of arrogant authoritarian idiots full of outraged ideological hot air that they always were.
How about actually addressing their argunments Hilker? and how is it authoritarian to argue against other people being bossy-boots about other peoples’ pleasures?
Back to front, Jason. Nobody’s being bossy about other people’s pleasure. They’re diagnosing other people’s stresses and displeasures.
Many on this thread wilfully confuse happiness with riches. A common mistake. Ask that famous herbal tea drinking stinking hippie, Jaysus H.
Like a lot of other people, I simply stopped reading when I saw Spiked was the source. They’re simply not credible enough to read, let alone respond to.
What wwb said, to which I would add the obvious fact that the sort of consumption levels that most of us currently think are reasonable are unsustainable in even the short term.
I haven’t read enough of Clive Hamilton to say for sure, but I would have thought that the environmental consequences of our current consumption levels would be a central part of his argument.
And the pursuit of happiness will seem like a vague fantasy if/when the planet slowly dies, in large part as a result of our obsession with possessions and consumerism.
Yes and also what wbb said…
Yeah, I’m not that hardline on the politics of consumption (call me old fashioned, but I still see production as the major focus, eg environmental pollution by major industry makes mum & dad’s end user decisions on flat screeens seem relatively unimportant), but nonetheless I think we are encouraged to live in ignorance by the regulatory framework.
eg the UK will be introducing meters in each house which show the money being consumed by power, not just the wattage. apparently it has a big impact on consumer behaviour.
And further, I fail to see why products that make other citizens less safe (eg 4WDs) should be given legitimacy by being treated within the paradigm of “choice”. Make city users pay the full duties on those cars, and while you’re at it, slap a big fat road safety/ environmental/ parking fat-arse levy on the bastards.
Oh yes, and they should have to justify why they need such a specialised vehicle in an urban area.
If they really have a caravan to tow or a burning desire to go off-road in wilderness areas, they can rent one. What they spend on petrol each week to feed these monsters would give them a bright new rental and driver once a year for the hols.
It may stop the looong procession of over-protective mums on my narrow one-way inner west rat run street every peak hour, with offspring too precious to walk to school or catch the bus lest they encounter ‘TEH PAEDOPHILES’.
Woops forgot to fix the name
Normal service is now resumed…..
I’m pretty much with wbb, here. What’s wrong with talking about curbing consumption? We know that after we reach a certain level of comfort, it won’t make us any happier.
I would probably have to describe myself as basically socialist but herbal tea doesn’t do it for me, I am more of a beer man - it’s a good, old fashioned working class drink.
Lefty E and Proposagnostic, I agree that 4WD’s are basically unnecessary in city areas. I do own one myself though (I live in a semi-rural area) and use it to tow a camper trailer fairly regularly. But smaller, more efficient cars and improved public transport are probably the way to go for city dwellers.
Fine, I agree all the way here. Clive Hamiltion’s “Affluenza” is a good read - sounds like you might have read it already? I am a fairly low income earner, well below that of many other workers here in this resource boom area. However, apart from the fact that my job suits me down to the ground, I am much richer in TIME than many (comparitively) money-rich people here are. I have four lots of gauranteed holidays a year - I cannot be asked to defer them. I use the time to do what I love doing - travelling around the country and now overseas as well. It’s great to be able to accumulate a wealth of actual experiences of people and places, rather than only have the time to sit at home watching it on a 20 grand, ultra-wide screen, mega digital surround sound home entertainment system.
I believe Clive Hamilton to be spot on - there are plenty of people who are confused about what it takes to lead a satisfying and fullfilling life.
I think Clive Hamilton raises some very valid points and welcome his social critique.
IN contrast, the following quote from O’Neil could be interpreted to sound suspiciously like social (emotional?) darwinism with a measure of Nietzsche thrown in.:
“I say we should resist the attempts by James and others to relieve us of our “emotional distressâ€?. Prickly emotions are frequently the triggers for change, making people strive for better and more meaningful ways of living. James, who advises the government on social policy, argues that “well-being should be a high governmental priorityâ€?. No, it should not; government-imposed “happinessâ€? or “satisfactionâ€? would only churn out an emotionally complacent populace trained to be satisfied by the simple life. We may all be on the edge - but some of us are looking over it, to see what will come next”
WHile i percieve that what he wants to communicate is that the placating of individual or social angst by fostering a medicalised theraputic culture or stop gap social policy can circumvent a broader and more thorough reconstruction of society, something suggests to me that perhaps instead of an idealistic solidarity, there is a thinly veiled contempt for the masses who he perceives allow themselves to be placated by the governmental/social opiate of whatever ilk.
WHich i don’t think is a helpful starting point. Nor do i think it reflects the breadth of social policy in Aust -The increasing prevalence of the Recovery Model in mental health policy for example - or a lived experience with the complexities of disadvantage.
Yes, surprising how few people pushing globalisation, either economically, politicially. socio-economically and/or conceptually, back in the 20th century didn’t quite grasp it would actually involve the whole bloody globe.
“OMG, now China, India, a bunch of 2nd world countries, etc, while stealing our jobs, are also getting rich off globalisation too and now they want to enjoy the same goodies as us Westerners. But that will just gobble up the whole planet’s resources won’t it? We’re gonna be ‘rooned I tells youse. ‘rooned!”
Time to move off planet (Hello Kim Stanley Robinson - a Boeing engineer seconded to NASA told me Kim’s books were a complete cult within that Imperial but quite confused agency) or to bioengineer gills (Hello Deep Ones. Sorry about the barrels of toxic waste, driftnetting and unrecoverable nukey shit still spattered around down here and there. Now move over).
Good thing we’re homo sapiens. I can’t think of any other species with enough energy, ingenuity and ambition to get out of a really tight spot while also passing the buck and blame onto what’s left behind.
Gills. More orifices, you say Nabs. We gonna have to decommission the nose then.
Sometimes. Those bastards on Easter Island didn’t impress.
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90210
Samatta, Jack, The HAL-9000 series don’t generate it for you no more? Keep this up and we’ll have to let Kier Dullea loose on yer innards.
Sublime Cowgirl, that reminds me of a friend’s therapist who just wouldn’t admit the validity of said friend’s argument that one of the reasons she sufferred from depression was because there was so much politically awful stuff occurring in the world. It was as though emotions could only be attached to the personal and the political had nothing to do with it. Get a new therapist I say.
Boy from Flynn, I haven’t read Hamilton and sometimes he seems a bit puritanical for me. But, surely we can see that getting richer doesn’t mean getting happier, after a certain level.
But, I must say I love widescreen tv’s as DVDs are my indulgence. But, LCDs are much better for the environment than plasmas, I’ve read.
Jack, I’ll see you 00100010 01010100 and raise you 01110010 01100001
Sublime Cowgirl, I’m not so sure about this…
… there is a thinly veiled contempt for the masses who he perceives allow themselves to be placated by the governmental/social opiate of whatever ilk.
O’Neil might just as well be seen to be sympathising with the large masses of people who complain about the intrusion of bureaucracy into their lives, and who still enjoy cigarettes/alcohol/drugs in social situations, and so on.
‘Sublime Cowgirl, that reminds me of a friend’s therapist who just wouldn’t admit the validity of said friend’s argument that one of the reasons she sufferred from depression was because there was so much politically awful stuff occurring in the world. It was as though emotions could only be attached to the personal and the political had nothing to do with it. Get a new therapist I say.’
Reread the quote and apply it to the Stolen Generation apology or people living with domestic violence.
“I say we should resist the attempts by James and others to relieve us of our “emotional distressâ€?. Prickly emotions are frequently the triggers for change, making people strive for better and more meaningful ways of living. James, who advises the government on social policy, argues that “well-being should be a high governmental priorityâ€?. No, it should not; government-imposed “happinessâ€? or “satisfactionâ€? would only churn out an emotionally complacent populace trained to be satisfied by the simple life. We may all be on the edge - but some of us are looking over it, to see what will come nextâ€?
Government social policy that has social wellbeing as one of its goals in not always individualistic in theory and application. I reject the notion that Govt has no role in working toward the wellbeing of its citizens as naive. It seems a false dichotomy to say if the state has any role or interest in social wellbeing it precludes a role in social restruction from within (and without).
“I reject the notion that Govt has no role in working toward the wellbeing of its citizens as naive. It seems a false dichotomy to say if the state has any role or interest in social wellbeing it precludes a role in social restruction from within (and without).”
Indeed, but the critique of ‘overconsumption’ is misdirected, or rather it’s less important than other things. Let’s look at workplaces, at public space and services first before we start to worry over whether or not our neighbour should have bought that plasma tv.
You presume these things are not connected?
They may well be, but I think the critique of overconsumption has got it’s priorities wrong even where there is genuine cause for concern.
I was listening to Mr Harvey from Harvey Norman a couple of days ago explaining why he was solidly against any further education, warnings or (gasp) regulation pertaining to buy now pay later offers, despite the increasing number of defaults and repossessions. His rationale was that people are adults, they know what they are getting themselves into, and its their own fault if problems arise later.
I’m surprised he hasn’t installed poker machines in his shop. I guess its that old nanny state regulation on social wellbeing getting in the way again.
[link]From the link:
Measuring emotional and social wellbeing in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations: an analysis of a Negative Life Events Scale
Background: Policy advancements, methodological problems
The poor health of Australia's Indigenous people relative to the nation's population is well documented. Indigenous people on average live 17 years less than other Australians, and suffer higher rates of nearly every type of illness and injury [1,2]. The reasons for these disparities are complex, but undoubtedly relate to a history of colonisation and ongoing disadvantage. Australia's approximately 450,000 Indigenous people, which make up 2.4% of the population, are more likely to live in remote areas far from services, less likely to be educated or employed, more likely to be jailed, and less likely to have adequate housing [2].
While the well-known determinants of health inequality, such as employment, education and wealth, have been extensively studied in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, it is only recently that the social and emotional aspects of health have received much attention. Since the 1990s it has been widely recognised in Australia that mental illness and stress are significant problems for Indigenous people, as well as direct causes, moderators and modifiers of physical ill-health [3-5].
The increase in interest in this area has been in response to the efforts of Indigenous leaders to raise the profile of mental health/Emotional and Social Wellbeing (ESWB) on the national policy agenda, through what has been called the Indigenous Mental Health Movement [[6]:85] (Note that the term 'Emotional and Social Wellbeing' is currently the term used within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health policy to represent an area that includes mental health [7]). It represents, in part, an attempt to recognise Indigenous definitions of health which see health holistically [[8]:ix]. Indigenous people have expressed that ESWB is important for its own sake and have outlined some of its dimensions:
Enhancing emotional and social wellbeing involves support for healthy relationships between families, communities, land, sea and spirit...A focus on strengthening communities and culture is fundamental to empowering individuals and communities to identify and meet their own needs. Strong healthy communities are those where individuals experience a sense of belonging, trust, participation and social support [[9]:9].
I agree that there should be greater transparency with respect to those kinds of ‘pay nothing now’ deals: it should be regulated to the extent that people are making informed choices, and that the terms aren’t ridiculous. Defaulting on an appliance is not as big a problem as the shortage of public housing, for example, or the lack of help for those leaving abusive relationships. The list goes on. Let’s have a nanny state that can get its priorities right. I’m all for interfering in the name of social wellbeing, believe me, but lets leave people to their ‘wasteful’ pleasures.
Jack, JPZ and sorcerer: 42.
I’ve been following this thread carefully trying to decide what I think, and the only useful conclusion I’ve come to so far is that it would be a shame to throw out the baby of simple pleasures with the bathwater of dud ideology. As far as the alleviation of emotional distress is concerned, there’s not much that can beat a cuddle, a Terry’s chocolate orange, a new Val McDermid, a nap with a cat, a basketful of ironing, or if you’re really desperate, Beethoven’s late string quartets.
“it would be a shame to throw out the baby of simple pleasures with the bathwater of dud ideology”
Agreed, Dr Cat. I think there is a qualitative difference between finding the pleasure in simpler things and curtailing desire. If we are to have an individual ethics of consumption, let it add something to the world, or show us something we didn’t realise was there. This dispute seems to come from the tension between morality and ethics, where morality involves adherence to principles and ethics is about cultivating practices.
Terry’s chocolate orang! Yum. Years since I’ve had one of those.
I certainly disagree with a lot of Hamilton’s positions. However, I think the crucial point of value he makes is that if we cut back our lifestyles for environmental reasons we won’t actually suffer much at all, because most of what we’re cutting out isn’t much good for us.
Without an environmental crisis it wouldn’t be the government’s job to worry about these things. But in a situation where we have multiple environmental crises and people sitting around saying The Australian/American way of life is not negotiable because its so important for our happiness Hamilton’s point is valuable (although it would be better if it wasn’t being espoused by someone who seems so keen to avoid pleasures that aren’t environmentally destructive as well).
This is where its relevant to consider the source you’ve linked to. Spiked are deliberately propagating lies which