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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The imperative of happiness dictates the conduct and direction of our lives. There is no escape from the tyranny of positivity. But is happiness the supreme good that all of us should pursue? So says a new breed of so-called happiness experts, with positive psychologists, happiness economists and self-development gurus at the forefront. With the support of influential institutions and multinational corporations, these self-proclaimed experts now tell us what governmental policies to apply, what educational interventions to make and what changes we must undertake in order to lead more successful, more meaningful and healthier lives. With a healthy scepticism, this book documents the powerful social impact of the science and industry of happiness, arguing that the neoliberal alliance between psychologists, economists and self-development gurus has given rise to a new and oppressive form of government and control in which happiness has been woven into the very fabric of power.
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Seitenzahl: 331
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
All that glitters is not gold: misgivings and disbeliefs
Outline structure
Notes
1 Experts on your well-being
When Seligman had positive dreams
Experts know best
Notes
2 Rekindling individualism
Happiness and neoliberalism
The retreat to the inner citadel
Educating for happiness
Notes
3 Positivity at work
The anteroom of happy organizations
Inverting the ‘Pyramid of Needs’, or how happiness is now required to succeed
Conditio sine qua non
Notes
4 Happy selves on the market’s shelves
Manage your emotions!
Be yourself!
And flourish!
Notes
5 Happy is the new normal
Revisiting the average person
A fallacious divide
Keep resilient and don’t worry
Useless suffering
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
To Jara, for her boundless love, her clear mind, and her exemplary sense of justice
Edgar Cabanas
To the memory of my father, Emile-Haim, who preferred justice over happiness
To my children, Nathanael, Immanuel and Amitai, who give me much more than happiness
Eva Illouz
Manufacturing Happy Citizens
How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives
Edgar Cabanas
Eva Illouz
polity
First published in French as Happycratie, © Premier Parallèle, 2018This English edition © Polity Press, 2019This edition is published by arrangement with Premier Parallèle in conjunction with its duly appointed agents Books And More. All rights reserved.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Edgar Cabanas co-financed by the Talent Attraction Research Fellowship [2017-T2/SOC-5414], Community of Madrid, Spain.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3790-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cabanas, Edgar, author. | Illouz, Eva, 1961- author.Title: Manufacturing happy citizens : how the science and industry of happiness control our lives / Edgar Cabanas, Eva Illouz.Description: Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018056641 (print) | LCCN 2019005414 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537907 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509537884 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537891 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Happiness. | Positive psychology.Classification: LCC BF575.H27 (ebook) | LCC BF575.H27 C33 2019 (print) | DDC 158.1--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056641
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
What apocalypse has ever been so kindly?
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Introduction
The Hollywood movie The Pursuit of Happyness was an international hit in 2006, raking in a total revenue of $307,077,300 at the box office. The movie is based on the best-selling memoirs of Christopher Gardner, a lower-middle-class African-American who went from living in poverty to become a successful businessman, stockbroker and inspirational speaker. Set in the early 1980s, the film begins with Ronald Reagan delivering bad economic news on television. The timing of the announcement could not be worse for Gardner and his wife, Linda, both of whom struggle to keep themselves and their five-year-old son out of poverty. Gardner’s family situation is indeed dire: they can barely afford their rent, bills or his son’s day care. Persistent and talented, Gardner is a go-getter with a deep longing for a better career and, in spite of everything, he remains optimistic.
One day, while standing in front of one of the most prestigious stockbrokerage firms in the country, Gardner stares at the faces of the brokers leaving work: ‘They all look so damn’ happy’, he thinks; ‘Why can’t I be like them?’ This thought inspires him to become a stockbroker at that very same company. His charm and social skills get him admitted into a highly competitive yet unpaid internship programme at the company. His wife, Linda, however, does not support his dreams. When Gardner tells her about his intention of becoming a broker, she sarcastically counters, ‘Why not an astronaut?’ Depicted as Gardner’s foil, she represents the whiner, the pessimist and the quitter, abandoning the family just when things seem that they could not get any worse. Without the economic support of his wife, Gardner finds himself destitute. He and his son are forced to move to a homeless shelter after being kicked out of their apartment and then a motel.
Nevertheless, Gardner does not allow himself to be overcome by the circumstances: he maintains the outward appearance of success in front of the programme’s CEOs and his Ivy League competitors. He works day and night, combining two jobs while studying hard for the final internship test, and still takes good care of his son. But Gardner is driven: ‘Do not ever let somebody tell you that you cannot do something. You got a dream, you have to protect it. If you want something, go get it. Period’, Gardner tells his son while they play basketball. Gardner finishes at the top of the programme and finally gets his dream job. ‘This is happiness’, he declares at the end of the movie.
An interesting aspect of the international success of the movie is that it says a lot about the extent to which both the ideal and pursuit of happiness are omnipresent in our daily lives. Happiness is everywhere: on TV and the radio, in books and magazines, at the gym, in food and diet advice, in hospitals, at work, at war, in schools, in universities, in technology, on the web, in sports, at home, in politics and, of course, on the market’s shelves. Happiness has haunted our cultural imaginary, becoming per diem and ad nauseam present in our lives, so rarely does one go a day without hearing or reading about it. Indeed, a simple search on the web for the word ‘happiness’ yields hundreds of thousands of results. For instance, whereas Amazon listed no more than 300 books with the word happiness in the title before the turn of the century, today that list includes more than 2,000; and the same increase goes for the weekly number of tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts that people exchange every day. Happiness has grown into a fundamental part of our commonsensical understanding of ourselves and the world, a concept so familiar that we take it for granted. It feels and rings so natural today that to call happiness into question is odd if not audacious.
Nevertheless, it is not only the frequency and pervasiveness with which happiness shows up that have radically changed in the past few decades. The way in which we have come to understand happiness has radically transformed as well. We no longer believe that happiness is somewhat connected to fate or circumstances; the absence of ailment, the valuation of a whole life, or a petty consolation for the foolish. In fact, happiness is now generally seen as a mindset that can be engineered through willpower; the outcome of putting into practice our inner strengths and authentic selves; the only goal that makes life worth living; the standard by which we should measure the worth of our biographies, the size of our successes and failures, and the magnitude of our psychic and emotional development.
Most importantly, happiness has come to be presented as the very epitome and incarnation of today’s ideal image of the good citizen. Gardner’s story becomes especially interesting in this regard. Indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of the movie The Pursuit of Happyness is not what it says about the notion of happiness per se, but what is reveals about the kind of citizen that rightfully achieves it.1 What Gardner’s story actually proposes is that happiness is not a thing as much as a particular kind of person: individualistic, true to himself, resilient, self-motivated, optimistic and highly emotionally intelligent. In this sense, the movie simultaneously renders Gardner as the ideal embodiment of the happy person and presents happiness as an exemplary narrative of how to organize and mobilize the self around certain ideological values, anthropological assumptions and political virtues.
Gardner’s story, though, goes beyond the movie. The story of the real Christopher Gardner continued in the media, which was interested in Gardner’s life and how it could inspire millions with the idea that wealth and poverty, success and failure, happiness and unhappiness are actually choices. In 2006, Will Smith, who played Gardner in the movie, said in a series of interviews that he loved Gardner because, ‘he personified the American Dream’. On the Oprah Winfrey Show, Smith also mentioned that ‘America was such a great idea’ because it was ‘the only country in the world that Chris Gardner could exist’ (sic). Nevertheless, Smith forgot to mention that cases like Gardner’s are actually as exceptional in North America as they are in the rest of the world. He disregarded that North America is one of the nations with the highest income inequality and social exclusion rates in the world,2 so wealth and upward mobility are actually very hard to achieve for the majority of the population. Smith also failed to mention that North America is one of the countries where the belief that, whether winners or losers, individuals are the only ones accountable for their own success or misery is deeply embedded in the cultural and national unconscious – a meritocratic assumption that extends to Western countries at large, where there is an increasing tendency to see one’s particular situation in terms of individual deservingness rather than in terms of structural processes.3 The movie is a very representative instance of this, with Gardner depicted as the quintessential self-made individual, and his life as a sort of Social Darwinist struggle for upward mobility which ends with the key message that meritocracy works because persistence and personal effort are always rewarded.
The film’s success brought the real Christopher Gardner immense global fame in the years that followed. He gave hundreds of interviews during which he shared his secret to happiness and explained why ‘happyness’ was spelled with a ‘y’: ‘the “y” is there to make us all mindful that it is YOU and YOUR responsibility to make the life you want for you. The cavalry ain’t coming. It’s about you.’ Gardner, a successful stockbroker turned motivational speaker, found his true mission in life: sharing with the world his hard-won wisdom about the power of people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and turning adverse circumstances into opportunities for growth and success. Named ambassador of happiness in 2010 for AARP, a non-profit organization with more than 40 million members worldwide, Gardner was fully devoted to spreading a simple message: just as selves can be moulded, shaped and transformed through willpower and the right know-how, happiness can also be engineered, taught and learned.
Gardner’s message, though, was at the very least paradoxical as well. At the same time that he claimed that happiness was about ‘YOU, YOUR responsibility, and only yours’, he nevertheless argued for the necessity of experts like him to guide people in this endeavour. Undoubtedly, Gardner was trapped in the everlasting paradox embedded in the myth of personal reinvention, to wit that even self-made individuals need instructions and guidance, after all. Gardner’s thinking, indeed, was not new. On the contrary, it comes out of a deep-seated tradition of mixed ideological, spiritual and popular features that have long fed a powerful market built on the commodification of lifestories of self-change, redemption and personal triumph – a sort of ‘emotional pornography’ aimed at shaping the way people should feel about themselves and the surrounding world. Indeed, turning these stories into exemplary biographies aimed at teaching people what to become to be happy has been a constant in American culture, one which traces back via Oprah Winfrey in the 1990s and Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s to Horatio Alger in the late 1880s and Samuel Smiles in the 1850s.4
The pursuit of happiness is actually one of the most distinctive exports and chief political horizons of North American culture that has been spread and pushed forward with the help of a wide array of non-political actors, including self-help writers, coaches, businesspeople, private organizations and foundations, Hollywood, talk-shows, celebrities and, of course, psychologists. Nevertheless, only recently did the pursuit of happiness cease to be a mainly North American political horizon to become a multibillion global industry operating alongside (and with the complicity of) hard, empirical science.
Had it been released in the 1990s, The Pursuit of Happyness would have gone relatively unnoticed amongst the vast array of stories of personal triumph that filled the market, especially the non-fiction bookstore shelves and Hollywood’s catalogue of cheesy drama movies. But in the 2000s, the situation was different. Founded in 1998 and handsomely financed with North American funds, the emergent science of happiness or positive psychology had already taken over the task of explaining why the pursuit of happiness should be self-evident not only for North Americans – as written in to their constitution – but also for the rest of the world. According to these psychologists, all individuals are driven by an inherent urge to be happy, so the pursuit of happiness should be seen not only as natural, but as the highest expression of their realization as human beings. Psychological science, it was claimed, had already hit on some of the key factors that would help people to lead happier lives, and anyone could benefit from such discoveries by just following uncomplicated, albeit proven, expert advice. Certainly, the idea did not sound new, but coming from the headquarters of psychological science it nonetheless seemed worthwhile to take it seriously. In a matter of years, the movement had achieved what no other had achieved before: it introduced happiness at the top of the academic priorities and set it high on the social, political and economic agenda of many countries.
Thanks to positive psychology, happiness was no longer considered a nebulous concept, a utopian goal or an inaccessible personal luxury. Instead, it became a universal objective, a measurable concept around which these scientists claimed to have finally spotted the psychological features that defined the healthy, successful and optimally functioning individual. It turned out, though, and to a great extent unsurprisingly, that these features almost perfectly matched those embodied by people like Gardner himself. According to positive psychologists, high levels of emotional intelligence, autonomy, self-esteem, optimism, resilience and self-motivation were the typical psychological features of self-managed, authentic and flourishing people who displayed higher levels of happiness, health, and personal success. Indeed, the profile of the happy individual bears such close resemblance to Gardner’s that it was claimed that the movie qualified as a high-quality positive psychological film.
The appearance of positive psychology at the turn of the century was a game changer. Gardner’s inspirational sermons no longer appeared to be mere mottoes about the power of individuals to lift themselves up, but rather, a scientific truth. Positive psychologists indeed provided the lofty legitimacy of science to powerful institutions, Forbes Top 100 multinational companies, and a multibillion global industry widely interested in promoting and selling the same simple idea that Gardner touts in his talks: anyone can reinvent their life and become the best version of themselves by simply adopting a more positive outlook on themselves and the surrounding world. To many, the pursuit of happiness had become a serious issue whose scientific approach would yield enormous social and psychological benefits. To many others, however, the science behind all these rosy promises of personal realization and social amelioration, both in theory and in practice, cast too much of a shadow over many of its most apologetic claims, disquieting uses and contentious effects.
Time has proved the sceptics and critics right: sure enough, all that glitters in happiness is not gold, so we should approach its science and enticing promises with caution.
All that glitters is not gold: misgivings and disbeliefs
The question then arises: is happiness the most important goal we should all strive towards? Perhaps. But, if we consider the discourse of happiness scientists, then we must remain critical. This book is not against happiness, but against the reductionist, albeit widespread view of ‘the good life’ that the science of happiness preaches. Helping people feel better is a commendable intention. That really goes without saying. But in the light of what the science of happiness has to offer in this regard, we are not so sure that its idea of happiness – henceforth, only ‘happiness’ – is without serious limitations, controversial claims, contradictory results and ill consequences.
Our reservations about happiness are based on four main critical concerns: epistemological, sociological, phenomenological and moral. The first might be called epistemological because it is concerned with the legitimacy of the science of happiness as science – and by extension, of its concept of happiness as scientific and objective. To put it bluntly, the science of happiness is a flawed science – and, as such, so too is the rationale behind the notion of human happiness that this movement posits. The pragmatist Charles Pierce once said that a chain of reasoning is no stronger than its weakest link, and the science of happiness relies on several unfounded assumptions, theoretical inconsistencies, methodological shortfalls, unproven results, and ethnocentric and exaggerated generalizations. This makes it difficult to uncritically accept everything this science claims as true and objective.
The second concern is sociological. Irrespective of how good or bad as science the science of happiness might indeed be, it is essential to interrogate and examine which social agents find the notion of happiness useful, what and whose interests and ideological assumptions it serves, and what the economic and political consequences of its broad social implementation are. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the scientific approach to happiness and the happiness industry that emerges and expands around it contribute significantly to legitimizing the assumption that wealth and poverty, success and failure, health and illness are of our own making. This also lends legitimacy to the idea that there are no structural problems but only psychological shortages; that, in sum, there is no such thing as society but only individuals, to use Margaret Thatcher’s phrase inspired by Friedrich Hayek. The notion of happiness as formulated and socially implemented by happiness scientists and experts works too often as little more than the handmaiden of the values which brought about the radical revolution of the world formulated by Chicagoan and other neoliberal economists, who, from the 1950s onwards, convinced the world that the individual search for happiness was the most worthwhile and the only realistic substitute for the search for the collective good – as Thatcher herself remarked on the occasion of an interview for the Sunday Times in 1981: ‘What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society […] Changing the economics is the means of changing that approach […] Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’5 In this regard, we argue that the pursuit of happiness as devised by happiness scientists does not represent the unquestionable and supreme good that we should all seek but epitomizes the triumph of the personal society (therapeutic, individualist, atomized) over the collectivist one.
The third concern might be called phenomenological. It relates to the fact that too often happiness science not only fails to deliver, but also breeds a great many unacknowledged, undesirable and paradoxical outcomes. Certainly, the science of happiness builds its proposal of well-being and personal fulfilment upon the very same therapeutic narratives of deficiency, inauthenticity and un-self-realization for which it promises solutions. As happiness is established as an imperative albeit moving goal with no clear end, it produces a new variety of ‘happiness seekers’ and ‘happychondriacs’ anxiously fixated with their inner selves, continuously preoccupied with correcting their psychological flaws, and permanently worried about their own personal transformation and betterment. Thus, whereas this makes happiness a perfect commodity for a market that thrives on normalizing our obsession with mental and physical health, this obsession easily turns against the very same people who pin their hopes on the many types of happiness products, services and therapies offered by scholars, professionals and so-called wellness experts.
Lastly, the fourth concern is moral and involves the relationship between happiness and suffering. In identifying happiness and positivity with productivity, functionality, goodness and even normality – and unhappiness with the exact opposite – the science of happiness places us at the major crossroads of a choice between suffering and well-being. This assumes one always has a choice – positivity and negativity are two diametrically opposed poles – as well as the possibility of ridding our lives of suffering once and for all. To be sure, tragedies are unavoidable, but happiness science insists on suffering and happiness as a matter of personal choice. Those who do not instrumentalize adversity into a means for personal growth are suspected of wanting and deserving their own misfortune, regardless of their particular circumstances. So in the end, we are not given much choice: the science of happiness not only obliges us to be happy, it blames us for not leading more successful and fulfilling lives.
Outline structure
Chapter 1 tackles the relationship of happiness to politics. The chapter begins with an overview of the rise and expansion of the most influential fields in the scientific study of happiness since the turn of the century: positive psychology and happiness economics. The chapter focuses on the foundational aims, methodological assumptions, social and academic reach and the institutional influences of both fields. It then argues that happiness research has wormed itself into the very fabric of government. The presentation of happiness as an objective and measurable variable allows happiness as a chief, legitimized criterion to steer first-order political decisions, assess social and national progress, and settle controversial ideological and moral issues (e.g., inequality) in a rather technocratic and non-moral fashion.
Chapter 2 addresses the relationship of happiness to neoliberal ideology. We argue that happiness proves useful in legitimizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through the neutralizing and authoritative discourse of positive science. The chapter first reviews positive psychology’s literature to show the extent to which the movement is characterized by strong individualist assumptions as well as by its narrow sense of the social. Then the chapter shows that whereas positive psychology might capture people’s longing for solutions, especially in times of social uncertainty, happiness recipes might themselves contribute to sustaining and creating some of the dissatisfaction which they promise to remedy. The chapter ends with a critical note on the introduction of happiness into the sphere of education.
Chapter 3 focuses on the organizational realm. It deals with the extent to which investing in one’s own happiness has come to be rendered as a conditio sine qua non for workers to navigate the emerging conditions and requirements of the world of labour. We argue that by displacing previous psychological models of work behaviour, the science of happiness articulates a renewed discourse for the construction of workers’ identities that allows for organizations to better adapt workers’ behavioural patterns, sense of worth and personal prospects to the emerging needs and demands of organizational control, flexibility and power distribution within corporations. The chapter also discusses the extent to which happiness repertoires and techniques facilitate workers’ acquiescence and conformity to corporate culture; exploit positive emotions as productive assets for corporations; and facilitate the displacement of the burden of market uncertainty, scarce employment, structural powerlessness and increased work competition onto workers themselves.
Chapter 4 analyses happiness as a commodity. It develops the idea that in twenty-first-century capitalism happiness has become the fetish commodity of a global and multibillion industry including things such as positive therapies, self-help literature, coaching services, professional counselling, smartphone applications and self-improvement tips. Here we argue that happiness has become a series of ‘emodities’ – namely services, therapies and products that promise and enact emotional transformation,6 circulating and exchanged in a market. These emodities follow a circuitous route – they may start as theories in university departments but quickly follow different markets, such as corporations, research funds or consumer lifestyles. Emotional self-management, authenticity and flourishing are not only ways of making the self constantly produce itself but a way for various institutions to make emotional commodities (or emodities) circulate in the social body.
Chapter 5 picks up on previous chapters to argue that the scientific discourse of happiness is progressively hijacking the language of functionality – to wit the language that defines what it is to perform, act and feel within psychological and social standards and expectations – thus establishing itself as the yardstick to measure what is considered healthy, adaptive and even normal. The chapter first analyses the strong divide that happiness scientists posit between what they consider positive and negative emotions, which they draw upon when revisiting the notion of the ‘average person’. We challenge this division by highlighting some of its pitfalls from a sociological perspective. The chapter then hinges on the relationship of happiness to suffering and ends with a critical reflection on the perils of rendering suffering as something instrumental, evitable and ultimately useless.
Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control our Lives aims to contribute to the lively debate on happiness from a critical sociological perspective. It builds on our previous works in the fields of emotions, neoliberalism, happiness and therapeutic culture,7 articulates and expands some of these arguments, and introduces new ideas on the relationships between the pursuit of happiness and the ways in which power is wielded in neoliberal capitalist societies. The term ‘happycracy’ – the title of the original edition – is here coined to emphasize the particular interest of the book in showing the new coercive strategies, political decisions, management styles, consumption patterns, individual obsessions and emotional hierarchies that, together with a new notion of citizenship, have emerged in the age of happiness. The book concludes with a more personal reflection on happiness and its truncated promises.
In recent years, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, journalists and historians have published an abundance of works dealing with happiness from a critical perspective. Prominent among these are the works of Barbara Ehrenreich8 and Barbara Held9 on the tyranny of positive thinking, Sam Binkley’s10 and William Davies’11 analyses of the relationships between happiness and the market, and Carl Cederström’s and André Spicer’s12 exploration of wellness as ideology, to name only a few that also inspire this book. Since happiness remains a rather controversial concept of notorious cultural, social, political and economic impact, we expect further publications.
Notes
1.
Edgar Cabanas, ‘“Psytizens”, or the Construction of Happy Individuals in Neoliberal Societies’, in
Emotions as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity
, ed. by Eva Illouz (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 173–96.
2.
Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman,
Distributional
National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States
, NBER Working Paper No. 22945, December 2016 <
https://doi.org/10.3386/w22945
>.
3.
Jonathan J. B. Mijs, ‘Visualizing Belief in Meritocracy, 1930–2010’,
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
, 4 (2018) <
https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118811805
>.
4.
Eva Illouz,
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular
Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
5.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475
6.
Eva Illouz, ed.,
Emotions as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity
(London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
7.
Eva Illouz,
Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Eva Illouz,
Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Illouz,
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery
; Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, ‘The Making of a “Happy Worker”: Positive Psychology in Neoliberal Organizations’, in
Beyond the Cubicle: Insecurity Culture and the Flexible Self
, ed. by Allison Pugh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 25–50; Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, ‘Fit fürs Gluck: Positive Psychologie und ihr Einfluss auf die Identität von Arbeitskräften in Neoliberalen Organisationen’,
Verhaltenstherapie & Psychosoziale Praxis
, 47.3 (2015), 563–78; Edgar Cabanas, ‘Rekindling Individualism, Consuming Emotions: Constructing “Psytizens” in the Age of Happiness’,
Culture & Psychology
, 22.3 (2016), 467–80 <
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X16655459
>; Edgar Cabanas and José Carlos Sánchez-González, ‘Inverting the Pyramid of Needs: Positive Psychology’s New Order for Labor Success’,
Psicothema
, 28.2 (2016), 107–13 <
https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2015.267
>; Cabanas, ‘“Psytizens”, or the Construction of Happy Individuals’; Edgar Cabanas, ‘Positive Psychology and the Legitimation of Individualism’,
Theory & Psychology
, 28.1 (2018), 3–19 <
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354317747988
>; Illouz,
Emotions as Commodities.
The authors wish to acknowledge that some paragraphs and sentences from these sources have been partially reproduced in this book.
8.
Barbara Ehrenreich,
Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World
(London: Granta Books, 2009).
9.
Barbara S. Held, ‘The Tyranny of the Positive Attitude in America: Observation and Speculation’,
Journal of Clinical Psychology
, 58.9 (2002), 965–91 <
https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10093
>.
10.
Sam Binkley,
Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life
(New York: SUNY Press, 2014).
11.
William Davies,
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and
Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
(London and New York: Verso, 2015).
12.
Carl Cederström and André Spicer,
The Wellness Syndrome
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
1Experts on your well-being
We live in an age consumed by worship of the psyche. In a society plagued by division of race, class, and gender we are nonetheless bound together by a gospel of psychological happiness. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female, straight or gay, we share a belief that feelings are sacred and salvation lies in self-esteem, that happiness is the ultimate goal and psychological healing the means.
Eva S. Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust
When Seligman had positive dreams
‘I have a mission’,1 declared Martin Seligman a year before running for president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States, with more than 117,500 members.2 Seligman was not sure what his mission was exactly, but he believed that he would find out once elected.3 He already had some things in mind, amongst them doubling research funding for mental health, further expanding the scope and reach of applied psychology to the field of prevention, and turning away from the dull, negative, disease model of clinical psychology. ‘But at bottom’, he said, ‘that’s not it.’4 He had a more ambitious goal in mind. Seligman was looking for a new psychological perspective on human nature that could rejuvenate psychology and extend its scope and influence.
Seligman’s ‘eureka’ moment came only a few months after being ‘surprisingly’ elected president of the APA in 1998. While weeding his garden with his five-year-old daughter, Nikki, he yelled at her for throwing weeds into the air and she replied: ‘Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.’5 According to Seligman, ‘Nikki hit the nail right on the head’ and he suddenly ‘realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining’, but about amplifying her ‘marvelous strength’.6 As with parenting, he said, the problem of psychology was to focus on fixing what is wrong with people rather than nurturing what is right with them to help them develop their fullest potential. ‘This was an epiphany for me, nothing less’,7 claimed Seligman in the inaugural manifesto, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’, published in American Psychologist in 2000. Seligman stated that he did not have a ‘less mystical way’ to explain the genesis of positive psychology. Indeed, offering the same epiphany narrative that religious leaders tell their followers, Seligman stated ‘I did not choose positive psychology. It called me […] Positive psychology called to me just as the burning bush called Moses.’8 Thus, as if descended from heaven, Seligman claimed to have finally found his mission: the creation of a new science of happiness to inquire about what makes life worth living and to discover the psychological keys to human flourishing.
But as is often the case with revelations, the picture of positive psychology presented in the inaugural manifesto was vague. Cherry-picking from evolutionary, psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical claims and concepts, the rubric of positive psychology was rather eclectic and poorly delineated. The manifesto resembled more a declaration of intentions than a solid scientific project. ‘Like all selections, this one is to some extent arbitrary and incomplete’, claimed the authors of the manifesto, who rushed to clarify that the special issue was intended only to ‘stimulate the reader’s appetite’ regarding the ‘offerings of the field’.9 But, what did the field really offer? For many, nothing new: old, scattered claims on self-improvement, happiness and deeply rooted American beliefs on the power of individuals for self-determination, clothed in positivist science, and whose history could be easily traced back via the adaptability psychologies and self-esteem movements of the 1980s and 1990s, the humanistic psychology of the 1950s and 1960s, and the consolidation of the self-help culture and ‘mind cure’ movements throughout the twentieth century.10
Indeed, it might be well said that, very much like the main character from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the newborn positive psychology seemed to have come into existence quite aged. Not for its fathers, though. In Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s own words, the newborn field offered ‘a historical opportunity […] to create a scientific monument – a science that takes as its primary task the understanding of what makes life worth living’.11 This included positive emotions, personal meaning, optimism and, of course, happiness. In this guise, positive psychology was optimistically announced at the highest levels of academic psychology as a new scientific enterprise able to expand its results ‘to other times and places, and perhaps even to all times and places’.12 Nothing less.
The idea raised eyebrows and sparked scepticism, to say the least, but Seligman was determined to push his mission forward. While in his 1990 book Learned Optimism, the former behaviourist and cognitive psychologist said that ‘optimism may sometimes keep us from seeing reality with the necessary clarity’,13 the epiphany changed him – as he put it, ‘in that moment, I resolved to change’.14 Seligman did not want to label his proposal as behaviourist or cognitivist, or even as humanistic, but to start a brand-new scientific field that could gather as many adherents as possible. After all, the road to a more positivist orientation towards the scientific study of happiness had already been paved: although timidly, it had already begun to be outlined in psychology in the early 1990s with the works of Michael Argyle, Ed Diener, Ruut Veenhoven, Carol Ryff and Daniel Kahneman, all of whom claimed that previous attempts to understand happiness had a meagre impact, lacked theoretical consistency and credible assessment procedures, and were excessively value-laden. Thus, perhaps aware that there was something fanciful about the newborn field of positive psychology – ‘you might think that this is a pure fantasy’, the founding fathers admitted – the manifesto concluded with a rather encouraging and confident statement: ‘the time is finally right for positive psychology […] We predict that positive psychology in this new century will allow psychologists to understand and build those factors that allow individuals, communities and societies to flourish.’15
In the weeks following his election as president of the APA, cheques started ‘appearing’ on Seligman’s desk, as he put it. ‘Grey-hair, grey-suited lawyers’ from ‘anonymous foundations’ that only picked ‘winners’ called Seligman for meetings in fancy buildings in New York, wondering ‘what is this positive psychology?’ and asking him for ‘ten-minute explanations’ and ‘three-pager’ proposals: ‘a month later, a check for $1.5 million appeared’, said Seligman. ‘Positive psychology began to flourish with this funding.’16 The field, indeed, expanded to unprecedented levels in a very short time. Already in 2002 the field had amassed around $37 million in funding. It seemed to be the right time to publish the first Handbook of Positive Psychology
