Affluenza - Oliver James Flashcards
Introduction
Our drive for money and success is often not just a 9 to 5 habit but a disease of the mind.
We are all being emotionally snookered by the demands of 21st century living.
My inner life is governed by how much The Market values my work.
We have become absolutely obsessed with measuring ourselves and others through the distorted lends of Affluenza values.
The great majority of people in English-speaking nations now define their lives through earnings, possessions, appearances and celebrity.
Psychologists agree on 4 fundamental needs:
1/ We need to feel emotionally and materially secure
2/ We need to feel part of a community
3/ We need to feel that we’re competent
4/ We need to feel autonomous and authentic, masters of our destinies and not living behind masks
Virus values screw us up by conflating what we want with what we truly need, Having with Being.
By Selfish Capitalism I mean four basic things:
1/ The success of business is judged almost exclusively by the current share price
2/ A strong drive for privatising public utilities
3/ As little regulation as possible
4/ The conviction that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost every kind.
America is the apotheosis of Selfish Capitalism.
In a developed nation, rates of emotional distress increase in direct proportion to the degree of income inequality.
Emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies.
Life is to be enjoyed, not endured.
Part One - The Virus
For some it does not occur to them to retire and spend more time with their money or family because they don’t know what it is not to work.
Insatiable materialism
The pathological need to please and to join oppressive working environments is viciously exploited by large organisations.
Key Virus values = money, possessions, physical and social appearances and fame.
We might be hyperactively busy in our day-to-day lives, but inactive in our apprehension, like hypnotised zombies.
The widespread depression and anxiety by the Virus are crucial for Selfish Capitalism. To fill the emptiness and loneliness, and to replace our need for authentic, intimate relationships, we resort to the consumption that is essential for economic growth and profits.
Consumption holds out the false promise that an internal lack can be fixed by an external means.
We medicate our misery through buying things.
Needs have been replaced by confected wants that people did not know they had.
Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. You open up emotional vulnerabilities.
We should more practical about the need to earn money: I’m making a living, paying my bills; it’s a means to an end, not status.
Apple have cleverly persuaded purchasers of their computers that buying one will confirm their self image as creative.
Advertisers have to pretend that their product will confer identity.
Strongly materialistic people are often using money and possessions to give themselves a sense of the emotional security that they lack, dating back to childhood.
Depressed people make a greater number of social comparisons than the undepressed. Lacking self-esteem and confidence in their own adequacy, they spend more time checking out how they are doing relative to others.
A tendency towards upward social comparison is a defining feature of Virus psychology.
Constant exposure to desirable people creates what is known as a contrast effect: you start judging normal people against the attractive ones.
Consumerist haze
If money engendered well-being, millionaires would be the most contented folk on the planet as well as the richest.
In Britain, we have lost the consumption plot.
We are rapidly disappearing down the plughole of conspicuous consumption.
In terms of possessions, we accumulate so much stuff that we are finding there is nowhere to put it: self-storage facilities have been growing by 30% a year.
Don’t let your whole persona be work-oriented.
Erich Fromm’s Marketing Character experiences himself as a commodity whose value and meaning is externally determined.
Because most people lack identity, consumerism has found it easy to offer distractions and false individualism, supplied by possessions.
What do we hope to achieve by working all of our waking hours? This is the uncritical state in which the life of the mind plays little part and emotion is regarded as dangerous, to be caged through ‘rigid and fastidious’ thought-control.
In Fromm’s Marketing Society, the consumer must be permanently dissatisfied, or gratified only for the shortest possible time. Satisfaction would stop consumption, which would stall economic growth. This society needs people with an exaggerated sense of the importance of work, a false need for things and an endless desire to consume, no deep feelings or convictions, standardised tastes, suggestibility and uncritical minds.
The necessity of paying the mortgage often forces us to work long hours at jobs we do not find fulfilling.
Perpetual action is a defence against depression.
Am I just a salary-earning gerbil on a wheel?
Compared to Sydney, Melbourne has bit more depth, more cultural resonances, with a lot of people who are creative and have an intellectual life beyond.
In Singapore, the government has fostered the exclusive pursuit of material goals, very systematically, for 50 years.
Personal fulfilment must take second place to the creation of a more efficient machine for creating wealth.
Part Two - The Vaccines
Since 1970 there has been no increase in upward social mobility in Britain as a result of education. Your family background is still by far the strongest indicator of whether, and where, you will go to university.
To what extent should we ignore or suppress depressing truths in order to keep the show on the road? Obviously, it is best not to be in social or work settings which conflict with your core values.
Preference for understated authenticity.
There is always liable to be some measure of contradiction between your ideals and reality.
Although putting on ‘a face to meet the faces that we meet’ (TS Eliot’s words) is essential to some degree for all of us us everywhere, the more it resembles what lies behind, the more likely it will lead to the expression of our authentic needs (rather than confected wants), and not just the biological ones, like food or sex, but for relatedness to others and playfulness as well.
The Vaccines
1/ Your best is good enough
2/ It’s not your fault that you are who you are
Recognise the extent to which you are the product of your family and society protects against unmerited self-blame or exaggerated notions of your own value.
Awareness of what ‘caused’ you creates a much more balanced, stable basis for appraising your performance.
3/ Take responsibility for your life and live with the consequences
4/ Hope for the best, expect the worst
5/ Avoid black and white simplification, embrace complexity and tolerate contradictions
6/ Be as self-concordant as possible - the more you can align your values with your life, the better it will be.
Virus motives are reward and praise, looking for others’ approbation in order to feel pleased or disappointed by what we do.
The opposite of virus motivation is known as intrinsic motivation. Motivation is at its most intrinsic where interest, enjoyment and the stimulation of a challenge are paramount; they are done for their own sake.
In the context of work, people with intrinsic motives and goals have been shown to seek intellectual fulfilment, creative self-expression and a sense of mastery in completing tasks. The Virus-infected look for money and see work as the way to get it.
A major pollutant of the Virus-infected person’s inner life is their self-consciousness, triggered by excessive concern about what others think of them. By definition, they are preoccupied with recognition and status, conferred by others.
The infected tend to watch a lot of TV, rather than the joy and excitement of more challenging pursuits. They work longer hours and amass more debt, risking the sense of being trapped on a hedonic treadmill: working to earn the money to buy the possessions by which they measure themselves against others.
“The organ grinder, not the monkey” - The person who is in charge, rather than a lackey or representative
Actively wrestling to be the organ-grinder rather than the monkey of your experience is a sign of psychological vitality.
Home ownership is easily confused with identity - a property fallacy.
A major element of Affluenza is consumers feeling that their possession, bodies, even their minds, are inadequate.
Without necessarily realising it, nearly everyone in the developed world is concerned about what their possessions say about them.
Vaccines
1/ Keep it real when it comes to the size of your mortgage
2/ Be grateful for what you have got
3/ Disentangle your parents’ values from your own
Education has been hijacked by business. The goal is to create good little producers and consumers, whereas it should be an enquiring mind capable of both scholarship and of a playful, self-determined and emotionally productive life. The result is Virus distress.
The curriculum in the State system is being increasingly divested of subjects which will not contribute to the economy.
The key message is that the purpose of education is not to find out what has intrinsic interest for you, but to work hard at school for long-term financial reward. This is a prescription for the absence of flow during work, for low self-esteem and is death to the capacity to think imaginatively.
The great majority of people’s educational and subsequent career achievements reflect their class of origin far more than their individual efforts.
How strongly were you sucked into the way of confusing your self-estimation with the worth placed on you by academia.
Discourage your children from believing that the purpose of education is to launch a career.
Long before Erich Fromm, Matthew Arnold was writing that ‘culture is not a having but a being and a becoming’, and Oscar Wilde the ‘true perfection of man lies not in what man has but what man is’.
Anomie = rootless emptiness
The anxious, bored alienated person compensates for his anxiety by a compulsive consumption.
To a considerable extent, playfulness is what makes life worth living.
Vaccines
1/ Don’t wait for a disaster before getting real
There is all too great a risk that the unreality in which most of us live for too much of the time may become visible to us only when we know we don’t have much longer to live.
Our material affluence and our social contrivances adopted to achieve it must be resisted in favour of real needs and authentic Being.
2/ Scale down your interest in people you have never met
With television, use modern technology to be very judicious about what you watch - record, don’t graze live.
3/ Develop habits that prevent hyperactivity
You need to be highly organised about getting a good night’s kip, like a pilot preparing for touchdown.
Part 3 Wakey Wakey
Myopic = short-sighted, narrow-minded
Reject much of the status quo
English-speaking nations are designed to maximise the profits of a tiny minority of very rich people, not the citizens’ well-being or, for that matter, the survival of the planet.
As people get older, they tend to work this out for themselves.
Exam fever entails people-pleasing, and that drains away creativity.
If you can grasp the fact that modern education is largely about creating good little consumers and producers, and boxing us up ready to be sold to future employers, you can start to feel better about yourself and begin to think about what actually interests you.
Finding work that satisfies you rather than merely enabling employers to get richer is not easy.
The key is to examine what it is about your work that you find truly interesting, and put that before pay and promotion in seeking positions.
The trite notion of a work/life balance is really ‘Selfish Capitalism’s’ pretence that it actually cares about your well-being. It doesn’t. In fact, it prefers you to be a wreck because then you will consume more, to compensate for your feelings of worthlessness, in turn requiring you to work ever harder to pay off the credit card and mortgage.
The solution to role strain is to reject the prevailing obsession with educational and career performance, and consumer goods, as the foundation of your identity.
The education system still contrives to spit you out feeling a failure and largely clueless as to your true intrinsic interests.
Growing up means accepting that your life is always going to be a great deal less than perfect.
“If you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a few years, get married; if you want to be happy for life, get a garden.”
The measure of a good education should be an emotionally literate adult who is capable of fulfilling themselves, rather than one with high exam grades.
Much formal education is a destructive imposition that curtails self-expression and vivacity.
We are constantly pressurised to believe that our possessions are outdated and that new ones will increase our enjoyments, yet a moment’s thought reveals that this is rarely true.
