Under the Skin - Will Storr "Selfie" Flashcards
Where did the ideal of the perfect self come from?
Important to have some of the language of academia.
The ‘Selfie’ is the story of the Western self. In our modern culture, we are surrounded by the image of the perfect self. It’s somebody in their 20’s, with a washboard stomach, they are globally minded and entrepreneurial.
Who is the person and how did it come to be?
The story began 2500 years ago in Ancient Greece. Who we are as a people is very much a product of the ‘geography of thought’.
The ecology of Ancient Greece (no farming, individual city states, large coastal areas for trade - encouraged innovation of ideas and debate) shaped an individual way of being human as opposed to any collective notion.
Narcissus saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus lost his will to live. He stared at his reflection until he died. Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a fixation with oneself and one’s physical appearance and/or public perception.
We can contrast Ancient Greece with East Asia, the land of Confucius. To get along and get ahead you had to be part of a collective. The superior self does not seek notoriety.
Westerner and East Asians literally see the world in different ways - for example, major differences in how we take selfies. Westerner prefer individual selfies, whereas East Asians prefer to take them in large groups.
There is no such thing as self (Yanis Varoufakis). We exist in dialectic, we exist in conversation. How can you individually exist without relationship?
In China the idea of somebody suffering unfairly for the benefit of the group is far more acceptable. They privilege the group over the individual. China would be far more prepared to tolerate human rights abuses.
A Japan CEO taking his own life (because the company is failing) might be seen as an honourable act.
The brain asks the question ‘Who do I have to be in this environment in order to get along/ahead in the tribe that I’m in?’.
There are various interesting neurobiological things that happen. ‘Neural pruning’ is one of the ways in which the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neutrons are not activated, they’re killed. It’s what’s taken away, not what’s added, that makes us who we are.
During the middle part of the 20th century, it was actually more of a collective time in the West - unionisation, regulation on banking and business, jobs for life etc - it spawned the hippies.
If you compare the political/economic landscape from 1965 to 1985 there is a vast difference. There is an absolute transformation in who we are due to neoliberalism, Thatcher and Reagan (the 2 swiftly developed an ideological love affair).
Thatcher: “Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul”. She meant that British people had to rediscover the virtue of traditional values such as hard work and thrift. The “something for nothing” society was over.
Many of the policies pioneered by her government in Britain were copied in the rest of the world: privatisation, deregulation, tax cutting, the abolition of exchange controls, an assault on the power of the trade unions, the celebration of wealth creation rather than wealth redistribution.
Thatcher: “The British people had given up on socialism. The 30-year experiment had plainly failed – and they were ready to try something else.”
In 1982 we had something weird happen on our maternity wards. Rather than give children ‘ordinary’ names, parents began finding unusual and distinctive and crazy names for their kids. It’s also the beginning of the keep-fit revolution. Then we have yuppies. We start changing because who we need to be to get ahead has been redefined by neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism: a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism. It’s a small-state economic ideology based on promoting “rational self-interest” through policies such as privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and tax cuts.
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Neoliberalism essentially wants to gamify all of human society. It wants to turn human life into a massive competition. Abolish the welfare state and the unions, and everybody has to look after themselves.
Never mind structural unemployment (resulting from industrial reorganization, typically due to technological change) - if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising.
In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.
Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers.
Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed.
Young people are brands and individual nodes of profit today. It’s Thatcher’s wet dream.
Today, (with the rise of Corbyn) we are seeing the beginning of a mass rebellion against neoliberalism.
What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed.
Globalisation is the neoliberal project: the desire to build a globalised mass market of consumers.
There was a big revolution in American thinking. For generations back through Freud, back through all of Christianity, we had the idea that a human being is essentially bad. There is original sin, the Oedipus complex (child’s desire to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex i.e. males attracted to their mothers).
Then Carl Rogers (US humanistic psychologist) comes along and says this is wrong. Human beings are amazing. People needed to be treated with ‘unconditional positive regard’.
The environment changes first and then we attach, en mass, to the idea.
Out of these ideas comes the self-esteem movement. Social esteem came to be seen as a ‘social vaccine’. We thought it was the cure for everything, and could make to us more competitive contestants in this great neoliberal game.
We have started raising generations of children, year by year, who have become more narcissistic than the cohort before.
How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John “Vasco” Vasconcellos. That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced that raising the population’s self-esteem would act as a “social vaccine”, saving the state billions.
But Vasco’s plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day; at the heart of his project was a lie.
There was no positive link between self-esteem and good outcomes.
Good exam results were causing high self-esteem rather than the other way round.
Storr’s “eureka” moment came when he discovered the work of Roy Baumeister whose research comprehensively debunked the mooted positive effects of high self-esteem.
The human potential idea still exists today. It is this toxic lie, that we tell people, that you can be anything you want to be.
It’s very inspirational but we what we forget about this idea is that, when you fail it’s deserved.
The model of pathway into suicide is having unrealistically high expectations.
We cannot transform our personality. We are animals and we are biologically limited. We cannot all be Beyonce or Brad Pitt.
The idea of change and potentiality is, however, very important to people.
We are not born with a blank slate. We all have different biological constitutions and different abilities.
We live in a neoliberal environment and the hero of this culture is a myth. It’s a construct/facsimile that we are all tormented by.
The most vulnerable groups for suicide are middle-aged men because they realise that are never going to be this person they ‘ought’ to be.
The material world has nothing else to give you. It only wants to take from you.
The self is an event, rather than an object. It is the conscious awareness of our own experience.
We should not abandon the pursuit, despite the shortfalls of individualism.
Individualism turns its back on the fact that we are a tribal animal - we are a connected species.
The middle 20th century was a time of greater equality. We had more collectivisation, higher regulation and unionisation. It was known as the ‘Great Compression’.
We think of ourselves as individuals but we’re essentially just walking brands.
We are a particular kind of tribal species (like the chimpanzees) in that we are groupish, prone to attack, and preoccupied with status.
This story-making has a name. It’s called ‘confabulation’. In an ordinary, healthy brain, it tends to make us feel good about ourselves and the reality that we feel we’re at the centre of. Religion is a kind of confabulation. It’s a story that explains the origin of life and the universe while answering profound questions about death, loneliness and morality. Another story is the notion that your family is special, or that your political ideology is important. None of this is true. To insist we matter is to conduct a circular argument: people matter because they matter to people (in which case, if you got rid of all the people, it wouldn’t really matter). But we must believe these tales – and we do.
