Empire of Illusion

by Chris Hedges

  “Now some flowers bloom just once. But others, like these day lilies,” she says, pointing to the slides of the blue and now red flowers, “they close up every evening and they bloom again when they see the sun. . . . Our minds are like these day lilies. Yet their openness honors momentary shifts in our positivity.” Frederickson pauses. “Positivity is to our minds what the sunlight is to day lilies.”

  Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park claim to have found the statistically most important “character strengths” in every society around the world. Peterson and Park stand on opposite sides of the stage. The large screen between them shows a bar graph titled “Adult Character Strengths.”

  “We have our adult questionnaire online,” says Peterson. “I think to date it’s been completed by about 1.3 million people. Pretty soon it will be the whole world! But about 100,000 people into this, we simply calculated the more common versus less common character strengths, and we have arranged them here.”

  Peterson gestures at the graph.

  “What’s interesting is that on the left side are certain strengths that are more common, like kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude. And, we wonder, and other people have said this, if these might not be the sorts of strengths that are necessary for a viable society? It’s kind of hard to imagine a viable society in which these things are not present.

  “Now what I left out is, ‘Who do these data refer to?’ Well, this particular graph is 50,000 Americans. But we subdivided it into all fifty states, and you get the same distribution across the fifty states.”

  Peterson chuckles.

  “Oh yeah, we also looked at fifty-four other nations, and you get the same distribution across the nations . . . I remember we sent it to a journal,” Peterson says confidently, “and the first journal editor rejected it, and he said, ‘You didn’t find anything different, any differences.’”

  Peterson comically slaps himself on the head, mugging in mock disbelief.

  “I said, ‘We found human nature!’” Peterson throws his arms out. “Isn’t that good enough!?”

  Peterson goes on to talk about the less important indicators. “Oh, look what’s on the bottom: Self-regulation—that’s like staying on a diet. That’s why I am hiding behind the podium!” The crowd chuckles.

  “Modesty,” he says. “Like, ‘God, we are good researchers!’” The crowd laughs louder. “You get the idea!”

  Kim Cameron is dressed in a black suit with a red tie. He is Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan, where he is co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizational Culture. Cameron has come to talk about how corporations can use positive or “virtuous” practices to improve profits.

  “All organizations exist to eliminate deviance,” says Cameron. “The reason we organize is to minimize unexpected, chaotic, unpredictable behavior. Right? Organization exists to eliminate negative deviance. The problem is, it also eliminates positive deviance. We organize, and thereby, by definition, we eliminate positively deviant or extraordinary or spectacular or virtuous behavior.”

  Cameron says he shows business executives how happiness, compassion, and goodness can increase profits. Cameron’s clients include Fortune 100 companies, but also small organizations, nonprofits, and county governments. Clients range from the YMCA to the trucking industry. Cameron reminds the audience he is not in it for the money, but for the fulfillment he gets from his work. What matters is feeling good. He sells harmony ideology to corporations.

  Most positive psychologists belong to the 148,000-member American Psychological Association (APA), which has lent its services for decades to the military and intelligence communities to research and perfect techniques for interrogation and control. Psychologists working for government agencies in the 1950s and ’60s conducted human experiments and discovered that psychological torture, including sensory and sleep deprivation, was far more disorientating and destructive to the human psyche than crude beatings and physical abuse. They refined psychological techniques to ensure complete emotional breakdowns. Psychologists are the only group of major health-care providers who openly participate in interrogations at military and CIA facilities. The American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have forbidden members to participate in military interrogations. But the APA, despite complaints and resignations by a few of its members, has refused to ban its psychologists from interrogations, including at notorious torture sites such as Guantánamo Bay.

  A May 2007 Pentagon report by the inspector general’s office acknowledged that psychologists oversaw the adaptation of the military’s Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape (SERE) program for use against prisoners. SERE was first designed to replicate torture techniques and help U.S. troops resist Chinese and Soviets interrogators. But, in the hands of army and intelligence psychologists, SERE has been reverse-engineered to break prisoners held in American interrogation centers. The sleep deprivation, lengthy stress positions, complete sensory deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, and forced nudity are systematically employed to reduce prisoners to a state of utter helplessness. Many become catatonic. The psychologists monitor the steady deterioration of the prisoner and advise interrogators how to employ techniques to complete the psychological disintegration.

  Psychologists, in and out of the government, have learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders. Personal values, those nurtured by an independent conscience, are gently condemned as antagonistic to harmony and happiness. Those who refuse under group pressure to become harmonious are deemed a drag on the corporate body and, if they cannot be reformed, expunged. Those who are willing to surrender their individuality are granted small rewards doled out by the corporate structure. They can feel, at least until they lose their jobs, that they belong to an important and powerful collective. They can adopt a corporate identity. They feel protected. The greatest fear becomes the fear of disrupting the system, of becoming an impediment to the harmony of the corporate collective. The quest for harmony, which these psychologists understand, lures people into a state of psychological somnambulism.

  Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader argues that most oppressive systems of power, including classical Western colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the idea of social harmony as a control mechanism. There is a vast difference, Nader points out, between social harmony and harmony ideology, between positivity and being genuinely positive. Nader sees harmony ideology as a concerted assault on democracy. The drive for harmony, Nader argues, always lends itself to covert censorship and self-censorship. The tyranny of harmony, when pushed to the extreme, leads to a life of fantasy that shuts out reality. Nader sees the ideology of harmony as one that has slowly dominated and corrupted the wider culture.

  Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism. A related ideology was lauded by Business Week in the early 1980s as the “New Industrial Relations.”16 It was touted as a new form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer” than the earlier “scientific management” and social engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor.17

  Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and “quality circles.” The goal of such programs, González found, “was to end the adversarial relationship between management and labor through ‘self-managed’ work teams, and in so doing improve the efficiency and psychological ‘health’ of those involved.” He notes that these workplace reform programs have gone by several names, including “the team approach,” “employee participation,” “workplace
democracy,” “human capitalism,” and “quality of work life” programs.18

  During the 1980s American automobile corporations used this tactic of labor-management cooperation to compete with what was seen as the Japanese economic juggernaut. “ . . . [T]his can be seen, for example,” González recounts, “in the charts at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle plant in Detroit, which lists the sales figures of various American and Japanese cars. Next to these lists is a sign that reads, ‘You are entering the war zone, Quality and productivity are our weapons.’”19

  Workers at GM were arranged into “self-managed” “quality circles,” or teams of workers who form an identity. These teams competed with other teams to increase their productivity. “We and they” mentality is reduced and collapses into a collective “we.” Quality circles at GM gave themselves names such as “Joe’s Trouble Shooters,” “Positive Approach,” and “Loose Wires and Stripped Nuts.”20

  “Any status symbol that ferments class consciousness is removed from the workplace,” noted Robert Ozaki in his book Human Capitalism in an observation of a GM-Toyota plant in California. “There are no parking spaces or toilets reserved for executives. Managers and workers dine in the common cafeteria. . . . Production workers are called ‘associates’ or ‘technicians’ rather than ‘workers’ or employees.’”21

  Prestige systems, like those in the military, were employed at the Toyota plant at which Satoshi Kamata worked in the 1970s. He recalled how hats of different colors and stripes were used to distinguish rank: “ . . . two green stripes stand for Seasonal Worker; one green stripe, Probationer; one white stripe, Trainee; one red stripe, Minor; a cap without any stripe, Regular Worker; two yellow stripes, Team Chief. . . .”22 “At the same assembly plant,” González continued, citing Kamata’s book Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider’s Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory, “Good idea suggestions” were elicited from workers, and the number submitted by each worker was posted in the locker room.23 Similarly, one of Kamata’s closest friends boasted about the number of pieces he could produce in a work day. Production became a source of identity and prestige .24 Any incident or act that disrupted production was condemned. When a worker in Kamata’s quality circle was injured on the job, all members were forced to wear a “Safety First arm band.” This saw them stigmatized by others in the plant.25 Low prestige was attached to the arm band. Peer pressure--from a worker’s own team-- formed a strong disincentive for anyone to report a job-related injury to avoid having to wear the arm band.

  González in Brave New Workplace described a long and double-edged history of attempts to reconcile workers’ interests with those of corporations. It dated back to the “scientific management” methods of Frederick Taylor, who, in the name of efficiency, “‘streamlined’ assembly plants by conducting time-motion studies of each worker, breaking down each movement into a number of discrete steps, and then reorganizing them in a more efficient sequence by eliminating all unnecessary movements.”26 This dehumanization led Taylor’s disciples to take another approach. While some conservative followers focused solely on “productivity and efficiency,” liberal “business leaders, bankers, politicians, trade-union leaders, and academic social scientists” during the 1920s “tried to forge a viable corporate order.”27 They sought to establish a stable corporate state by implementing worker “uplift” programs, such as collective bargaining, profit-sharing, company magazines, insurance, pension plans, safety reform, workmen’s compensation, restricted work hours and the “living wage.” The idea that “better living and working conditions would render him [the worker] more cooperative, loyal, content, and, thus, more efficient and ‘level-headed’ . . . also carried over into such aspects of the industrial-betterment movement as gardens, restaurants, clubs, recreational facilities, bands, and medical departments.”28

  “Since at least a century ago, a number of engineers, businessmen, and scientists realized that technology was no longer the limiting factor of production; now, it was man that could be engineered, and made still more efficient, given the right motivation,” González wrote, quoting from historian David Noble’s book America by Design.29 “However there are two aspects of today’s industrial relations that are genuinely new: first, the specific psychological techniques used to motivate workers; and, second, the increased number of companies willing to experiment with these techniques.”30

  Toyota pioneered the new approach. “Toyota City” was built by the corporation to completely encapsulate and control the lives of its employees. “Total control over the social environment is an important component of thought reform programs,” González wrote.31 “At Toyota City, thousands of young men were housed in military-style dormitories, surrounded by a fence and a guardhouse.” He also describes how, “during the time Kamata wrote his account, visitors—including family members—were not allowed to enter the dorms to visit temporary workers. Roommate assignments often grouped men from the same town together,” because, “according to Kamata, ‘it helps them adjust to the new environment and stay put during the employment period.’”32

  These techniques were adopted by “U.S. bureaucracies and corporations, such as supermarkets, schools, banks, and government offices, including the Pentagon.”33 During the 1990s, American and Japanese automakers began pursuing what they called the Southern Strategy. They set up factories modeled on Toyota City in Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, where, they believed, a lack of unions and rural insularity made for a fertile environment .34

  González quotes Kamata’s personal account of Toyota City in the 1970s as an example of how emotional stress and sheer fatigue can create bewildering confusion and despair reminiscent of the experiences of those who are inducted into a cult. “When I come back from work,” Kamata recounts, “I do nothing but sleep. I try not to think about the job; even the thought of it is enough to make me feel sick. Mostly, I feel too tired to think about anything.” Several weeks later, Kamata slips into trancelike states on the assembly line:[S]ometimes I think of something totally illogical: landscapes with towns I once visited suddenly appear one by one. It’s impossible to concentrate on any one scene. . . . I’m not myself while I’m on the line. . . . It often surprises me to look up and suddenly find some strange scene in front of my eyes. In that split second I always wonder where I am. Merely seeing the light come in through a door on the opposite side of the building can bowl me over. . . . Again, for a few seconds, I’m totally disoriented.35

  This peer group approach replicates the techniques used in coercive influence and control programs in Communist China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. In these programs, the target subject “would become emotionally attached to the peer group members, who ‘came to know the target’s personality and history exceedingly well.’”36

  “ . . . [A] prisoner in Communist China would develop a circle of friends among his jailers,” explains González, “who could reward or sanction him according to whether or not his behavior fit their standards. Eventually, his behavior could be conditioned through peer pressure.”37

  Similar processes occur in the cooperative work groups. Kamata explains: “If Fukuyama, the worker on my right, falls behind, he’ll pull me behind, since I barely keep up with the work myself. Even if Fukuyama finishes his job in time, should I take longer on my job, then the next worker, Takeda, will be pulled out of his position. It takes enormous energy to catch up with the line, and if things go wrong, the line stops.”38

  Anthropologist Alejandro Lugo, who worked at a maquiladora plant in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, describes a similar experience. He dropped behind many times in his first few days of work, and writes that “the pressure would be almost unbearable” as members of his work group would shout at him for not keeping up.39

  When a temporary worker at Toyota City was injured and forced to quit, he told Kamata: “I’d have quit a long time ago. But I came here with Miura, so I can’t let him down.”40 Reflecting on these statements, Kamata argues that the “work h
ere is so difficult that people try to support and encourage one another, especially the ones who come here together. We feel it’s not fair to drop out and go home alone.”

  “Circle leaders often learn a great deal about team members’ personalities and histories, sometimes for the purpose of manipulation,” González writes.

  For example, at an assembly plant jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota in Fremont, California, a management handout, entitled “Facts a Group Leader Must Know,” implored team leaders to learn the birthday, marital status, anniversary, number of children, and hobbies of each circle member. Furthermore, “team members are encouraged to help each other deal with personal problems.” At a Toyota plant in Japan, team chiefs even used team members’ birthdays to calculate biorhythm charts, so that an individual’s “bad days” could be anticipated by the quality circle.

  At a General Motors plant, 22,000 employees partook in weeklong “family awareness training” aimed at “establishing a family atmosphere within the division,” where managers and workers did interpersonal activities.41 “One of the exercises worked at developing trust,” González summarized:Employees were paired up and then one of them was blindfolded and guided by the other. In another exercise, “Johari Window,” the object was to reveal as much about one’s “joys, fears, and needs” as possible—and in so doing, open the “window.” Another exercise, “Hot Seat,” took place on the last day of the training session: “One by one each person sits on the ‘hot seat’ and listens to group members say positive things about him or her. It is hard to say which is the more moving experience—sitting on the ‘hot seat’ or seeing those in the seat moved to tears.”42