Responsibility without power is a formula that is bound to create trouble, and that is exactly what has happened. Just about any psychological study of employee motivation shows the negative impact this has on commitment, motivation, and job satisfaction, as well as on the quality of the work done. In the pre-digital age, directors took policy decisions, and plans filtered down from headquarters to the various branches and departments. This process took months, and had the advantage of involving the lower echelons. Very often, modifications to plans were proposed further down, to tie in better with the reality of the work floor, usually without senior management even having to be consulted. Implementing plans was largely the joint responsibility of the various echelons; this enhanced the quality of decision-making as well as staff motivation. These days, it only takes a couple of weeks for a decision from senior management to be conveyed to the work floor, completely sidestepping all the intermediate levels.5 Their task has been reduced to executing a plan that was dreamed up elsewhere, usually with the involvement of external consultants.
Thus the feeling of ‘belonging’, so strongly promoted in the initial stage of the meritocracy, disappears completely. On top of this, staff are increasingly hired on a project-by-project basis, so that they have to work furiously and compete with one another right from the start in the hope that their contract will be extended. This system can only reward a few ‘winners’, giving rise to fear (‘Will I keep my job?’) and jealousy (‘I bet he’ll be kept on, he’s always sucking up to the boss’). The lack of team spirit creates a need for team building, not infrequently — oh, irony — in the form of corporate survival (of-the-fittest) weekends. Solidarity makes way for general mistrust. Loyalty to and identification with the enterprise are things in which employers must literally invest. The death of team spirit can even be seen on the football field. The Belgian politician Louis Tobback, once a keen football fan, lamented: ‘I can see 11 private limited companies running round the field, players whose only thought is, “Where can I earn more next season?” ’
Thus a neo-liberal meritocracy leads to its own point of departure: universal egotism. Efforts to account for this often entail very strange reasoning. Taking their lead from populists such as Theodore Dalrymple, many blame the welfare state, with its emphasis on solidarity, for the increase in ‘sponging’ and ‘skiving’. From a psychological perspective it makes more sense to attribute the current sense of entitlement and the rise of individualism to a society that teaches people to pursue their own advantage, irrespective of and, if needs be, at the expense of, the other. ‘You only live once.’
The loss of a communal code of ethics has led to a new, purely utilitarian morality. Everything is quantified in terms of production, growth, and profit. Organisations must therefore carry out frequent evaluations, which soon come to resemble controls. Every individual is suspect, since everyone is focused on their own profit. On top of that, organisations are run by individuals who necessarily also seek their own profit, and who are consequently even more suspect. They, too, must be evaluated and controlled — which raises the question of who is controlling the controllers. In a society of this kind, authority ceases to be invested in identifiable figures. Instead, it is wielded by bureaucratic powers in anonymous organisations.
As a result, people feel that their rights are being eroded, and they distance themselves even more from the organisations they work for. The more rules and regulations proliferate, the more everyone tries to escape from them. That isn’t even difficult: scope for fiddling with recording and measuring systems increases in proportion to their growth. As a consequence, measurement becomes less and less reliable, necessitating even more checks on employees. A climate of fear and uncertainty prevails.
New personality traits
A look at meritocratic neo-liberalism shows that it favours certain personality traits and penalises others, thus perpetuating the system. Koen Meulenaere, a columnist writing for the Flemish weekly magazine Knack, described the ideal characteristics needed to make a career.
The first requirement is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact will be superficial, but since that applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed. It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can — you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt, and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel very little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour. If something goes wrong, it’s always the other person’s fault. You usually even manage to get them to believe that, because you have elevated manipulation into an art form. If that doesn’t work, you resort to instrumental or ‘goal-oriented’ violence. You apply violence rationally, without being distracted by trivial matters like emotions. Feelings aren’t your strongest suit, anyway; unfeelingness is what you’re best at, and simulating emotions is a routine component of successful manipulation. On top of all this, you are extremely flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and new challenges. In practice, this leads to highly risky behaviour; but, never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces.
The source of inspiration for this little list? A manual of psychopathy.6 Meulenaere’s description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the current financial crisis illustrates at a macro-social level (in the conflicts between Eurozone countries) what a neo-liberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation. Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak — in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
A decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms results in what Richard Sennett has very aptly called ‘infantilisation of the workers’.7 Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (‘He got a new office chair and I didn’t!’), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others, and cherish petty feelings of revenge. I see this as the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults. If you treat someone like a child, that person is likely to behave like one, especially if he or she has little or no chance of escape.
Much more important is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Hegel sees recognition by the other as the basis of self-consciousness. Lacan regards identity development as starting with the pronouncement of the other: Tu es cela (This is you). We are haunted by the fear that the other will cease to need us: Veut-il me perdre? Does he want to get rid of me? Unconsciously, Sennett comes to the same conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being ‘Who needs me?’ For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one. They form part of the quantité négligeable, the makeweights.8
In a society which constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, an increasing number of people feel humiliated, guilty, and ashamed. They feel guilty because they’re trying to convince themselves that they needn’t have failed (‘If only I’d done that, then …’). The truth is simpler: ‘YOU don’t really matter.’9
Powerless perfectibility
A neo-liberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning that responsibility lies e
ntirely with the individual, and that authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. Nil volentibus arduum, nothing is too hard for those who really want it. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. And if we’re going to be quoting Latin, how about Vocavit servos suos (‘He called his slaves’) — the sentence with which, in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, the Evangelist Matthew starts his meritocratic parable about the talents.
The contemporary fiction that we are the captains of our fate conceals the fact that we are subject to a ‘permanent economic tribunal’, according to Michel Foucault.10 We have scarcely any redress against what he calls ‘biopolitics’ — a form of control that is forced upon us, and that extends to every aspect of life, from relationships, child rearing, diet, education, housing, healthcare (physical and mental), and social care, to the media and the environment. He clearly understood neo-liberal economic thinking; this has little or nothing to do with politics in the true sense of the word.
Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom that we perceive ourselves as having in the West is the greatest untruth of this day and age. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as follows: ‘Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.’ We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can slag off religion (though we have to be careful when it comes to Islam and Judaism), take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex, and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance — freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka feel weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.
We feel this hidden yoke all the more when it comes to that second lie, perfectibility. Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful — that is, ‘make’ something of ourselves. Here, the Aristotelian notion of self-realisation as the ethical cultivation of the seed of self gets an extremely contemporary interpretation. The freedom to choose another form of self-realisation, outside the success narrative, is very limited. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before his or her career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy — unless those other things ensure success. A girl who wants to become a primary-school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics — a primary-school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of!
In chapter two, I referred to laments about the perceived loss of norms and values. We are now better placed to see this claim in context, and to refute it. It’s true that the old norms and values — and therefore the old ethics — have virtually disappeared. Initially, at least, this was generally regarded as liberating; these days, it tends to be seen as a threat. It’s striking that in both cases ethics is perceived as something external to us, and which we can therefore ‘have’ or ‘lose’. In chapter two, I showed that this view resulted from centuries of Christian ethics interposing a transcendent relationship between man and God. Norms and values lay outside man, with God. When we wrote off God, it appears we also wrote off ethics. This reasoning is faulty because norms and values are an integral part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed society reflects a changed identity and, along with it, changed ethics.
Efficiency is the new norm, material profit the new goal, and greed the new virtue. Looked at from this perspective, there is no ethical difference between bankers who bamboozled people into making unsafe investments while awarding themselves exorbitant bonuses, British parliamentarians who submitted forged expense accounts in 2009 (arguing that it wasn’t against the rules), and the young people who looted London’s shopping malls under the motto ‘If you can’t make it, take it.’ And these are just scaled-up instances of what we ourselves do in our daily lives.
How does the new ethics measure up ethically? The question itself shows the circular nature of the issue. We don’t have an objective yardstick for measuring different ethical systems. The fact is that many people, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, are all for neo-liberal ethics, especially the heroic version presented in Atlas Shrugged. It’s not for nothing that this novel by Ayn Rand is the bestselling book in the United States after the Bible. Her way of thinking tied into an American tradition. At the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926, a display would light up every 15 seconds, telling the visitor that yet another hundred dollars of his (or sometimes, her) money had been spent on care for people with ‘bad heredity, including the insane, feebleminded, criminals, and other defectives’.11 Note the juxtaposition.
Objectively judging the value of an ethical system is as difficult as objectively judging the value of a psychiatric diagnosis. The two are closely connected, by the way, as will emerge in the next chapter. Some go so far as to claim that ethics is based on some kind of law of nature.12 I do not feel qualified to pronounce on this, but I am convinced that our behaviour has an evolutionary basis. Lurking in the foliage of our evolutionary heritage are two fundamentally opposing patterns of behaviour. One is highly egotistical, and focused on ‘divide and rule’; the other is highly altruistic, and focused on ‘give and receive’. The studies by Frans de Waal discussed in chapter four show that the environment determines which tendency gets the upper hand. These days, it is the egotistical side.
The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.
SEVEN
THE NEW DISORDERS: RANK AND YANK
Certain films remain seared on the retinas of a generation of viewers. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is one of them. In the space of two hours, it highlights all the failings of mental-health care at that time: unreliable diagnoses, socially deviant behaviour being labelled as psychiatric disorders, compulsory treatment, overmedicalisation, and lobotomies. A little over a decade after it was made, still wet behind the ears, I was given the job of teaching clinical psychodiagnostics — a job that none of the professors in my department would touch with a barge pole. Research in the wake of the anti-psychiatry movement had shown that diagnostic labels were largely unreliable (a single patient would be given different diagnoses by different experts). The presumed biological foundation of those diagnoses had turned out to be largely imaginary. Psychopharmaceuticals were overprescribed, and treatment invariably amounted to compelling patients to conform to the norm. A great deal of attention was paid to this state of affairs in books, films, and the general media.
We are now a good 30 years down the road, and the situation is as follows. In the world’s most widely used handbook, the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), there has been a spectacular rise in the number of disorders in each new edition: 180 in the second edition, 292 in the third, and 365 in the fourth, while the latest, DSM-5, gives a diagnosis for many normal human emotions and behaviours. The number of people labelled with mental disorders has risen equally spectacularly during the period in question. Medically speaking, these labels have little significance, with most of the diagnoses being made on the basis of simple checklists. The presumed neurobiological origin of such disorders owes more to pharmaceutical advertising slogans than to scientific fact. Official statistics show an exponential rise in the use of pharmaceuticals, and the aim of psychotherapy is rapidly shifting towards forcing patients to adapt to social norms — you might even say, disciplining them.
It’s not even as if we were back at square one. We’ve over-shot in a direction that was rightly condemned 30 years ago. However, there is one huge difference: protests nowadays attract very l
ittle attention. Back then, criticism came from the anti-psychiatric movement, led by a number of psychiatrists from around the world. These days, too, the protest comes from within, from a few psychiatrists and psychologists (‘critical psychiatry’ and ‘critical psychology’), along with a handful of science journalists, but as yet their voice is not very loud. The fact that a suspect movement such as the Church of Scientology actively criticises present-day psychiatry also makes many therapists and academics reluctant to associate themselves with the modern manifestation of the anti-psychiatric movement.
Moreover — and this is more important — unlike 30 years ago, very little protest is heard from patients themselves. Instead, the man and woman in the street has embraced the culture of labels with a certain relish. People frequently enter consulting rooms fresh from a Google search, with a ready-made diagnosis under their arm. After telling you what’s wrong (‘My child has ODD’, ‘I’m suffering from depression’), they often demand to be prescribed a particular drug. (‘According to the internet, medicine X is the preferred treatment.’) No less remarkable is the fact that the vast majority of young clinicians and even their professors are convinced that these disorders are of proven neurobiological and genetic origin, just as they suppose DSM labelling to be largely reliable. This calls for an explanation.
Two approaches to diagnosis
In the field of general medicine, professionals collect painstaking descriptions of symptoms with the diagnostic aim of establishing the underlying disease. Much of the time, this approach works quite well, so that we now have a reliable and valid system of medical diagnosis. ‘Reliable’ means that different doctors will make the same diagnosis on the basis of the same symptoms; ‘valid’ means that a diagnosis convincingly refers to something that exists in reality. In the field of psychiatry, this is considerably more difficult. As a result, there are two warring approaches, and the history of psychiatry is a history of the power shifts between advocates of the two.
What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society Page 15
