What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

by Paul Verhaeghe

  As an academic, I am deeply suspicious of statistics. The same data can be used to support very different views in both the life sciences and social sciences, including economics. Moreover, the methods used to produce figures are often debatable, to say the least, and the reliability of the result can only be judged by someone with a degree in advanced statistics. The main illusion produced by all these figures is that they represent ‘reality’. In the majority of cases, however, they are doing something else. They are creating a certain image of reality. That image reflects expectations, the product of an ideology we are not always aware of. People then make decisions without reflecting — ‘the figures speak for themselves’.

  That’s why it’s so important not just to look at the figures, but also to take note of someone who has tried to understand the German model by consciously experiencing it. Günter Wallraff is a journalist who occasionally goes undercover to find out exactly what it means, say, to be a member of an ethnic minority. He did the same thing as a worker right at the bottom of the social ladder, taking on jobs such as a baker in the Lidl supermarket chain and an operator in a call centre. He published his account in a book entitled Heerlijke nieuwe wereld (Brave New World). Besides the starvation wage (7.66 euros an hour before tax), Wallraff said that the hardest thing to bear was the loss of dignity, the feeling of no longer belonging. The system creates an underclass who regard themselves as failures, are ashamed, and seek to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. The old silent majority has now become an invisible majority of isolated groups who try to hide their difficult situation from the outside world. This also has the effect of undermining solidarity just when it is most sorely needed. Wallraff believes that these working poor will soon become a self-perpetuating problem because their children are so disadvantaged. In a society of this kind, there can be no question of a meritocracy for these youngsters.15

  From Wallraff, we can move on to the impact on individuals of the misconception that to measure is to know. Figure-driven evaluation and performance interviews are lethal to job satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, and identification with an enterprise. This approach stifles creativity and autonomy, humiliates employees, and destroys their self-respect. These negative effects become even more pronounced as qualitative and contextual factors are left out of evaluations, being replaced by uniform measuring systems imposed by higher-ups with little understanding of what really goes on in the workplace.

  Advocates of the system invariably advance two arguments in its favour: it improves quality and rewards the best people. Actually, it does neither. The positive effects of a neo-liberal meritocracy are confined to the initial stage, after which social mobility soon grinds to a halt. Quantitative evaluation of this kind tends to diminish rather than enhance the quality of the work done. The system spawns an increase in paperwork, leaving less and less time for core tasks, even though work pressure is increasing everywhere. If you have to meet a quota, quality won’t be your first concern. How much time do police officers still spend on police work, teachers on education, and therapists on treatment? Employees burdened by quality controls become demotivated, and, ironically, the quality of their work suffers.

  I don’t doubt the need for evaluation, especially as more and more people — responding to the call to think of themselves as one-person enterprises — are putting their own ego and profit at the heart of their identity. The question is what form it should take. In the majority of cases, quantitative measurement is not just undesirable but impossible. To measure anything, you need an objective yardstick, such as centimetres for length, kilograms for weight, and litres for volume. Certain kinds of production can be measured — for instance, the number of cars coming off a production line (though this doesn’t tell you anything about product quality). But the majority of jobs involve a range of complex tasks that are also highly context-dependent. It is a fallacy to think that one can develop a yardstick to ‘measure’ this objectively, resulting in ‘hard’ figures.*

  [* Measurements of this kind tend to use Likert scales. These involve respondents rating statements by selecting from a range of possible responses (e.g. poor, adequate, good, very good) or figures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2). There are a number of variants, based on three to seven possible ‘values’. It is all too often forgotten that these are intuitive approximations, based on subjective criteria. Any translation of the results into figures creates a false impression of objective quantifiability. A centimetre is always a centimetre, but what is +2 for one member of staff will be something quite different for another. It is shocking that the figures obtained from these scales are often used to perform mathematical calculations (finding the sum, calculating the average and deviations from the average, etc.).]

  Evaluation is undoubtedly necessary, but it needs to be differently conceived and carried out. The focus should be on qualitative evaluation, involving people being questioned about the different aspects of their work. As long as it is taken seriously, this approach has been shown to produce spectacularly positive results. Allow people to set their own objectives in consultation with their direct superior, along with the criteria for their success or failure. ‘What do you find important in your work?’ ‘What would you like to change?’ ‘How do you think you can do that?’ Staff and managers should set up a periodic reporting system, preferably together, so that timely adjustment is possible if things go wrong. And last but not least, since everyone needs to be evaluated, a bottom-up qualitative evaluation of managers by people who work for them is very much part of this process. It is striking how little affinity managers these days have with the reality of the workplace and, consequently, how poorly placed they are to gauge the effects of their actions.

  Experience shows that qualitative evaluations of this kind very soon increase staff engagement and mutual trust in the workplace. Here, too, the key is to find a good balance between the individual and the group, between individual creativity and productive co-operation.

  The other must change — we are the other

  The economic crisis has shaken many awake, and the call for change is becoming louder, as well as more varied. Populist groups blame corrupt leaders; intellectuals blame ‘the system’; and politicians and economists blame ‘the markets’. They all share the same conviction: it’s the fault of the other; I’m just the victim. It’s those others — ethnic minorities, the scrounging unemployed, greedy bankers, ruthless managers — who need to change, and then everything will be all right. Unfortunately, the other can be hard to identify. Protest focuses on anonymous molochs (‘the banks’), and oscillates between outbursts of street violence and periods of aimless torpor. This mirrors the behaviours of the stock market, either rearing up in ADHD mode or sinking back in depressed apathy. Bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression) is the disorder of neo-liberalism par excellence.

  There is a general conviction that the cause lies outside us. In its wake comes the conviction that any solution must also come from outside — that there must be a magic pill somewhere, or a new Führer who will deliver us from evil without too much effort on our part. In the process, we lose sight of a fundamental truth: we have gradually all become neo-liberal, in both thought and deed. This is without doubt the most painful implication of what I described in chapter one regarding identity formation.

  It’s not just young people who have been kitted out with a neo-liberal identity; their parents have also gone a long way down that road. Nowadays, everybody is first and foremost a consumer, interested only in what benefits them. So getting up in arms about issues such as top executives laying off staff, or companies relocating to low-wage countries, is a bit short-sighted. Those sackings happen because shareholders want greater profits in the short term, and every shareholder shares responsibility for that decision. Offshoring happens because everybody wants things to be cheap. Getting the best possible product for the lowest possible price is a principle we all live by, and anybody who gets hot under the collar about a
ll those lorries and trucks cluttering up our motorways and arterial roads needs to remember that they are there because they supply our consumer goods most cheaply — goods that are made in countries with the lowest wages.

  The postmodern individual suffers from a strange type of dissociation, a new form of split personality. We condemn the system, are hostile to it, and feel powerless to change it. Yet at the same time we act in a way that reinforces and even extends it. Every decision we make — what to eat and drink, what to wear, how to get about, where to go on holiday — demonstrates this. We are the system that we complain about. Protesting by voting for the ultra-left or ultra-right won’t alter this state of affairs. It is not simply a question of making the ‘other’ change; the painful truth is that we, too, will have to change. Instead of being merely consumers, we must once again become citizens — not just in the voting booth, but above all in the way in which we lead our lives.

  One of the things we most need to do is to ditch the cynicism that has taken hold of nearly all of us. We have become wearily pessimistic, taking the neo-liberal construction for an exclusive truth. The TINA syndrome (‘There is no alternative’) shows that the current crisis is also, and perhaps predominantly, a crisis of the imagination, resulting in fatalistic pronouncements such as ‘That’s just how people are’, ‘We can ride it out’, and ‘Let’s milk the system’. There can be no doubt that egotism, competitiveness, and aggression are innately human characteristics — the banality of evil is a reality. But altruism, co-operation, and solidarity — the banality of good — are just as innate, and it is the environment that decides which characteristics dominate. Frans de Waal’s studies of our closest relatives have taught us that. The main difference between us and primates is that we can do much to shape our environment. What’s more, there is plenty of evidence that doing something for others and achieving recognition for that makes us feel happier. And such happiness is an excellent antidote to the current mood of depressive hedonia.

  Depression often results from a sense of impotence, when people feel powerless to change their lives. They lay the blame on their genes, on their unhappy childhoods, on society. To a certain extent they may be right, but if they can look no further than these constraints, their condition simply gets worse. To recover from depression you have to focus on those facets of your life over which you still have control. It’s not easy, but it can be done. And this applies even more to the depressed consumers that we have currently all become. Everyone can change their pattern of consumption.

  So, instead of consumers, we need once more to become citizens. If we want politics to be governed by the public interest — and that is more necessary than ever — we ourselves must promote that public interest, rather than private concerns. This will require material sacrifices that should ideally go hand in hand with the creation of a new system of ethics. Given the dual processes that shape our identity, any such system will always need to find a balance between autonomy and solidarity, between the individual and the group. The binding element is authority, and the way in which it is exercised. Citizenship isn’t just about subjecting ourselves to whomever we have democratically vested with authority, but also about having the courage to assume authority ourselves when a situation demands it. In his final lectures, Michel Foucault spoke of the need for parrhesia, the courage to speak out. We tend to interpret this lazily, for instance by sniping at the Catholic Church, or venting our opinions (bristling with exclamation marks) on internet forums.

  But this rather adolescent attitude won’t bring about much change. There are times when speaking out demands rather more of us. Take the way we respond to aggressive incidents — for example, in buses or trains. We usually only get vocal after the event, moaning that the police aren’t doing anything to tackle the problem, and calling for more cops on the beat. After a fatal assault on a public-transport inspector in Brussels in 2012, the journalist Nina Verhaeghe called upon people to respond actively — and preferably collectively — to antisocial behaviour, instead of merely putting up with it.16 This is the parrhesia required of us all. It’s not enough to rant on the internet; solidarity and democracy also demand a collective response from, say, bus passengers when the bus driver is threatened. That bus driver is us. Verhaeghe proposes a public-information campaign along the lines of the BOB campaign.* She suggested that it, too, be given a keyword to trigger the solidarity response.

  [* The bob campaign is a highly successful government initiative aimed at curbing drink-driving. It encourages people partygoers to select a designated driver who will stay off the alcohol for the evening. The keyword is ‘Bob’, and the question ‘Who’s going to be the Bob tonight?’ has now become a standard concept, drastically influencing drink-driving behaviour in Belgium.]

  Changes to and through values

  Verhaeghe’s suggestion to use a keyword ties in perfectly with the findings of psychological studies of behavioural change. A well-chosen and well-promoted keyword (for example, ‘Respect!’) triggers an instinctive feeling that galvanises people into action. This approach completely conflicts with prevailing notions about how people modify their behaviour. There is an all-too-common misconception that behavioural change proceeds along rational and cognitive lines — explain to somebody what is in their interests, also in the long term, and they will automatically see the light and take the right decisions, however hard they might be. For years now, this strategy has been adopted in all kinds of public-information campaigns, usually with very little result. The conclusion is painfully clear: it doesn’t work.

  Why most moral philosophers refuse to acknowledge this is a mystery to me — one can only put it down to the persistent view of humans as rational beings, going back to the pseudo-religious version of the Enlightenment. The advertising world grasped the situation ages ago. To change behaviour (in this case, consumer behaviour) you need to sell values, and the most effective way to do so is to appeal to the emotions by invoking family, maternal love, fidelity, security, status, triumph, performance, et cetera. When you look at commercials in this light, you see straightaway that the product itself, and rational, factual information about it, are mere side issues. Indeed, the thing that’s being sold is often hardly shown. And yet this approach works, unlike all those well-intentioned campaigns targeting our welfare. Non-commercial organisations are beginning to get the message, too. Feeling the need for a change of tack, the WWF recently commissioned an expert study on more effective ways to achieve behavioural change. What follows is largely taken from that study.17

  If a particular message catches on, that’s because it ties in with deep-rooted emotions and the values that go with them. The metaphor ‘deep-rooted’ signifies not only that we are scarcely conscious of them, but also that they branch out very widely. Freud dubbed these ‘unconscious associative complexes’; today’s cognitive psychologists speak of ‘deep frames’. When treating patients, Freud discovered that by using certain keywords, his patients could access those complexes and emotions. More importantly, he found that they could be worked on (in his case through psychoanalysis) and even changed — enabling a patient, say, to cope better with fear. Following on from that, behavioural changes could be made.

  The same reasoning applies at a collective level. In chapter one, I described how our identity is based on what we adopt from our environment; this is why people who share a culture also share the same deep frames, or sets of values. And at a collective level, too, these are activated via keywords. If, when speaking at a university, you refer from time to time to ‘academic freedom’, your audience will nod approvingly. If, on the other hand, you toss in a word like ‘nigger’, they will mentally reel.

  The explanation is that keywords activate underlying frames of association with a powerful emotional charge, provoking a gut response. Studies of such deep frames reveal that some can, for instance, be held simultaneously, while others are in mutual opposition. Activating a single value also automatically activates associated val
ues, while suppressing opposing values. Simultaneously activating the values of opposing frames is impossible.

  Different clusters exist, almost always pushing two opposing frames to the fore, each containing different values and life goals. On one side, we find things like physical attractiveness and popularity, competition and career, money and material luxury. Accordingly, activating a value like popularity automatically also entails activating the associated life goals, such as competition and money. In the opposite frame are physical health and autonomy, solidarity and co-operation, wellbeing and spiritual values. And here, too, the same rule applies: if you, say, activate autonomy, the associated elements will automatically be assigned greater significance, while the significance of, say, popularity and competitiveness will decline.

  Broadly, clusters can be divided into extrinsic values and intrinsic values, something I touched upon earlier when talking about motivation in the workplace. But this goes much further than work alone: the two clusters give rise to two different identities, with two different interpretations of morality. These differences originate from the two processes that shape our identity, each of which strives for dominance. As I described in chapter one, we need to both identify with and separate ourselves from the other in order to build up a solid identity.

  No extensive social study is needed to confirm that our current economic and social organisation only stimulates the deep frame of individualism and separation. The current emphasis on competency-oriented education is driving our youngsters straight into the competition-and-career cluster, with all the associated values following in their wake. What the advocates of the system fail to realise is that this automatically undermines other norms and values. There is no such thing as competitive solidarity.

  Indeed, its impossibility is clearly illustrated by what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When you hold strongly to a particular value-laden cluster, you simply can’t take in information that contradicts it, however objective and factual. Someone who sets great store by solidarity, public-spiritedness, and spirituality will find it almost impossible to take in information about the advantages of individualism, competitiveness, and materialism. And vice versa. We are all familiar with this phenomenon, by the way. That’s to say, we notice it in others, saying that they are ‘not open to reason’.