If we are to change, it won’t be through rational knowledge, but through emotionally charged values. Not through our cerebral cortex, but through gut feelings. Plans for reform will have to take account of this. We must also have the courage to push communal values back to the forefront — values from which the individual benefits, too. To start, we only need to ask ourselves a question that is as simple as it is fundamental: what do I really need to build a good life?
Self-care and the good life
The impatient among us believe that radical social change is best achieved by imposing new ideological systems, often abruptly, by revolutionary means. History shows the price that is paid for this: each revolution devours its own children. History also shows that every system, whether autocratic, socialist, or liberal, will, if it remains in power long enough, become a caricature of itself.
Lasting change comes from the grassroots, and ties in with gut feelings. If more and more people feel that things are going fundamentally wrong, then change is in the air. An increasing number do feel this way at present, but as things stand they are not managing to form an organised group. That failure itself illustrates the central problem — namely, excessive individualisation. Attempts to invoke solidarity through rational argument won’t work. Given the current cult of the ego, the impetus for change is best sought in individuals’ concern for their own welfare. This is what the ancient Greeks knew as epimeleia, care of the self. If we have all become so individualistic, let us then take the following question as the starting point for change: what is ‘the good life’, what feels good about it to me?
Two words immediately stand out: ‘feels’ and ‘me’. The emphasis on feeling has to do with the fact that change is driven not by knowledge and insight, but by emotionally perceived values. If we want change, knowledge is not enough. The emphasis on ‘me’ may sound strange given my criticism of excessive individualisation. Aren’t we already too focused on ourselves?
It’s striking how difficult it is to think of self-care other than in terms of one’s own interests. The current mindset means we automatically assume that such care must be at the expense of the other. If you get something, this means I don’t get it. On top of that, the neo-liberal narrative conjures up the idea that self-care should be interpreted in material and extrinsic terms: more goods, greater comfort and a more attractive body, always entailing competition and envy. Does this make us feel happier? And is this actually self-care?
The way we care for our bodies is a case in point. It takes the form of an obsession with fitness. In Flanders, this fanaticism is most marked in the world of cycling — Belgium’s sport of choice. Sam De Kegel, a journalist and keen cyclist, sums it up as follows:
Nowadays we ride carbon-frame bikes that weigh next to nothing and cost a fortune. We know our anaerobic thresholds and peak oxygen uptakes better than our own phone numbers. We have lactate tests done on our blood every year, and we record all our rides and mileage in Excel documents … Thanks to cyclist apps and Facebook, we can compare our performance with everyone else in the world.18
It all got too much for De Kegel, and he quit his cycle club. He now cycles by himself, or with a few kindred spirits.
Competitive macho behaviour isn’t the same thing as self-care, and it doesn’t feel good either. Someone else will always score better, and someone else will always have a more expensive gadget. The notion that care of the self must be at the expense of the other results from a distorted vision of both care and identity. As I wrote in chapter one, our identity is inextricably bound up with that of the other. If my identity changes in some way, this will have an impact on the other, and vice versa. To the ancient Greek mind, care of the self simultaneously implied responsibility to shape one’s life ethically, in line with the interests of the community. And ethics, in this context, has to do with the way in which we treat our bodies and those of others, and more broadly, the way in which we deal with guilt and responsibility.
In recent decades, we have overturned traditional notions about the body. Whereas the emphasis was previously on prohibition — just about everything corporeal was immoral — it is now on compulsion. Thou shalt enjoy food, drink, sex, and care of the body. Here, too, it’s worth going back to the original question: how does this feel? The answer is obvious: not good. Too much of a good thing at best leads to boredom, and at worst to disorders and addiction. It is striking that all ethical systems place emphasis on moderation and self-control, relegating freedom to the background. Equally strikingly, both Freud and Lacan concluded, on the basis of their professional experience, that an internal brake on pleasure is innate to humans and is given external shape in the form of social norms. Too much pleasure is unbearable.
And deep within ourselves we know this. Our gut feelings tell us so, clashing with the message of present-day advertising that more is better. The harm this does is distressingly evident: children who are denied nothing grow up into obnoxious adults. Ironically enough, they themselves often feel deprived. We all come to realise that, beyond a certain level, money and material welfare no longer promote happiness. On the contrary, we get a sense of disappointment. Is this it? Isn’t there more to life than that? The better off we are, the more sharply we feel a fundamental lack that can never be satisfied in a material way.
This brings us to the second major aspect of self-care and ethics. How do we deal with this existential deficit, with the lack of material answers to life’s big questions? How do we deal with guilt and responsibility? The usual response nowadays is to find a scapegoat. Are children too fat? It’s the fast-food sector’s fault! Was there gridlock during the Monday rush-hour because of a heavy downpour? It was the weather forecasters’ fault! If they’d got their predictions right, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The notion that we cannot control everything, and that we have little or no say over essential matters such as life, love, and death, has become unbearable. What we forget is that it is precisely this shortcoming that is the source of all human creativity, as well as a stepping stone to a higher goal to which we, together with others, aspire. Whether that goal is scientific, religious, ideological, or artistic is less important than the fact that it binds people together into a community, which jointly shapes answers to those big questions.
Individual and community
The care that an individual shows towards his or her body and those of others derives from the way in which a community collectively formulates answers to existential questions. How do I give shape to my gender identity? How do I deal with parenthood? What is my attitude to authority? In turn, the communal answers to those questions derive from individual choices. If, for example, people increasingly want their own say about the end of their lives, eventually their political representatives will have to draw up legislation on euthanasia. Thus we rediscover the tension that underpins our identity, between the individual (separation, wanting to function autonomously) and the communal (identification, wanting to be part of a larger entity). Individual self-care exists alongside and sometimes in opposition to collective care, both invariably in a relationship of mutual dependency.
These days, the calls for more collective care, ‘more government’, are becoming increasingly vociferous. A growing group believes that our individual freedom has become far too great and the impact of the community far too small; it urgently wants this imbalance to be corrected. It is directly opposed by another group, which is equally vociferous in concluding the opposite, that we have too much ‘state’ and too much interference from above. Call a halt, they say, and let people do their thing.
Both views are wrong. Contrary to what the first group claims, we are not free at all as individuals, and there is in fact too much interference from above. Contrary to what the second group claims, we have too little ‘state’; the current political authorities have almost no say left in how things are run.
Neo-liberalism is not an emancipatory regime that has made individuals autonomous by curbing external interf
erence. The fact that the neo-liberal economy has put politicians in its pockets has not resulted in fewer rules and greater freedom of choice. Quite the reverse. The proliferation in contracts, rules, and regulations is universally felt — and is an inevitable consequence of the way in which a neo-liberal society functions. When you no longer have any symbolic, identifiable authority, and when a communal ethos has been elbowed out by a view of humanity as competing individuals, the result is indeed the survival of the fittest. The vacuum left by authority is filled with ever more regulations. This is the first important paradox of the neo-liberal free-market ideology: it invariably culminates in an excess of interference.
The second paradox concerns the so-called liberation of the individual. Anyone who buys into this claim is confusing individualisation and loneliness with autonomy and free choice. The obligation to both succeed and enjoy has turned postmodern consumers into clones of each other’s exclusiveness, without the advantage of mutual solidarity. Hence the strange combination of excessive individualism and a collective consumerism in which we all cherish the illusion that we are unique. The irony is that we end up flocking together at a ‘little place that nobody knows about’, brandishing the latest ‘personal’ computer and ‘exclusive’ limited-edition handbag or pair of shoes, firmly convinced that we, and we alone, are free spirits who don’t just blindly follow the herd.
Individualism has indeed gone too far in this day and age. People have been reduced to consumers who live in the illusion that they are unique and make their own choices. In actual fact, they are being made to think and behave alike to an extent that is previously unparalleled. Self-care has fallen by the wayside, because consumerism sweeps away any notions of self-control and restraint.
So wrangling about whether ‘the government’ or ‘the individual’ should be given a greater say is missing the point. There is no effective government anymore, just as there are no longer any autonomous individuals. In his last lectures, just before he died, Michel Foucault contrasted the consumption and production imposed by neo-liberalism (or anarcho-capitalism, as he called it) with classical liberalism, a critical movement that arose to defend civil liberties against the encroaching power of the state. A critical movement of this kind is sorely needed now, along with a new polity that can maintain the tricky but necessary balance between sameness and difference, between group and individual, between mandatory parity and freedom of choice. And we ourselves must take the first steps towards creating that social polity through the choices that we make. To quote Shakespeare:
Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Cassius, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book is never written in isolation, and originality is just as much an illusion as the one about identity that prompted this book. I should like to thank the following people.
My first readers, Christine, Eline, and Tim, who politely gave me to understand that a lot of work still needed to be done.
My second readers and walking companions, Piet and Johan, who have kilometres of debate to answer for, and whose friendship is very dear to me.
Wouter Van Driessche and Andreas Tirez, for the information on meritocracy.
Jan Van Duppen, for sending me newspaper articles from the Netherlands.
All my colleagues at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting at the University of Ghent, both for their help and for putting up with my abstractedness while I was working on the book. Special thanks to Stijn Vanheule for introducing me to the work of Richard Sennett.
Philipp Blom, who urged me to write less like a professor and more like a storyteller.
Peace and quiet are rare and precious commodities. Jan Celie hospitably invited me and my wife to spend a week in Broussoles in the Dordogne, where I made the final revisions of the book. We have fond memories of our talks at the dinner table.
Over the last six months, Erwin Mortier and Leonoor Broeder landed me with a lot of working weekends, short nights and long days in which I tore my hair and bit my nails. The number of times that I wished them both in hell is proportionate to the book’s ultimate quality as well as my gratitude.
My son Sander, who took responsibility for the index in the Dutch edition, Julie De Ganck, for her painstaking work on the proofs, and Theo Veenhof, who as subeditor ensured that the i’s were properly dotted and the t’s properly crossed.
And finally, Rita, who steered the general thrust of my arguments more often than she herself suspected.
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