The Happiness Industry (16 page)

In recent years, Britain's Conservative Party has viewed its annual conference as a PR disaster waiting to happen. These meetings, traditionally held in seaside towns such as Brighton and Blackpool, see thousands of delegates from local Conservative clubs congregate in search of leaders finally willing to throw off the scourge of political correctness and modern values. Whether it be low-level racism emanating from the conference platform, the bland male greyness of the figures in the spotlight or the sight of elderly supporters expressing their disgust with same-sex relationships, potential embarrassment lurks around every corner.

But in 1977, two years into Margaret Thatcher's leadership of the party, a dose of youthful and unexpected colour was injected into proceedings. A sixteen-year-old schoolboy with a thick Northern accent, William Hague, took the platform and elicited hoots of approval from the otherwise staid conference, including from the woman who would go on to be prime minister for eleven years.

In between tearing into the ‘socialist state' of the Labour government of the day, the teenager gently ribbed his audience: ‘It's alright for most of you – half of you won't be here in thirty or forty years' time'. He proceeded to identify the nub of the
socialist threat. ‘There is at least one school in London', he announced, ‘where the pupils are allowed to win just one race each, for fear that to win more would make the other pupils seem inferior. That is a classic illustration of the socialist state, which draws nearer with every Labour government.'

Twenty years later, Hague was the new leader of his party. He never got to taste the electoral victory as leader that his heroine had over the course of the 1980s. But he would no doubt have been delighted with how British society had developed in the meantime. After twenty years of Thatcherite policy-making, the ‘socialist state' was scarcely discernable anywhere, least of all in Tony Blair's recently elected Labour government. A pro-business, free-market creed had taken hold across the Western world. And in keeping with the teenage Hague's vision, the political appeal of competitive sport had never been higher.

During the long economic boom that lasted from the early 1990s up until the banking meltdowns of 2007–08, sport was the great unquestionable virtue for political leaders everywhere. Attracting international sporting contests, such as the FIFA World Cup and Olympics, to particular cities became a cause célèbre for political elites who hoped to bask in the reflected glory of successful professional athletes. As prime minister, Tony Blair took to the sofa of the BBC's flagship football programme to chat informally about the skills of his favourite midfielder. His successor, Gordon Brown, tried to get in on the act, using his first day in 10 Downing Street to give a speech citing his school rugby team as his abiding inspiration. And when his authority was tottering in the summer of 2008, Brown returned to Hague's original theme, throwing his weight behind more competitive school sport. ‘That is the spirit we want to encourage in our schools,' he declared, ‘not the medals for all
culture we have seen in previous years, but more competition'.

Meanwhile, there was little sporting metaphors couldn't apparently justify. Every further inflation of executive pay was explained in terms of maintaining a ‘level playing field' in a ‘war for talent'. When pressed by an interviewer in 2005 about the rising inequality that his government had overseen, Tony Blair responded that ‘it's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money', despite the fact that football had nothing to do with the question.
¹

Even after the epic failure of the neoliberal model of 2008, Britain's political class has returned to this rhetoric, announcing that the ‘global
race
' requires that welfare is slashed and labour markets further deregulated. The need to entrench ‘competitiveness' as the defining culture of businesses, cities, schools and entire nations, so as to out-do international rivals, is the mantra of the post-Thatcher era. A science of winning, be it in business, sport or just in life, now brings together former sportsmen, business gurus and statisticians to extend lessons from sport into politics, from warfare into business strategy, and from life coaching into schools.

But as the teenage Hague imagined the future thirty or forty years hence, there was one defining trend of the new era that neither he nor anybody else could foresee. It transpires that competition and competitive culture, including that of sport, is intimately related to a disorder that was scarcely discussed in 1977 but which had become a major policy concern by the end of the century. As the 1970s drew to a close, Western capitalist countries stood on the cusp of a whole new era of psychological management. The disorder at the heart of this was depression.

One way of observing the relationship between depression and competitiveness is in statistical correlations between rates of
diagnosis and levels of economic inequality across society. After all, the function of any competition is to produce an unequal outcome. More equal societies, such as Scandinavian nations, record lower levels of depression and higher levels of well-being overall, while depression is most common in highly unequal societies such as the United States and United Kingdom.
²
The statistics also confirm that relative poverty – being poor in comparison to others – can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money. For this reason, the effect of inequality on depression is felt much of the way up the income scale.

Yet there is more to this than just a statistical correlation. Behind the numbers, there is troubling evidence that depression can be triggered by the competitive ethos itself, afflicting not only the ‘losers' but also the ‘winners'. What Hague identified as the socialist fear, that competition makes many people ‘seem inferior', has been proved far more valid than even left-wing 1970s schoolteachers could have imagined; it also tells them that they
are
inferior. In recent years, there has been a flurry of professional sportspersons confessing their battles with depression. In April 2014, a group of prominent ex-sportsmen in the UK penned an open letter urging ‘sporting directors, coaches, and leaders of development programmes, to attend to the development of “inner fitness” alongside “athletic fitness”', to protect professional sportsmen from this epidemic.
³

A study conducted at Georgetown University found that college footballers are twice as likely to experience depression as non-footballers. Another study discovered that professional female athletes display similar personality traits as those with eating disorders, both being linked to obsessive perfectionism.
⁴
And a series of experiments and surveys conducted by the American psychologist Tim Kasser has revealed that ‘aspirational' values, oriented around money, status and power, are linked to higher risk of depression and a lower sense of ‘self-actualization'.
⁵
Wherever we measure our self-worth relative to others, as all competitions force us to, we risk losing our sense of self-worth altogether. One of the sad ironies here is that the effect of this is to dissuade people, including schoolchildren, from engaging in physical exercise altogether.
⁶

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a society such as America's, which privileges a competitive individual mindset at every moment in life, has been so thoroughly permeated by depressive disorders and demand for antidepressants. Today, around a third of adults in the United States and close to half in the UK believe that they occasionally suffer from depression, although the diagnosis rates are far lower than that. Psychologists have shown that individuals tend to be happiest if they credit themselves for their successes, but not for their failures. This might sound like a symptom of delusion, but it is arguably no more delusional than a competitive, depressive culture which attributes every success
and every failure
to individual ability and effort.

Hasn't America always been a competitive society? Isn't that the original dream of the settlers, the Founding Fathers and the entrepreneurs who built American capitalism? This myth of society-as-competitive-sport surely dates back far earlier than the late 1970s; and yet it was only in the late 1970s that the epidemic of depression first took hold. It seems extraordinary now to consider that, in 1972, British psychiatrists were diagnosing depression at five times the rate of their US counterparts. And as recently as 1980, Americans still consumed tranquilizers at more than twice the rate of antidepressants. What changed?

From ‘better' to ‘more'

The sixteen-year-old Hague had taken the conference platform at a turning point in the history of economic policy-making in the Western world. According to the most respected measure of income inequality, Britain has never been more equal than it was in 1977.
⁷
But at the same time, the case for market deregulation was becoming increasingly credible, urged on by corporations that felt that they had become victimized by regulators, unions and consumer pressure groups.
⁸
Persistently high inflation had led a number of governments, including Britain's, to experiment in ‘monetarism', an attempt to control the amount of money in circulation but which also threatened economic growth and jobs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were waiting in the wings to usher in the era that would become known as ‘neoliberalism'.

One way of understanding neoliberalism is to examine how things progressed from there: the spiralling executive pay, the unprecedented levels of unemployment, the growing dominance of the financial sector over the rest of the economy and society, the expansion of private sector management techniques into all other walks of life. Analysing these trends is important. But it is also important to understand how and why they were possible, and that involves turning in the opposite direction, to the twenty-year period which preceded young Hague's call to arms. It is during those two decades that many of the critical ingredients of neoliberalism would shift from the outer margins of intellectual and political respectability to becoming the orthodoxies of a new era. Among these were a renewed reverence for
both
competitiveness
and
the management of happiness.

At the heart of the cultural and political battles of the 1960s was an acute relativism which attacked the roots of moral,
intellectual, cultural and even scientific authority. The right to declare some behaviours as ‘normal', certain claims as ‘true', particular outcomes as ‘just', or one culture as ‘superior' was thrown into question. When the traditional sources of authority over these things attempted to defend their claims, they were accused of offering just one partial perspective, and of using their own parochial language to do so. In place of some values being ‘better' or ‘truer' than others, there was simply conformity on the one hand and difference on the other.

The core political and philosophical questions posed by the 1960s were these. How to take
any
publicly legitimate decisions, once there are no commonly recognized hierarchies or shared values any longer? What
will
provide the common language of politics, once language itself has become politicized? How
will
the world and society be represented, once even representation is considered to be a biased and political act? The problem, from a governmental point of view, was that the reach of democracy was extending too far.

Jeremy Bentham's vision of a scientific, utilitarian politics was initially motivated by an urge to cleanse legal process and punishment of the abstract nonsense that he believed still polluted the language of judges and politicians. In that sense, he hoped it would rescue politics from philosophy. But viewed differently, it could also serve a different function. The recourse to mathematical measurement could also rescue politics from excessive democracy and cultural pluralism. The Benthamite emphasis on a robust and scientific measure of psychological welfare reappeared in the wake of the 1960s, in various guises, some of which were associated with the counter-culture, others of which were ostensibly being peddled by conservatives. But they succeeded politically to the extent that they could claim to sit outside the
fray. What they shared was an attempt to use numbers as a means of recreating a common public language.

In a world where we cannot agree what counts as ‘good' and what counts as ‘bad', because it's all a matter of personal or cultural perspective, measurement offers a solution. Instead of indicating quality, it indicates quantity. Instead of representing how good things are, it represents how much they are. Instead of a hierarchy of values, from the worst up to the best, it simply offers a scale, from the least up to the most. Numbers are able to settle disputes when nothing else looks likely to.

At its most primitive, the legacy of the 1960s is that
more
is necessarily preferable to
less
. To grow is to progress. Regardless of what one wants, desires, or believes, it is best that one gets as much of it as possible. This belief in growth as a good-in-itself was made explicit by some subcultures and psychological movements. Humanistic psychology, as advanced by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, attempted to reorient psychology – and society at large – away from principles of normalization and towards the quest for ever greater fulfilment.
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Individuals were perceived to be hemmed in by the dull conformity of 1950s culture, which blocked their capacity to grow. To assume that there was a ‘natural' or ‘moral' limit to personal growth was to fall back into repressive traditions. It wasn't long before corporations were making the identical argument about the malign impact of market regulation on profit growth.