The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being

THE HAPPINESS INDUSTRY

THE

HAPPINESS

INDUSTRY

How the Government and Big

Business Sold Us Well-Being

WILLIAM DAVIES

For Lydia

First published by Verso 2015

© William Davies 2015

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-845-8 (HC)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-272-6 (Export)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-847-2 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-846-5 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland

Printed in the US by Maple Press

Contents

Preface

1 Knowing How You Feel

2 The Price of Pleasure

3 In the Mood to Buy

4 The Psychosomatic Worker

5 The Crisis of Authority

6 Social Optimization

7 Living in the Lab

8 Critical Animals

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Preface

Since the World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded in 1971, its annual meeting in Davos has served as a useful indicator of the global economic zeitgeist. These conferences, which last a few days in late January, bring together corporate executives, senior politicians, representatives of NGOs and a sprinkling of concerned celebrities to address the main issues confronting the global economy and the decision-makers tasked with looking after it.

In the 1970s, when the WEF was still known as the ‘European Management Forum’, its main concern was slumping productivity growth in Europe. In the 1980s, it became preoccupied with market deregulation. In the 1990s, innovation and the internet came to the fore, and by the early 2000s, with the global economy humming, it began to admit a range of more ‘social’ concerns, alongside the obvious post-9/11 security anxiety. For the five years after the banking meltdown of 2008, Davos meetings were primarily concerned with how to get the old show back on the road.

At the 2014 meeting, rubbing shoulders with the billionaires, pop stars and presidents was a less likely attendee: a Buddhist monk. Every morning, before the conference proceedings began, delegates had the opportunity to meditate with the monk and learn relaxation techniques. ‘You are not the slave of your thoughts’, the man in red and yellow robes, clutching an iPad, informed his audience. ‘One way is to just gaze at them … like a shepherd sitting above a meadow watching the sheep’.¹ A few hundred thoughts of stock portfolios and illicit gifts for secretaries back home most likely meandered their way across the mental pastures of his audience.

True to their competitive business principles, the Davos organizers had not just gone for any monk. This was a truly elite monk, a French former biologist named Matthieu Ricard, a minor celebrity in his own right, who acts as French translator to the Dalai Lama and gives TED Talks on the topic of happiness. This is a subject he is uniquely qualified to speak on, thanks to his reputation as the ‘happiest man in the world’. For a number of years, Ricard participated in a neuroscientific study at the University of Wisconsin, to try and understand how different levels of happiness are inscribed and visible in the brain. Requiring 256 sensors to be attached to the head for three hours at a time, these studies typically place the research subject on a scale between miserable (+0.3) and ecstatic (-0.3). Ricard scored a -0.45. The researchers had never encountered anything like it. Today, Ricard keeps a copy of the neuroscientists’ score chart on his laptop, with his name proudly displayed as the happiest.²

Ricard’s presence at the 2014 Davos meeting was indicative of a more general shift in emphasis from previous years. The forum was awash with talk of ‘mindfulness’, a relaxation technique formed out of a combination of positive psychology, Buddhism, cognitive behavioural therapy and neuroscience. In total, twenty-five sessions at the 2014 conference focused on questions related to wellness, in a mental and physical sense, more than double the number of 2008.³

Sessions such as ‘Rewiring the Brain’ introduced attendees to the latest techniques through which the functioning of the brain could be improved. ‘Health Is Wealth’ explored the ways in which greater well-being could be converted into a more familiar form of capital. Given the unique opportunity of having so many of the world’s senior decision-makers in one place, it is no surprise that this was also the scene of considerable marketing displays, by companies selling devices, apps and advice aimed at supporting more ‘mindful’ and less stressful lifestyles.

So far so mindful. But the conference went further than just talk. Every delegate was given a gadget which attached to the body, providing constant updates to the wearer’s smartphone to assess the health of his recent activity. If the wearer is not walking enough, or sleeping enough, this evaluation is relayed back to the user. Davos attendees were able to glean new insights into their lifestyles and wellness. Beyond that, they were getting a glimpse of a future in which all behaviour is assessable in terms of its impact upon mind and body. Forms of knowledge that could traditionally be accrued only within a specialized institution, such as a laboratory or hospital, would be collected as individuals wandered around Davos for the four days of the conference.

This is what now preoccupies our global elites. Happiness, in its various guises, is no longer some pleasant add-on to the more important business of making money, or some new age concern for those with enough time to sit around baking their own bread. As a measurable, visible, improvable entity, it has now penetrated the citadel of global economic management. If the World Economic Forum is any guide, and it has always tended to be in the past, the future of successful capitalism depends on our ability to combat stress, misery and illness, and put relaxation, happiness and wellness in their place. Techniques, measures and technologies are now available to achieve this, and they are permeating the workplace, the high street, the home and the human body.

This agenda extends well beyond the reaches of Swiss mountaintops and has in truth been gradually seducing policy-makers and managers for some years. A number of official statistical agencies around the world, including those of the United States, Britain, France and Australia, now publish regular reports on levels of ‘national well-being’. Individual cities, such as Santa Monica, California, have invested in their own localized versions of this.⁴ The positive psychology movement disseminates techniques and slogans through which people might improve their happiness in everyday life, often by learning to block out unhelpful thoughts and memories. The idea that some of these methods might be added to the curriculum of schools, so as to train children in happiness, has already been trialled.⁵

A growing number of corporations employ ‘chief happiness officers’, while Google has an in-house ‘jolly good fellow’ to spread mindfulness and empathy.⁶ Specialist happiness consultants advise employers on how to cheer up their employees, the unemployed on how to restore their enthusiasm to work, and – in one case in London – those being forcibly displaced from their homes on how to move on emotionally.⁷

Science is advancing rapidly in support of this agenda. Neuroscientists identify how happiness and unhappiness are physically inscribed in the brain, as the researchers in Wisconsin did with Matthieu Ricard, and seek out neural explanations for why singing and greenery seem to improve our mental well-being. They claim to have found the precise parts of the brain which generate positive and negative emotions, including an area that provokes ‘bliss’ when stimulated, and a ‘pain dimmer switch’.⁸ Innovation within the experimental ‘quantified self’ movement sees individuals carrying out personalized ‘mood tracking’, through diaries and smartphone apps.⁹ As the statistical evidence in this area accumulates, so the field of ‘happiness economics’ grows to take advantage of all this new data, building up a careful picture of which regions, lifestyles, forms of employment or types of consumption generate the greatest mental well-being.

Our hopes are being strategically channelled into this quest for happiness, in an objective, measurable, administered sense. Questions of mood, which were once deemed ‘subjective’, are now answered using objective data. At the same time, this science of well-being has become tangled up with economic and medical expertise. As happiness studies become more interdisciplinary, claims about minds, brains, bodies and economic activity morph into one another, without much attention to the philosophical problems involved. A single index of general human optimization looms into view. What is clear is that those with the technologies to produce the facts of happiness are in positions of considerable influence, and that the powerful are being seduced further by the promises of those technologies.

Is it possible to be against happiness? Philosophers can argue as to whether or not this is a plausible position to take. Aristotle understood happiness as the ultimate purpose of human beings, though in a rich and ethical sense of the term. Not everyone would agree with this. ‘Man does not strive for happiness’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘only the Englishman does that.’¹⁰ As positive psychology and happiness measurement have permeated our political and economic culture since the 1990s, there has been a growing unease with the way in which notions of happiness and well-being have been adopted by policy-makers and managers. The risk is that this science ends up blaming – and medicating – individuals for their own misery, and ignores the context that has contributed to it.

This book shares much of that disquiet. There are surely ample political and material problems to deal with right now, before we divert quite so much attention towards the mental and neural conditions through which we individually experience them. There is also a sense that when the doyens of the World Economic Forum seize an agenda with so much gusto, there is at least some cause for suspicion. The mood-tracking technologies, sentiment analysis algorithms and stress-busting meditation techniques are put to work in the service of certain political and economic interests. They are not simply gifted to us for our own Aristotelian flourishing. Positive psychology, which repeats the mantra that happiness is a personal ‘choice’, is as a result largely unable to provide the exit from consumerism and egocentricity that its gurus sense many people are seeking.

But this is only one element in the critique to be developed here. One of the ways in which happiness science operates ideologically is to present itself as radically new, ushering in a fresh start, through which the pains, politics and contradictions of the past can be overcome. In the early twenty-first century, the vehicle for this promise is the brain. ‘In the past, we had no clue about what made people happy – but now we know’, is how the offer is made. A hard science of subjective affect is available to us, which we would be crazy not to put to work via management, medicine, self-help, marketing and behaviour change policies.

What if this psychological exuberance had, in fact, been with us for the past two hundred years? What if the current science of happiness is simply the latest iteration of an ongoing project which assumes the relationship between mind and world is amenable to mathematical scrutiny? That is one thing which this book aims to show. Repeatedly, from the time of the French Revolution to the present (and accelerating in the late nineteenth century), a particular scientific utopia has been sold: core questions of morality and politics will be solvable with an adequate science of human feelings. How those feelings are scientifically classified will obviously vary. At times they are ‘emotional’, at other times ‘neural’, ‘attitudinal’ or ‘physiological’. But a pattern emerges, nevertheless, in which a science of subjective feeling is offered as the ultimate way of working out how to act, both morally and politically.

The spirit of this agenda originates with the Enlightenment. But those who have exploited it best are those with an interest in social control, very often for private profit. That unfortunate contradiction accounts for the precise ways in which the happiness industry advances. In criticizing the science of happiness, I do not wish to denigrate the ethical value of happiness as such, less still to trivialize the pain of those who suffer from chronic unhappiness, or depression, and may understandably seek help in new techniques of behavioural or cognitive management. The target is the entangling of hope and joy within infrastructures of measurement, surveillance and government.

Such political and historical concerns open up a number of other propositions. Maybe this scientific view of the mind, as a mechanical or organic object, with its own behaviours and sicknesses to be monitored and measured, is not so much the solution to our ills, but among the deeper cultural causes. Arguably, we are already the product of various overlapping, sometimes contradictory efforts to observe our feelings and behaviours. Advertisers, human resource managers, governments, pharmaceutical companies have been watching, incentivizing, prodding, optimizing and pre-empting us psychologically since the late nineteenth century. Maybe what we need right now is not more or better science of happiness or behaviour, but less, or at least different. How likely is it that, in two hundred years’ time, historians will look back at the early twenty-first century and say, ‘Ah, yes, that was when the truth about human happiness was finally revealed’? And if it is unlikely, then why do we perpetuate this kind of talk, other than because it is useful to the powerful?

Does this mean that the current explosion of political and business interest in happiness is just a rhetorical fad? Will it dissipate, once we’ve rediscovered the impossibility of reducing ethical and political questions to numerical calculations? Not quite. There are two significant reasons why the science of happiness has suddenly become so prominent in the early twenty-first century, but they are sociological in nature. As such, they are never directly addressed by the psychologists, managers, economists and neuroscientists who advance this science.

The first concerns the nature of capitalism. One of the attendees at the 2014 Davos meeting made a remark that contained far more truth than he probably realized: ‘We created our own problem that we are now trying to solve’.¹¹ He was talking specifically about how 24/7 working practices and always-on digital devices had made senior managers so stressed that they were now having to meditate to cope with the consequences. However, the same diagnosis could be extended to the culture of post-industrial capitalism more broadly.

Since the 1960s, Western economies have been afflicted by an acute problem in which they depend more and more on our psychological and emotional engagement (be it with work, with brands, with our own health and well-being) while finding it increasingly hard to sustain this. Forms of private disengagement, often manifest as depression and psychosomatic illnesses, do not only register in the suffering experienced by the individual; they are increasingly problematic for policy-makers and managers, becoming accounted for economically. Yet evidence from social epidemiology paints a worrying picture of how unhappiness and depression are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values.¹² Workplaces put a growing emphasis on community and psychological commitment, but against longer-term economic trends towards atomization and insecurity. We have an economic model which mitigates against precisely the psychological attributes it depends upon.

In this more general and historical sense, then, governments and businesses ‘created the problems that they are now trying to solve’. Happiness science has achieved the influence it has because it promises to provide the longed-for solution. First of all, happiness economists are able to put a monetary price on the problem of misery and alienation. The opinion-polling company Gallup, for example, has estimated that unhappiness of employees costs the US economy $500 billion a year in lost productivity, lost tax receipts and health-care costs.¹³ This allows our emotions and well-being to be brought within broader calculations of economic efficiency. Positive psychology and associated techniques then play a key role in helping to restore people’s energy and drive. The hope is that a fundamental flaw in our current political economy may be surmounted, without confronting any serious political–economic questions. Psychology is very often how societies avoid looking in the mirror.

The second structural reason for the surging interest in happiness is somewhat more disturbing, and concerns technology. Until relatively recently, most scientific attempts to know or manipulate how someone else was feeling occurred within formally identifiable institutions, such as psychology laboratories, hospitals, workplaces, focus groups, or some such. This is no longer the case. In July 2014, Facebook published an academic paper containing details of how it had successfully altered hundreds of thousands of its users’ moods, by manipulating their news feeds.¹⁴ There was an outcry that this had been done in a clandestine fashion. But as the dust settled, the anger turned to anxiety: would Facebook bother to publish such a paper in future, or just get on with the experiment anyway and keep the results to themselves?

Monitoring our mood and feelings is becoming a function of our physical environment. In 2014, British Airways trialled a ‘happiness blanket’, which represents passenger contentment through neural monitoring. As the passenger becomes more relaxed, the blanket turns from red to blue, indicating to the airline staff that they are being well looked after. A range of consumer technologies are now on the market for measuring and analysing well-being, from wristwatches, to smartphones, to Vessyl, a ‘smart’ cup which monitors your liquid intake in terms of its health effects.

One of the foundational neoliberal arguments in favour of the market was that it served as a vast sensory device, capturing millions of individual desires, opinions and values, and converting these into prices.¹⁵ It is possible that we are on the cusp of a new post-neoliberal era in which the market is no longer the primary tool for this capture of mass sentiment. Once happiness-monitoring tools flood our everyday lives, other ways of quantifying feelings in real time are emerging that can extend even further into our lives than markets.

Liberal concerns about privacy have traditionally seen it as something which needs to be balanced against security. But today, we have to confront the fact that a considerable amount of surveillance occurs to increase our health, happiness, satisfaction or sensory pleasures. Regardless of the motives behind this, if we believe that there are limits to how much of our lives should be expertly administered, then there must also be limits to how much psychological and physical positivity we should aim for. Any critique of ubiquitous surveillance must now include a critique of the maximization of well-being, even at the risk of being less healthy, happy and wealthy.

To understand these trends as historical and sociological does not in itself indicate how they might be resisted or averted. But it does have one great liberating benefit: of diverting our critical attention outward upon the world, and not inward upon our feelings, brains or behaviour. It is often said that depression is ‘anger turned inwards’. In many ways, happiness science is ‘critique turned inwards’, despite all of the appeals by positive psychologists to ‘notice’ the world around us. The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibly divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems. Rather than seek to alter our feelings, now would be a good time to take what we’ve turned inwards, and attempt to direct it back out again. One way to start would be by turning a skeptical eye upon the history of happiness measurement itself.

1

Knowing How You Feel

Jeremy Bentham was sitting in Harper’s Coffee Shop in Holborn, London, when he shouted, ‘Eureka!’ The prompt was not some intellectual inspiration from within, as it had been when Archimedes immortalized the exclamation from his bath, but a passage from a book, Essay on Government, by the English religious reformer and scientist Joseph Priestley. The passage was this:

The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members, of any state, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined.

Bentham was eighteen years old and the year was 1766. Over the next sixty years, he took Priestley’s insight and converted it into an extensive and hugely influential doctrine of government: utilitarianism. This is the theory stating that the right action is whichever one produces the maximum happiness for the population overall.

There is something telling about the fact that Bentham’s ‘eureka’ moment was not a matter of great intellectual originality. Nor did he ever claim to be much of a philosophical pioneer. In addition to Priestley’s influence, Bentham was content to admit that much of his account of human nature and motivation was lifted from the Scottish philosopher David Hume.¹ He had little interest in producing new theories or weighty philosophical tomes, and never took much enjoyment in writing. As far as Bentham was concerned, there was a limit to what any idea or text could hope to achieve when it came to the political or social improvement of mankind. Merely believing that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ should be the goal of politics and ethics was of little consequence, unless a set of instruments, techniques and methods could be designed to turn this belief into the founding principle of government.

Rather than as an abstract thinker, Bentham is best understood as half philosopher and half technician, and from this various contradictions followed. He was an intellectual with a classically English distaste for intellectualism. A legal theorist, who believed that much of what law rested on was simple nonsense. An Enlightenment optimist and modernizer, who scoffed at any notion of inherent human rights or freedoms. And an advocate for hedonism, who insisted that every pleasure be neurotically accounted for. Reports of his personality vary wildly, with some discovering a man of great warmth and humility, and others one who was vain and dismissive.

Bentham’s relationship with his father caused him considerable misery. He was a weak, shy and often unhappy child, and appears to have been bullied into the status of a child prodigy by his father, who insisted on teaching him Latin and Greek from the age of five. He attended Westminster School but was made miserable by being the smallest boy there. Aged twelve, Bentham went to Oxford, where he was drawn towards chemistry and biology. If anything, he was even less happy at university than at school. He established a small chemistry laboratory in his room and felt a strong affinity for the natural sciences, which he pursued throughout his teens. With a less domineering father, this would no doubt have provided him with the intellectual satisfaction that his mathematical mind was seeking. But his father was a lawyer and insisted his son follow in his footsteps in order to earn a decent income. Under duress, he became a barrister in London’s Lincoln’s Inn.

Practising law did not make Bentham happy, and nor did the continued influence of his father. His shyness made him dread having to stand up and speak in court. Perhaps he still longed for his homemade chemistry laboratory. He certainly pined for emotional and sexual intimacy, but when he fell in love in his early twenties, yet again his father stood in his way, vetoing the relationship on the basis that the woman in question wasn’t rich enough. In this conflict between love and money, the measurable thwarted the immeasurable. Later in life, Bentham would be an outspoken advocate for sexual freedoms, including the tolerance of homosexuality, which he saw as an inevitable component of the maximization of human pleasure.²

His career, as it developed from his arrival at Lincoln’s Inn, was always a compromise, between the professional and moral injunctions imposed by his father, and the scientific and political urges that drove him from within. The law would indeed become the field in which he made his name, but never as his father intended. Instead, he set about criticizing law, ridiculing its language, demanding more rational alternatives and designing policies and instruments through which government could finally escape the philosophical nonsense of abstract moral principles. This stance did not make him rich, and Bentham ended up financially dependent on a stipend from his father, whose disappointment in his failed barrister son never lifted.

There were times when Bentham the technician overshadowed Bentham the philosopher. During the 1790s his activities were those of what we might now associate with a public sector management consultant. He spent much of this period designing exotic schemes and technologies, which he believed could improve the efficiency and rationality of the state. He wrote to the Home Office suggesting that the various departments of government be linked up by a set of ‘conversation tubes’ for better communication. He drew up plans for what he termed a ‘fridgarium’, to keep food fresh. And he wrote to the Bank of England with the blueprint for a printing device that would produce unforgeable bank notes.

This engineer’s vocation was integral to his vision of a more rational form of politics. It drove many of his more famous policy proposals, such as the ‘Panopticon’ prison, which was very nearly signed into English law during the 1790s before falling by the wayside. During the late 1770s, Bentham began to write on the topic of punishment, specifically because punishment seemed to offer a rational means of influencing human behaviour, if it could target the natural psychological propensity to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. This was never a merely academic or theoretical issue, and very little of this writing was published until several years later. His goal was always to achieve reform of public policy. But this did require a little deeper thinking about the nature of human psychology.

The science of happiness

Bentham was a fierce critic of the legal establishment, but he was scarcely much more sympathetic to the radical and revolutionary movements which were erupting elsewhere. Confronted by the political