The Happiness Industry (12 page)

In the twenty-first century, popular psychologists and neuroscientists are doing a roaring trade, as consultants and authors, in promising to reveal the ‘truth' of how we take decisions, how
influence works, and what will deliver the target emotions and moods. The need to ask people what they want tends to diminish somewhat during these upturns in behaviourist excitement, as it did during Watson's day. The Benthamite distrust of language as an indicator of our feelings is manifest in how the neuromarketers claim to bypass what we say we feel, directly to the feeling itself.

The plausibility of this project is built on various strategic acts of forgetting or not seeing, of both history and political possibility. History falls by the wayside, or else somebody might notice that the waves of scientific marketing exuberance tend to resemble each other, yet never quite deliver on what they originally promised to. The dream of rendering people completely predictable and controllable is always dashed, and that rather low-tech alternative form of engagement – dialogue – is reintroduced in some form or other. And politics disappears, to the extent that, whenever dialogue does come back in, it does so within safely administered routines and spaces, where political desire can appear but not translate into political transformation.

The power of human speech is, ultimately, necessary for consumer culture to be sustained. A science built on the study of white rats, combined with clever tools for peering at our eyes and other body parts, is not, in the final instance, adequate for selling products. Less still is it adequate for the management of human beings in workplaces. For this latter purpose, yet another set of techniques, instruments and measuring devices is required, of which ‘happiness' evaluations are the latest instalment.

The end of capitalism has often been imagined as a crisis of epic proportions. Perhaps a financial crisis will occur that is so vast not even government finances can rescue the system. Maybe the rising anger of exploited individuals will gradually congeal into a political movement, leading to revolution. Might some single ecological disaster bring the system to a halt? Most optimistically, capitalism might be so innovative that it will eventually produce its own superior successor, through technological invention.

But in the years that have followed the demise of state socialism in the early 1990s, a more lacklustre possibility has arisen. What if the greatest threat to capitalism, at least in the liberal West, is simply lack of enthusiasm and activity? What if, rather than inciting violence or explicit refusal, contemporary capitalism is just met with a yawn? From a political point of view, this would be somewhat disappointing. Yet it is no less of an obstacle for the longer-term viability of capitalism. Without a certain level of commitment on the part of employees, businesses run into some very tangible problems, which soon show up in their profits.

This fear has gripped the imaginations of managers and policymakers in recent years, and not without reason. Various studies
of ‘employee engagement' have highlighted the economic costs of allowing workers to become mentally withdrawn from their jobs. Gallup conducts frequent and wide-ranging studies in this area and has found that only 13 per cent of the global workforce is properly ‘engaged', while around 20 per cent of employees in North America and Europe are ‘actively disengaged'.
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They estimate that active disengagement costs the US economy as much as $550 billion a year.
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Disengagement is believed to manifest itself in absenteeism, sickness and – sometimes more problematic – presenteeism, in which employees come into the office purely to be physically present.
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A Canadian study suggests over a quarter of workplace absence is due to general burn-out, rather than sickness.
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Few private sector managers are required to negotiate with unions any longer, but nearly all of them confront a much trickier challenge, of dealing with employees who are regularly absent, unmotivated or suffering from persistent, low-level mental health problems. Resistance to work no longer manifests itself in organized voice or outright refusal, but in diffuse forms of apathy and chronic health problems. The border separating general ennui from clinical mental health problems is especially challenging to managers in twenty-first-century workplaces, seeing as it requires them to ask personal questions on matters that they are largely unqualified to deal with.

Lack of engagement from the workforce also registers as a problem for governments, inasmuch as it bites into economic output, and in doing so hits tax receipts. In societies with socialized health insurance and unemployment insurance, the problem is far more serious. There is a growing economic problem of individuals dropping out of work due to some often ill-defined personal and intangible problem, then gradually sinking into a
more generalized inactivity. These people may show up at the doctor's surgery on a regular basis, making complaints about undiagnosable pains and problems. This is often because they have nobody else to speak to and are lonely. Unemployment undermines their sense of self-worth, and inactivity brings various other psychosomatic problems with it. A general deflation of psychological and physical capacity is the end result, which in many societies produces costs for the state to pick up.

Nor is the economic threat posed by declining mental health confined only to the periphery of labour markets. The World Health Organization caused a stir in 2001 by predicting that mental health disorders would have become the world's largest cause of disability and death by 2020. Already, some estimates suggest that over a third of European and American adults are suffering from some form of mental health problem, even if many are going undiagnosed.
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The economic costs this imposes are vast. Mental health disorders are estimated to cost 3–4 per cent of GDP in Europe and North America. In Britain, the overall cost of this to the economy (including various factors, such as workplace absence, reduced productivity, medical costs) is put at £110 billion per year.
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This is already far more than the economic cost of crime, yet it is a figure that is expected to double in real terms over the next twenty years, unless the current trend is diverted in some way.
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The causes of mental health problems are obviously complex and do not lie simply in the economy any more than they do in brain chemistry. But it is the way in which these problems manifest themselves in the workplace, threatening productivity as they do so, that has placed them amongst the greatest problems confronting capitalism today. It is the principal reason that the World Economic Forum is now so concerned about our health
and happiness.
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The murky grey area separating workplace disaffection from a clinical disorder has required managers, and the human resources profession especially, to equip themselves with various new ways of intervening in the minds, bodies and behaviours of their workforce. The term most commonly used to describe the goal of these new interventions is ‘well-being', which encompasses the happiness and health experienced by employees.

There is a clear economic incentive for managers to consider the positive attitude of employees. Endless studies have shown that workers are more productive when they feel happy, possibly by as much as an additional 12 per cent of output.
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And in workplaces where they feel respected, listened to, consulted and involved, they are more likely to work harder, and less likely to take sick leave. Where employees have no say in how their work is organized, this is known to generate some of the psychological problems that now concern businesses, up to and including mental health problems.
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By emphasizing well-being, managers hope to turn a vicious circle of disengagement and ill-health into a virtuous one of active, fulfilling commitment.

It is tempting to be cynical about some of this: the manager is after all still attempting to extract effort from the worker. But why not also recognize the opportunity contained in this current business anxiety? If capitalism is being ground down by the chronic, unspecifiable alienation of those it depends on, then surely solving that problem may also open up possibilities for political reform? The hard economic costs that ennui now places upon employers and governments means that human misery has shown up as a chronic problem that elites cannot simply shove aside. The question of what type of work, and what type of workplace organization, might generate a real sense of
commitment and enthusiasm on the part of workers should not be abandoned altogether.

The difficulty is that the enthusiasm managers are seeking to promote is no less slippery than the psychosomatic problems they are seeking to avoid. A report commissioned by the UK government on the importance of employee engagement found it impossible to say exactly what this gaseous entity consists of. Expert insights that ‘you sort of smell it' and ‘know it when you see it' confirmed a shortage of objectivity on this particular issue.
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Managers and policy-makers yearn for a hard science of workplace happiness. But it is with that sort of hard science that many of our problems begin.

Happiness boot camps

Confronted by other people's problems which are both ambiguous and personal, senior decision-makers have a tried and tested coping method: bring in the external contractors and consultants. There is copious political and market demand for experts willing to pronounce and act upon the well-being of others, on the basis of some presumed scientific authority. These sit on a spectrum between qualified medical practitioner and ill-informed bully. When handling painful issues of other people's health and happiness, outsiders have the great advantage of being able to duck full moral accountability and, if necessary, withdraw from the job altogether. Bentham's vision of a ‘National Charity Company', a corporation established by the state to put people to work, foreshadowed today's murky world of workfare that lies in the unaccountable gaps between market and state.

In its bid to push people off reliance on the welfare state and
into the labour market, the UK government appointed the public service outsourcing company Atos to conduct individual ‘work capability assessments' of individuals. As this agenda was ramped up by the Conservative-led government from 2010 onwards, it led to a number of tragedies and acts of cruelty. These included the suicide of a 53-year-old blind and agoraphobic man, Tim Salter, only weeks after his benefits were stopped in 2013, following an assessment by Atos that he was able to work.
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Atos also found individuals suffering brain damage and terminal cancer to be ‘fit for work'. In 2011, Britain's General Medical Council investigated twelve doctors working for Atos as disability assessors, due to allegations that they were not performing their duty of care towards patients.
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Between January and November 2011, 10,600 sick and disabled people died within six weeks of their benefits being stopped.
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In one darkly comic computer malfunction, Atos confirmed that a disability benefit claimant was fit to work, even after they'd died of their illness.

When it comes to then motivating people to seek work, once again, the government also stands back, letting its contractors perform the most controversial psychological interventions. Those being forced to seek work are assessed, in terms of their attitude and optimism, and then have their motivation reactivated. The companies who carry out this task in the British context are A4e and Ingeus, who hold contracts with the government to get unemployed people into jobs. Around a third of the people who come through their doors report some sort of mental health problem, although the companies suspect that the rate is really twice that. Questionnaires are used to try and spot what the behavioural and mental obstacles are towards working (lack of jobs not being viewed as an adequate excuse).

In the eyes of these contractors, unemployment is really a
‘symptom' of some broader personal malaise, which manifests itself in inactivity. The solution consists of a range of coaching programmes, combined with ‘behavioural activation' courses, aimed at restoring the unemployed individual's self-belief and optimism with ruthless efficiency. As one participant in an A4e course reported, they were shouted at by a self-help guru to ‘talk, breathe, eat, shit belief in yourself' and that ‘you are the product – you either believe it or you don't'.
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Wherever the economics of mental health become more explicit, the gap between care and punishment tends to shrink. In 2007, the economist Richard Layard laid out the ‘business case' for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), demonstrating that it could save the UK government money, given the treatment's brevity and apparent success rate in keeping people in work.
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This was instrumental in the creation of the Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme, which involved a dramatic rise in the number of cognitive behavioural therapists trained and employed by the National Health Service.

But with the dawning of austerity, this sympathy for talking cures started to look somewhat different. In 2014, the government announced that disability benefit claimants could have their payments stopped if they refused to attend sessions of CBT. People would effectively be forced to receive a talking cure. Quite how therapy could be expected to ‘work', when it was only being undergone under the threat of losing £85 a week, was not explained.

To close down every route for the avoidance of work, doctors have had to be conscripted into this policy agenda too. A UK government report published in 2008 complained that ‘the fallacy persists that illness is incompatible with being at work', which doctors were guilty of peddling.
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A government
campaign was launched to dissuade doctors of this, and their official ‘sick notes' (which were once signed by doctors to declare that an individual
shouldn't
work) were replaced by ‘fit notes', requiring doctors to describe the remaining ways in which an individual could still be employed, despite any illnesses or disabilities. Doctors were encouraged to sign a draft statement scripted by the state, agreeing that work is good for people.

At the opposite end of the labour market, things look a lot sunnier, but somehow no less brutal. While Atos, A4e and Ingeus grapple with the apparent sluggishness and pessimism of the poor, high-end wellness consultants make large sums of money by teaching corporate elites how to maintain themselves in a state of optimal psychosomatic fitness. Classes such as Dr Jim Loehr's ‘Corporate Athlete Course' ($4,900 for two and a half days) introduce executives to elite ‘energy investment' strategies, which will enable them to achieve a high performance level of physical and mental wellness. The American productivity guru Tim Ferriss sells advice on how senior managers should best employ their own brains over the course of the working day, following an earlier career selling dubious brain-enhancing nutritional supplements.

This consultancy circuit moves seamlessly among various apparently separate domains of expertise. The psychology of motivation blends into the physiology of health, drawing occasionally on insights from sports coaches and nutritionists, to which is added a cocktail of neuroscientific rumours and Buddhist meditation practices. Various notions of ‘fitness', ‘happiness', ‘positivity' and ‘success' bleed into one another, with little explanation of how or why. The idea which accompanies all of this is that there is one ideal form of human existence: hardworking, happy, healthy and, above all, rich. A science of elite
perfectibility is built on the back of this heroic capitalist vision. The flip side of this, and the real driving force behind many executive wellness programmes, is a set of well-researched risks run by highly competitive businessmen, colloquially known as ‘burn-out', which includes the higher chance of heart attacks, strokes and nervous breakdowns.