The Happiness Industry

Words such as ‘goodness’, ‘duty’, ‘existence’, ‘mind’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘authority’ or ‘cause’ might mean something to us, and they have come to dominate philosophical discourse. But, as far Bentham was concerned, there is nothing which these words actually refer to.

‘Man does not strive for happiness’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘only the Englishman does that.’

The reduction of social life to psychology, as performed by Jacob Moreno and behavioural economists, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible either. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the ‘bourgeois ideology’ which stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual well-being or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.

What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called ‘neoliberal socialism’. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands. Empathy and relationships are celebrated, but only as particular habits that happy individuals have learnt to practise. Everything that was once external to economic logic, such as friendship, is quietly brought within it; what was once the enemy of utilitarian logic, namely moral principle, is instrumentalized for utilitarian ends.

Businesses have long worried about their public reputation and the commitment of their employees. And it goes without saying that informal social networks themselves are as old as humanity. What has changed is not the role of the ‘social’ in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitization of social relationships.

The ideology of this new ‘social’ economy depends on painting the ‘old’ economy as horribly individualistic and materialistic. The assumption is that, prior to the World Wide Web and the Californian gurus that celebrate it, we lived atomized, private lives, with every relationship mediated by cash. Before it became ‘social’, business was a nasty, individualist affair, driven only by greed.
This picture is, of course, completely false.

One of the outcomes of this fine-grained level of social analysis is the discovery that different social relationships have very different levels of economic value. Once marketing campaigns are being mediated by individuals, in their informal social lives, it quickly becomes plain that certain individuals – well-connected influencers – are more useful instruments of communication than others. In the workplace, the socially connected employee will come to appear more valuable than the more isolated one.

The business practice known as ‘friendvertising’

Authority consists simply in measuring, rating, comparing and contrasting the strong and the weak without judgement, showing the weak how much stronger they might be, and confirming to the strong that they are winning, at least for the time being.

One report on the topic, sponsored by a number of UK corporations including Barclays Bank, stated with a peculiar absence of compassion, ‘Today’s brain-based economy puts a premium on cerebral skills, in which cognition is the ignition of productivity and innovation. Depression attacks that vital asset.’37