Shame and Blame (Neoliberalism & Capitalism)

I see society generally struggling with all the toxic elements capitalism and neoliberal society values and its making people sick. People are trapped in toxic jobs, feeling constantly over-worked, overwhelmed, stressed out, tired, and lonely.  And then I see profiteers, people capitalizing on these discontents by selling their brand of wellness, telling people how if they just tried harder to be healthy and well, if they were more disciplined, if they meditated more, or exercised more or ate better they could beat it.  But the overarching element of this – to save yourself from yourself, you need to do more, you might need to work less, but you need to DO MORE for yourself, and — all the things you need to do more of yourself, well they usually involve money, more classes, more retreats, more organic food, more massages. 

I see this logic – in order to be less focused on my job, I need to run a marathon. I need to train and raise money and take pics and show to the world how I am achieving something other than financial or work-related success.  But I’m still success-focused. It’s individualistic, it’s goal-oriented, it’s achievement and its linked with status, to celebrate my achievement to the world.  I put all those pressures that are making me fall apart in the career capitalist working world based on competition into my hobbies.  I record my performance, I analyze it, I ask myself how can I improve, be better, do better.  I buy products that facilitate this.  

Here’s the thing, the way consumerism works so well in a capitalist society is by shaming us and making us feel insecure that we need this product to improve our lives.  There is enormous research that shows all the feminine ideals we strive to achieve, hairless bodies, etc. was just excellent marketing and stem from ad campaigns by companies targeted at making money by making women feel bad about themselves.  These are not new revelations. 

The wellness regime is no different.  It is built on the assumption that if you are unhappy, if you are feeling worn out, — you are doing something wrong, or at least there is something you could be doing better, and all you need to do is buy this self-help book to find the answers to overcoming all of that.  

DO MORE.  SPEND MORE. ACHIEVE MORE.    

Which the corollary is right now, you are not doing enough, you are not trying hard enough, you are underachieving at your own well-being.  Isn’t that shameful?

People who seek out the solutions mass marketed by the wellness industry, usually experience many of those telltale signs from the annoying list of symptoms for the mental illness of depression, which happen to almost anyone from burnout, from heightened stress and from coping with any of the hardships life inevitably throws a person.  Insomnia, over or lessened appetite, lack of motivation and concentration.     

So when I explain I have a serious mental illness, they prescribe their favorite pick from the “wellness regime,” whatever they’ve bought into. (Detailed in “Have you tried to meditate? Oh, Fuck off.” post.  And like I said before, I internally, say, “fuck off.”)

“If the individual is responsible for her own happiness, then she is also responsible for her own unhappiness. If the keys are in our own hands, each of us is personally responsible for almost everything. Success or failure, and health or illness are a matter of subjective willpower, lifestyle, and choice alone. While we may not be able to change other people, or the world for that matter, we certainly can work on changing ourselves and our selves. Structural change, a change of the system, is abandoned in favor of subjective change, a change of the self. Every problem, however social, political, or economic in nature, is personalized and even criminalized, the subject is made responsible for its own unhappiness, and made to suffer alone and to feel guilty, at the same time, for feeling unhappy, for not being a good and productive citizen, for not coming to work, for not getting out of bed. “

“It is a deeply moral message. Failing to be happy is simply immoral. If you are such an immoral and bad person that you have become unhappy — or depressed — it is you, and you alone that is to blame. This is the blaming cult of contemporary capitalism: you are causing your own depression — even when evidently you are not
Capitalism, in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people. First, it causes, or contributes to, the state of depression. Second, it erases any form of causality and individualizes the illness, so that it appears as if the depression in question is a personal problem (or property). In some cases, it appears to be your own fault. If you had just lived a better and more active life, made other choices, had a more positive mindset, et cetera, then you would not be depressed. This is the song sung by psychologists, coaches, and therapists around the world: happiness is your choice, your responsibility. The same goes for unhappiness and depression. Capitalism makes us feel bad and then, to add insult to injury, makes us feel bad about feeling bad.”

In McMindfulness (which I quote at length in this post), the author Ronald Purser speaks of a recent ideological shift, “in which an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness becomes a moral imperative. In The Wellness Syndrome, Carl Cederström and André Spicer call this development “healthism,” a form of bio-morality that tells individuals to make themselves flexible and more marketable in a precarious economy by making the “right” life choices — whether it’s exercise, food, or meditation.“

So while I feel social norms may have evolved now to stop blaming people with mental illness for being sick, people know it’s not okay to say, “it’s your fault” or ‘just snap out of it.”
They ask, have you tried this? Have you done this? Are you doing that?
ARE YOU TRYING HARD ENOUGH TO FIX YOURSELF? 
It might not be your fault you have this illness, but it is your fault if you aren’t doing everything in your power to fix it! And the fixes are so easy, they are everywhere, see all the wellness advice out there? It works! Just follow it and you will cure yourself.
PROVE TO ME YOU ARE DOING EVERYTHING. TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DO TO CARE FOR YOURSELF.

But it’s not just the wellness market, its embedded in the latest brands of psychotherapy. It teaches you to rise above your unruly emotions and quiet them.  Like Dialectical Behaviors Therapy’s lauded approach based on mindfulness. (BTW it’s so well-marketed, that it’s impossible to find anything via google criticizing the treatment.  It’s got so much good spin – which costs a lot of money, you’d think it’s the new wave of Big Pharma.)  

One of the only critiques I found, explains, “DBT is a modification of CBT, the main tenant of which is “your thoughts cause your emotions; change your thoughts, and you can change your emotions.” CBT seeks to achieve this by identifying cognitive distortions, or basically logical fallacies in your thoughts. However, this is troubling for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the idea that your thoughts cause your emotions is really out-of-touch with the complex nature of how emotions really work. Secondly, CBT assumes your thoughts are inaccurate – and subsequently that your emotions are inappropriate. This is really dismissive, though, since very often your thoughts might be very accurate perceptions of reality, and the emotions that follow are rational responses to the circumstance…

Since DBT is focused on mitigating one’s emotional response, it ends up blaming individuals to responding “inappropriately” to difficult situations.” The author explains that many people end up hospitalized due to abuse, trauma, and difficult life circumstances, and are forced into DBT treatment (praised for it’s short-term one-time fix – cheaper, faster way to get rid of patients.) But she argues DBT forces, “these individuals to accept things the way they are (literally DBT teaches “radical acceptance”) and just change how one responds to things. This blames victims for their emotions and fails to provide the necessary resources to cope with difficulties.”   

In McMindfulness, Purser also quotes Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in Selling Spirituality, “psycho-physical techniques described in terms of ‘personal development’ seek to pacify feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress.” He explains that instead of paying attention to what our thoughts and feelings may be trying to tell us about our experience — including questionable corporate practices, mindfulness gurus simple tell folks to “drop into the being mode,” to let go of our “mental chatter.” So instead of “listening to internal voices of dissent, or our reasons for frustration with bad bosses, social injustices or pointless tasks, we are taught to self-monitor internal states so we become more skilled at riding the waves of competitive enterprise.” 

So not only is everyone NOT DOING ENOUGH, SPENDING ENOUGH, ACHIEVING ENOUGH to lead a healthy lifestyle and address their stress and well-being,
THEY are also NOT SIMPLY COACHING THEMSELVES out of BAD EMOTIONAL REACTIONS, a simple solution-cure all.   

If you are emotionally DYSregulated, if you are upset, if you are feeling bad, REGULATE YOURSELF.  It’s easy! Just meditate! Be mindful.  And no matter what they say about emotions having purpose, DBT therapists coach you to engage in “opposite action” when you are feeling angry, distressed, or upset. “Honor” your feelings, but obviously, your feelings must be wrong, if the only answer to getting it right, is to do the “opposite.” YOU CAN DO IT.     

“The injunction to “be mindful” includes implicit assumptions that individuals lack self-control, discipline, and willpower. In many respects, the imposed self-management of “the wellness syndrome” is like the continual failure and episodic guilt associated with diets; both forms of self-discipline internalize the punitive commands of the superego. The individual is forever vigilant, wary of slipping from their regimen and fearful of becoming tormented by feelings of shame.“

SHAME & BLAME are still the underlying names of all these games.

To me,  even the concept of “balance” is elusive and just another “diet” that makes you feel bad about yourself because you’ll never get it.  Balance is not doing less, it’s about strategically DOING MORE to DO LESS.  Better boundaries at work, more meaningful time with your friends and families are lip service.  You will need constant reminders, books on how to do this, articles to read, and pay for lots of services to get the balance you need but can never get.  

When my chronic mental illness flares up, as I’ve accepted it does and will continue to do, I must control it, I must put it into check, I must care for myself. I must never show “bad emotions.” I must always have empathy for everyone else who misbehaves and acknowledge their point of view. Or I must “accept” that people are “imperfect” and that is the “way of the world,” and to “lower my expectations.” 

…Mindfulness interventions have a Puritan obsession with controlling emotions, especially anger, that is cloaked in new psychological and neuroscientific garb. The labels for dysfunction change over time — immaturity, hysteria, neurasthenia, nervous breakdowns, lack of emotional intelligence, problems of emotional self-regulation, mindlessness — but the fundamental model stays constant, based on a cult of subjectivity.

And I’ve done it, underneath the constant shaming and blaming myself for being unable to fix myself over the years, lies the neoliberal value of personal responsibility.  It diverts us from exploring the causes in the world around us, the problematic values of the environments we are forced to be in, it isolates us from one another and teaches us nothing about how to support one another during hardships – practical and emotional – tells us we can self-care our way to betterment on our own, it’s all in our heads anyways, and it destroys our ability to harness our feelings of anger and injustice to recognizing systemic abuses of power and putting the collective and engaging in collective action ahead of our individual selfish needs to pacify our stress. 

Purser says, “ In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with our modern age. It’s just our maladaptive responses that make us unhappy. Having inherited this flawed biology, it is up to us to compensate and self-correct. Biological reductionism, inherited from Cannon, puts the onus on individuals to monitor and manage unruly emotions. The capitalist economy is simply a given, to which all must adapt. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest ideology that naturalizes stress, ignoring structural factors that cause the response.”  The wellness movement/“mindfulness merchants”, “have a vested interest in psychologizing, pathologizing and normalizing stress, promoting interventions that are said to provide magical keys to controlling the causes of our misery. However, sources of collective suffering in external conditions are left unchanged.”

I don’t want to do more, I want to do less.  I want to stop shaming myself that I’m not doing enough.  I don’t want to spend more money, or time, or energy, to do more. I don’t want to keep using shame to mobilize me into being disciplined to achieve a perfect existence that’s out of reach and not my vision.

I don’t want to continue on a journey seeking a magical potion or regimen or perspective that will cure me of my diseased mind. 

I don’t want to assume personal responsibility when I react strongly emotionally to bad things in my life and bad things in the world and require myself to auto-correct my emotions to be chilled out, understanding and calm at all times.

I want to think. I want to consider all the injustices and fucked up things that exist in the world and I don’t want to believe I must tap into some exceptional ability within myself to be unaffected by it and that people who do are somehow superior. 

I want to care for others and build a community whereby we are an integrated part of one another’s life and no one feels self-conscious for leaning on someone else in hard times or like a burden or is afraid to ask for help. 

I want to live a life, where I enjoy the things that nourish me as person, and don’t use them as “tools” in desperation to combat my low moments so I can get back to the perfect emotional baseline and productive person whose sense of self-worth and value derives from ability to perform work.

” Maybe a good place to start, then, with regards to the politics of depression, is to collectivize suffering, externalize blame, communize care. At this point, the question of responsibility returns in all its force. The neoliberal responsibilization of the depressed subject must be rejected, and, also, replaced by an idea of collective responsibility…. Therapy as resistance, not as reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation. “

” We need a language that joins this archive to a movement and separates it from institutional psychiatry, neoliberal therapies, and the capitalist pursuit of profit. This is care that transcends the hospital, the clinic, the family, the state, the insurance company, Capital as such (even if one does not have access to those institutions in the first place). This is care which, based on a politicized understanding of mental illness, moves beyond care in its commodified and capitalist form. When bodies take care of each other, when responsibility is redistributed, and individual collapses are transformed into collective intimacies, the future can be (re)built in the name of a communist, shared, and sustainable one “

“ Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks. “