What Not to Do About America’s Unhappiness Crisis: The Right-Wing Happiness Con
Immigration Hypocrisy in the US and Europe; Working with Despair; A Song that Will Make you Smile
Our essay in this issue of The Platypus explores America’s astounding levels of unhappiness, right-wing efforts to harness that dissatisfaction, and conservative ideologues (like The Atlantic’s Arthur C. Brooks) who pedal a version of the “science of happiness” that is infecting our culture.
A few other articles and items of note:
The warm welcome Ukrainian refugees have received in Europe (which we applaud) has exposed the appalling hypocrisy of the continent’s response to forced migration from the Middle East and Africa. We recommend a superb Intercept article by Max Granger, “As Europe Welcomes Ukrainian Refugees, It Leaves Other Migrants Caught Between Two Deaths.” Granger discusses the extreme lengths to which Europe has gone to interdict migrants at sea — and to cooperate with armed gangs who imprison migrants in appalling conditions in Libya to prevent them from even getting on a boat. Lamis Abelaaty has studied the reasons countries welcome some refugees and exclude others and finds that a number of factors explain the difference, including foreign policy, how the cause of refugees’ flight to safety is portrayed in the media, and, of course, identity: “Ukrainians are seen as white, Christian. Syrians, Afghans, and others are not perceived this way. People sympathize with refugees who they think share their race, religion, etc.” She concludes that “This conflict shows us that the EU (the third-largest economy in the world) is more than capable of receiving large numbers of refugees who are fleeing deadly violence. We need to bring this empathy to all refugee groups, who are equally worthy of our compassion and assistance.” We are seeing a vivid and moving example of what an embrace of migrants looks like – and it should inspire us to demand the same treatment for migrants of color in Europe and the U.S.
It is also true that the left should embrace democracy in Ukraine as a cause worth fighting for. Maria Stephan correctly argues that “It’s time to take Inspiration from Ukraine, and double down on global democratic solidarity.” And we agree with Roane Carey’s take: “Don’t be a Tankie: How The Left Should Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.” We should also be pointing out the pro-Putin complicity of a large segment of the right, the former president, and the current Republican Party, what Liz Cheney has called the “Putin-wing of the GOP.”
If you’ve been looking for a way to help the 2.5 million refugees who have fled Ukraine, our friend Negar Tayyar has some guidance. Negar is director of the Global Whole Being Fund, “a global philanthropic fund supporting people on the move, [that] is committed to advancing the rights and wellbeing of displaced people.” Negar encourages people to support the new campaign launched by Choose Love, which is mobilizing “resources for refugees (Ukrainian citizens, BIPOC communities, and other third nationals) fleeing the bombs and devastation. The campaign has raised over $3 million in two weeks and committed $1.7 million to 20 frontline organizations already. The campaign is aligning and leveraging the funds entrusted by institutional, private, and corporate philanthropy, celebrities, and most importantly everyday people! Choose Love is committed to being thoughtful, fast, transparent, and accountable. You can read more about the context in Ukraine and where the funds have been moved to here.” For those who want to engage more deeply to address the refugee emergency, Negar’s colleague Ariadne Papagapitos just returned from the Poland-Ukraine border and produced this report on “Philanthropic support for people on the move within and outside of Ukraine.”
The deadline to apply for the Executive Director position of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice has been extended till March 15th, so this is the last call to circulate the job description to potential candidates.
Because we all need some joy and resolve, we highly recommend Linqua Franqa’s music video for “Wurk,” a hip-hop adaptation of the labor anthem “Which side are you on?” Genius!
And if you’re contending with despair about climate change or the relentless torrent of bad news, we recommend highly Yotam Marom’s moving essay “What to Do When the World Is Ending.” A necessary passage here:
So what do we do when the world is ending? The same things that so many of the giants on whose shoulders we stand did when their worlds were ending. We choose to face our despair — to walk towards it and through it — choose to take action, choose to build movements. We do it because we don’t know how it ends, because there are possibilities out there that we simply can’t see from here. We do it because every person organized and campaign won and fraction of a degree of global warming prevented will save lives. Because movements that believe are far more powerful than movements that don’t. And, yes, we fight because fighting is one of the ways we get to nurture our courage and generosity and hope and all those other fundamentally human traits that we treasure most — because our lives will be infinitely richer in that struggle than outside of it. We do it because it is how we get to truly live.
What Not to Do About America’s Unhappiness Crisis: The Right-Wing Happiness Con
America is experiencing a profound crisis of unhappiness. It shapes our politics, energizes the authoritarian right, and produces dangerous currents of gloom and despair on the left. It is also transforming our economy: the “Great Resignation” and renewed energy in union organizing speak to the depth of dissatisfaction.
In today’s Platypus, we explore connections between neoliberalism, the American right, and the so-called “science of happiness.” The sinister power of this convergence is exemplified by “AmaZen,” Amazon’s audacious effort to reconcile workers to abysmal working conditions through screen-based mindfulness training. In a future issue, we’ll expand on the argument we begin today: that the struggle ahead calls for the left to offer an alternative to a deeply conservative and individualist ideology that blames people for their unhappiness. People’s desire to feel good is legitimate and to be honored. A more emotionally resonant and effective progressive politics will put these issues at the center of our politics and offer a robust vision for human flourishing to counter right-wing pablum.
Just how unhappy are we? Consider the recent finding that in America people are unhappier than they've been in fifty years.
Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” For the first time, in 2021, the “very happy” and “not too happy” lines crossed.
And a large subset of unhappy Americans are driving right-wing populism. In their paper “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” sociologists Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown found a strong link between social sources of unhappiness and support for Trump in 2016.
Nationally, and across all regions, Trump's average over-performance was higher in more economically-, socially-, and health-distressed counties. Specifically, Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment, and higher marital separation/divorce rates.
. . . this is a place-level analysis so we cannot say who voted for Trump with these data. What remains murky is whether economically-distressed residents themselves supported Trump (or simply did not come out for Clinton) or whether Trump amassed his support among less-distressed community residents who were anxious about and frustrated with the poverty, joblessness, and illness they saw around them. Ultimately, what these descriptive findings suggest is that Trump performed well within these ‘landscapes of despair.’
The graphic below from Monnat and Brown’s paper shows the characteristics of counties in which Trump overperformed Romney (the red bars) and vice versa (the blue bars). Counties with more disability, more vacant housing, more poverty, more suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, and poor health voted more strongly for Trump than Romney.
To sum up, millions of Americans are miserable, and the right has practiced a kind of mass emotional alchemy to transmute that suffering into rage — a rage that now threatens to fatally undermine our democracy.
But discontent isn't restricted to the right-wing base; it can be found in all strata of our society, and it underlies the massive reappraisal of work that produced “The Great Resignation.” As Noreen Malone writes in her New York Times Magazine essay “The Age of Anti-Ambition: When 25 million people leave their jobs, it’s about more than just burnout,”
. . . it’s as if our whole society is burned out. The pandemic may have alerted new swaths of people to their distaste for their jobs — or exhausted them past the point where there’s anything to enjoy about jobs they used to like.
Perhaps that’s why the press is filled with stories about widespread employee dissatisfaction; last month an Insider article declared that companies “are actively driving their white-collar workers away by presuming that employees are still thinking the way they did before the pandemic: that their jobs are the most important things in their lives,” and pointed to a Gallup poll that showed that last year only a third of American workers said they were engaged in their jobs. . . .
A McKinsey study from last year showed that 42 percent of women feel burned out, compared with 32 percent in 2020. (For men, it jumped to 35 percent from 28 percent.) . . .
Things get weird when employers try to address this discontent. Amazon’s warehouse workers have, for the past year, been asked to participate in a wellness program aimed at reducing on-the-job injuries. The company recently came under fire for the reporting that some of its drivers are pushed so hard to perform that they’ve taken to urinating in bottles, and warehouse employees, for whom every move is tracked, live in fear of being fired for working too slowly. But now, for those warehouse workers, Amazon has introduced a program called AmaZen: “Employees can visit AmaZen stations and watch short videos featuring easy-to-follow well-being activities, including guided meditations [and] positive affirmations.” It’s self-care with a dystopian bent, in which the solution for blue-collar job burnout is . . . screen time.
As our opening chart shows, according to the General Social Survey, the number of “very unhappy” American began to rise in 1990. But, remarkably, in that same period the new fields of positive psychology and happiness economics — a.k.a. “the science of happiness” — have dramatically transformed their disciplines and gone on to reshape business and governments around the world; been taken up by educators, therapists, and coaches; and been popularized by innumerable books, videos, and podcasts. Despite this intellectual and cultural profusion, Americans have gotten sadder.
Yale professor Laurie Santos is one of the more candid and credible positive psychologists, and she’s experienced the successes and failures of the happiness movement first hand. In 2018, when she began teaching her course entitled “Psychology and the Good Life,” it became “the most popular course in Yale’s 316-year history,” with almost a quarter of undergraduates signing up to take it. (A similar course had broken records at Harvard in 2006.) Santos’s podcast, The Happiness Lab, has been downloaded 64 million times. Yet, in a recent interview with the New York Times, she acknowledged that positive psychology’s saturation of our culture had not, so far, made us happier: “Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy?” she asked. “Because it takes work! Because it’s hard!”
In our view, however, much of the problem lies with happiness science itself, which is deeply flawed, rife with methodological sloppiness and crude popularization, often in the service of a half-hidden ideological agenda to defend the political and economic status quo of our current, rapacious stage of capitalism.
That sounds pretty harsh, so we hasten to add that many people doing happiness science have fine minds and good hearts, and many of their findings offer real potential to help individuals navigate the madness of our current world with a little more ease and less anxiety — to be, in a word, happier. We ourselves have employed and found value in many of the strategies, practices, and mind tricks proffered by happiness researchers. We’ve made gratitude lists, sought states of “flow,” quit bad habits, talked with strangers, committed to exercise and good sleep, kept journals, striven to be mindful in everyday life, and spent countless hours in silent meditation.
But happiness science and its many cheerleaders too often suggest the solutions to life’s challenges lie solely with the individual. For all their claims to being scientific pioneers, they are singing an old tune of capitalist propaganda, akin to the 19th-century rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger and the 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (the pastor to the Trump family whom Donald J. Trump idolized while growing up). The tendency to focus solely on individuals rather than social forces and structures is deeply rooted in both psychology and economics, which take as their focus psyches or brains or the mythical, utility-maximizing homo economicus — and too often evade the rich debate in social science about the causal influence of structure versus agency.
As Edgar Cabanas and Eva Ilouz argue in their brilliant book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives,
. . . happiness should not be seen as an innocuous, well-meant abstraction for wellness and satisfaction. Nor should it be conceived as an empty concept devoid of profound cultural, moral and anthropological biases and assumptions. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why happiness and not any other value—e.g., justice, prudence, solidarity or loyalty—has come to play such a prominent role in advanced capitalist societies, or why it has come to organize in powerful ways how we explain human behaviour. Instead, we argue that one of the reasons accounting for why happiness has become so prominent in neoliberal societies is that happiness is saturated with individualist values—defining the individual self as a paramount value, conceiving of groups and societies as an aggregate of separate and autonomous wills. More specifically, we argue that if happiness has come to be so prominent in neoliberal societies, it is because it has proven a very useful concept for rekindling, legitimizing and re-institutionalizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through science’s neutral and authoritative discourse.
To find examples of individualist and neoliberal bias in the new science of happiness, a good place to start is the writing of one of today’s leading happiness gurus, Arthur C. Brooks. For over a decade, Brooks ran the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), described by the Washington Post in 2014 as the “dominant conservative think tank.” With AEI’s coffers filled by the likes of Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry as well as tens of millions in dark money, Brooks emerged in the Obama era as a leading culture warrior for capitalism, cheering on the Tea Party, decrying concerns about rising inequality as the politics of envy, and claiming that conservatives are the true champions of the poor. In 2019 Brooks left behind his $2.7 million a year salary at AEI to teach at Harvard and write a regular column on happiness for The Atlantic, in whose pages he seldom reveals his politics.
Brooks’s reinvention as a self-help writer at one of our nation’s most prestigious publications has a nefarious purpose: to forge a new corporate-friendly conservative hegemony by disseminating a right-wing ideology about happiness and fostering the idea that the right has the answers to deep and legitimate, age-old questions about “how to build a happy life” (which is, in fact, the name of a new Atlantic podcast hosted by Arthur C. Brooks).
The March issue of The Atlantic features articles on the theme “How to Find Happiness,” with top billing for a long piece by Brooks entitled “How to Want Less: The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff.” (No nod to the irony of arguing that we should be happy with less from the man who made bank at AEI). Citing positive psychologists, neuroscientists, and happiness economists along with spiritual teachers like Thomas Aquinas, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Brooks reflects on his journey from running a think tank (whose political leanings and identity he does not mention) to becoming a relaxed sage with tenure at Harvard (which he mentions twice). He concludes by offering three lessons that have helped him “beat the dissatisfaction curse”:
“[S]atisfaction lies not in attaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people—including by sharing whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve acquired.”
“Most research has shown that intrinsic rewards [e.g., from “love, relationships, and deep purpose”] lead to far more happiness than extrinsic rewards,” such as those Aquinas categorized as “money, power, pleasure, and honor.”
“We can . . . find immense fullness when we pay attention to smaller and smaller things” — e.g., being mindful while we wash the dishes.
You might ask, “What’s the harm in this? It seems like sound advice.” There is, indeed, wisdom in these prescriptions, but they address only the agency side of the agency-structure dichotomy. Brooks argues, convincingly, that money and stuff are not the paths to happiness, but he draws no systemic conclusions from this and nothing that calls plutocracy into question. He does not implore Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to see the folly in accumulating more billions. Nor does he conclude that there is something wrong with the world’s billionaires adding $5 trillion to their wealth in the first year of the pandemic. He does not bemoan the fact that, between 1974 and 2108, the top 1% of Americans made off with $50 trillion that would have gone to the bottom 99% if the more equitable pattern of enrichment that prevailed in the decades before 1974 had continued. Instead, Brooks seems to envision happiness solely as an individual pursuit, at the end of which one can say with a satisfied smile, “I’ve got mine.” The cover of The Atlantic’s happiness issue likens the quest for happiness to a maze, and the artwork accompanying the article by Brooks depicts a ladder leading to a smiley face—two images that perfectly capture the individualist bias at the heart of today’s right-wing happiness con.
To take another example, in an article addressing the question “Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement?,” Brooks wrote that “many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored.” He proposed that such languishing retirees had failed to heed a lesson of the “hero’s journey” described by Joseph Campbell. They do not grasp that “the battle” is no longer with “an external enemy, but with one’s own demons. Win that final battle—the hardest one of all—and true victory is yours.” One might say many things about the social structures and forces in America that darken what are supposed to be one’s “golden years,” but here’s just one example from Elizabeth Bauer’s article in the not-so-lefty Forbes, “Eldercare: How Does the United States Stack Up?”
Other countries have responded to their aging populations with government-provided care, and many have beefed up the number of aides and providers. America and England are the only economically developed nations in the West that do not provide a universal long-term-care benefit, said Howard Gleckman, author of a book about long-term care and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
In another Atlantic piece promising “The Secret of Happiness at Work,” Brooks touts the importance of “earned success,” citing the founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, on the connection between achievement to wellbeing. But if “earned success” is so important, why does Brooks not take aim at so-called “legacy admissions” to elite colleges? After all, studies show that having a parent alumnus can boost an applicant’s chances of getting in by nearly sixfold or give an edge comparable to 160 points on the SAT. Likewise, the benefits of “earned success” do not lead Brooks to the conclusion that a higher estate tax might be in order. Rather, in an exchange with Gail Collins in the New York Times, he repeats the poll-tested framing of estate taxes as “death taxes,” asking rhetorically, “I mean seriously, we tax dying?” Do the heirs of great fortunes not feel twinges of conscience or self-doubt from the fact that their success was not earned. Some, of course, do, like Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins, and they decide to give all or most of their riches away. Have positive psychologists studied the happiness of legacy admissions, inheritors of great wealth, or those, like Collins, who chose a humbler life? Not that we know of.
The emphasis on each individual’s ability to create their own happiness regardless of circumstances reached absurd proportions in another Atlantic piece by Brooks entitled “When You Can’t Change the World, Change Your Feelings.” After considering a series of unalterable life challenges readers might encounter, like having a bad boss, he offers a set of simple prescriptions: 1) “Notice your feelings,” 2) “Accept your feelings,” 3) “Lower your expectations,” and 4) “Give more.” (Collective, political responses — like joining a union to deal with the aforementioned bad boss — go unmentioned.) Brooks concludes by reflecting on the case of the Roman philosopher Boethius, unfairly sentenced to death by an Ostrogothic king:
Boethius could not change his appalling circumstances. However, he could and did change his attitude toward them. “So true is it that nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so,” he wrote, “and conversely every lot is happy if borne with equanimity.” To take this to heart and act on it is one of the greatest secrets to increased well-being, but it doesn’t have to be a secret. If Boethius could do it, so can you.
The notion advanced here by Brooks, invoking Boethius, that with enough equanimity one can be happy in the most wretched conditions is, to say the least, far-fetched. In “Dreaming the American Dream: Individualism and Positive Psychology,” Dana Becker and Jeanne Marecek concisely rebut the view, so often promoted by happiness scientists and amplified in click-bait articles, that simple tips and tricks—from accepting your feelings to making gratitude lists—are all that’s needed to overcome the most adverse circumstances.
The good life is not readily or equally available to all. Disparities in status and power resulting from social class, gender, skin color, race, nationality, and caste, markedly influence wellbeing. These structural differences dramatically affect one’s access to health-care, educational and economic opportunity, fair treatment in the criminal justice system, safe and secure living conditions, a promising future for one’s children, and even mortality. What kind of fulfillment is possible in the absence of these basic conditions? To suggest that self-help exercises can suffice in the absence of social transformation is not only short sighted but morally repugnant.
Yet, this callous way of thinking has had an enormous impact on our culture.
Although “positive psychology” can trace roots back to the work of Abraham Maslow in the 1950s, its true liftoff came in 1998, when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman announced that it would be the theme of his term as incoming president of the American Psychological Association. Where psychology in the past had focused on curing pathologies, Seligman called for a new science dedicated to cultivating positive states: gratitude, optimism, resilience, etc. Grants from foundations helped get the nascent subfield on its feet — including millions from the conservative Templeton Foundation and $145 million from the U.S. Army, which Seligman promised would help create an “indomitable army.”
From the beginning, positive psychology has attracted critics. Bowdoin professor Barbara Held, author of Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching, contended that, despite their professed commitment to scientific “realism and objectivism,” positive psychologists advised people to delude themselves with false optimism. In 2003 she showed up at positive psychology conference with T-shirts bearing a crossed-out happy face and insisted that Seligman wear one during her talk. In her 2009 book Bright-Sided: How Positive Psychology is Undermining America, Barbara Ehrenreich dissected methodological flaws in some of positive psychology’s foundational studies and argued that an excess of optimism gave us both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the housing bubble.
Despite the trenchant critiques, however, positive psychology and the related field of happiness economics only grew as a cultural force. As Cabanas and Ilouz note in Manufacturing Happy Citizens, happiness got a major lift from the global economic crisis of 2008, which produced a flood of content in both academia and popular media devoted to self-care and the quest for happiness, especially in chaotic times. Corporations began hiring Chief Happiness Officers (CHOs), and the Coca-Cola Institute of Happiness set up dozens of branches around the world. Government, which had been warming for a decade to the notion of happiness as an alternative metric for national prosperity, took the economic upheaval as an invitation. As Cabanas and Illouz write of the United Kingdom,
In 2010, straight after announcing the greatest economic cutbacks in the history of the country, [Prime Minister David] Cameron declared that the UK should adopt happiness as a national index of progress. The Conservative put aside economic issues to instead focus on promoting amongst Britons the brand-new idea that ‘it’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing’.
It’s worth noting that the Dalai Lama, whom Arthur Brooks often invokes as a source of legitimacy, has long espoused very different views about capitalism and happiness. In his 1996 book Beyond Dogma and Change, His Holiness wrote,
Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilisation of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes—that is, the majority—as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. . . . The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.
In his remarkable 2017 manifesto, A Call for Revolution: An appeal to the young people of the world, the Dalai Lama affirms that “in terms of redistribution of wealth as well as solidarity, I consider myself to be a Marxist” and goes on to say, in a profound rebuttal to the solipsism of the happiness industry
It is essential that we be aware of our ecosystems that regulate our survival. Individualistic, egocentric attitudes are dangerous because they are not based on reality. I invite you, therefore, to pursue a process of inner transformation that acknowledges the interconnectivity of life . . . Western philosophy, ideology, politics and economic theory have spread the belief that economic competition, fuelled by rivalry, envy, jealousy and resentment, impart a creativity and dynamism to society. The twentieth century has exacerbated destructive competitiveness. People live together in a way that is underpinned by mutual indifference and withdrawal into the self.
For the Dalai Lama, true spirituality entails not individualism and AmaZen, but rather universal compassion and activism in pursuit of our collective liberation.
We believe that the problem of happiness is central to our politics and that the left dare not leave the field to Brooks and his ilk — or, even worse, those farther to his right, like the “postliberal conservatives” who contend that authoritarian governments are more conducive to “thriving” and the “common good” (For more on them see Elizabeth Zerofsky’s “How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary.”) In a future issue of The Platypus we’ll consider if and how happiness and the science of it can be redeemed and reclaimed by a left that puts people’s emotions, lived experiences, and well-being at the center of its politics.