Neurotic Age Part 1
How capitalism fuels the basic anxiety
A few months ago I sat at a local bar reading Karen Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. I know the bartender from hanging out at this place regularly and when he saw the title he said “So what’s it like reading your biography, man?” I laughed in part because it was a pretty good dig, and Horney has helped me better understand myself and my work in therapy lately. I also believe Horney accurately identifies something worth exploring, not just in me, but in our current political and cultural moment. While people lament our polarized politics and the way that social media shapes our lives, few seem to want to connect this to the development of any sort of psychological structure of fear or anxiety.
At the moment, it feels easy to blame everything on capitalism and leave what’s meant by “capitalism” so vague as to not say anything at all. Those on the right blame “woke capitalism” while more liberal centrists pin problems on “unchecked capitalism” and those on the left have a tendency to toss capitalism in with sexism, racism, and homophobia all under the banner of “systemic injustices.” All of these reduce capitalism to whatever the bad things are and serve as a way to check off that one has made the trendy move of talking about how bad capitalism is.
But capitalism has a real definition. It’s a real thing and a real process. I take capitalism to be the private and unequal ownership of the productive stuff of society. That’s basically it. Whoever owns the productive stuff gets to make money off of owning it. When you combine private ownership with inequality and a labor market, the inequality perpetuates or gets worse and then you get the results of inequality, with the degradations of poverty being the worst of it.
In a post entitled Capital as a Real God, Ian Wright writes about capital as an entity that, though created and maintained by humans, doesn’t answer to any one. The basic idea is that capitalism functions like a control system similar to climate control in a house. All you have to do is set the thermostat on the wall, the system reads the temperature, and influences the environment with electricity, air, ducts, vents, and fans until it meets the goal temperature. A few ticks up and the heat kicks on, and a few down and the cool air flows until the temperature in the room adjusts. Under capitalism, the thermostat reads “make more money,” and the system adjusts until it achieves that goal.
Here’s what that can look like. Let’s say you own shares in a company. You want to make a little bit more return on that investment, and in fact you have to because you’re pretty sure your rivals in your industry might do the same and put you out of business. So you click the goal up a few degrees.
As that part of the system adjusts, the company determines that they can only achieve your goal by closing down a factory in Pennsylvania and opening one in a country that pays workers less than they make in the US. Now that this will put thousands of people out of work and devastate a local economy matters about as much as an air conditioning unit blowing some papers off a desk when it pumps cold air into a room. Both are just unfortunate side effects in reaching the goal.
Under capitalism, there is no satisfactory stasis and so the “temperature” keeps getting ticked up, the system kicks in, and the adjustments made. And none of this, and this will be key later, requires any one person or a small group of people to decide to do so. Once the system’s up and running, it can just keep plugging in individual capitalists and individual workers as it needs to.
According to Horney, people develop neurotic tendencies as defense mechanisms against insecurity, a sense that the world isn’t safe and that someone, everyone perhaps, is out to get them. It’s an ever present belief (sometimes conscious most of the time not) that you are not safe and something out there will destroy you. Horney calls it “ the basic anxiety.” It’s “the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world.” No single cause generates this feeling, and people experience it to varying degrees and in a variety of ways, but it’s a feeling that the world is hostile, and they are helpless within it.
I’ve written before for both Vox and Commonweal about the pressures that kids face today as the institutions of society have gradually made their singular goal enhancing everyone’s competitive edge in the labor market. I won’t repeat most of what I said there, although, in case you don’t click the link, I want you to know how terrifying it remains to me today to have heard a middle school student talk about “needing to have a better work life balance.” Here’s just a few ways in which capitalism feeds this “basic anxiety.”
Today kids get their grades pushed to their phones meaning at any moment they could find out that they bombed a test. Sixth graders have to fill out life plans in which they have to write about what they’d like to study and at what university. I believe this is a state by state effort, and I have no doubt plenty of education companies will sell you their innovative, ready out of the box, programs to help students think more about their careers. I remember talking to one teacher a few years ago about how his school used some software to predict students future grades based on 3rd and 4th grade test scores. They then showed these predicted scores to the students and encouraged them to do better than predicted. Now in addition to seeing themselves in competition with all their classmates, they have to view themselves in competition with what an algorithm says they will achieve.
In the book The Great Risk Shift, Jacob Hacker writes that while income inequality has drastically grown over the last thirty years or so, it has actually lagged behind income instability. Year to year, households have had less security in predicting their future income than they did in the 1970’s. The book The Financial Diaries, chronicles an in-depth tracking of finances of 235 families from poverty to solidly middle class. They found that people in America don’t just experience income insecurity year to year, but month to month and in some cases, week to week. This instability has drastic impacts on family structure, stress, but ultimately in being able to trust that the future will get better, week to week, month to month or year to year. You just don’t know.
Perhaps the best example of what spurs this basic anxiety is hypocrisy. In Our Inner Conflicts, Horney writes, “The only factor to which I should like to draw special attention in this context is the child’s sense of lurking hypocrisy in the environment: his feeling that the parents’ love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity, and so on may be only pretense. Part of what the child feels on this score is really hypocrisy; but some of it may be just his reaction to all the contradictions he senses in the parents’ behavior.”
Think about this from a kid’s perspective. You’re told that in America, all people are considered equal, but you look around for about five minutes and realize that’s not true. You see poverty and extravagant wealth sitting side by side and you know that rich people have it better. You hear that if you work hard you can achieve your dreams, but then you see people that work plenty hard that get stuck with thousand dollar medical bills, lose their job due to economic downturn, or struggle just to get by. When you see a homeless person on the street, your parents tell you not to give them money despite what you’ve heard in church, and then they explain that the person must’ve wound up that way because of drugs or mental illness or something outside their control. What you actually hear is that if you do drugs or suffer mental illness or can’t work, this is your life.
Is all of this presently conscious for everyone all the time? No, of course, not. But it’s not hard to develop a sense that these contradictions between professed belief and actual practice coupled with the fear of losing income mean that the world doesn’t work the way that the grown up people in your life say that it does. Not only that, but it seems like, your parents, the grownups, the bosses, the politicians, the teachers, the parents, should be doing something about this, but they aren’t. Either they don’t want to or they can’t.
Not only should you be afraid of the consequences of failure, but it seems like the people that should do something about this aren’t.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see a drastic increase in the number of people diagnosed with anxiety. It’s a logical outcome of an economic system that holds out the fear of impoverishment as punishment and makes competition its guiding ethos top to bottom. All of this has been pointed out before, but I thought I should go ahead and establish it here before moving on to look at Horney’s neurotic tendencies. That’s where she gets real interesting, and where I wrote “Holy shit” in the margins over and over again. I started to go into them here, but the post got long, I wanted to stick roughly to my word count, and I think it’s worth spelling them out in more detail to really get what’s going on with them and to see the way that social media platforms have fed into them and need them for engagement and profitability.