An Infliction of Sacred Wounds: On Mental Health Under Capitalist Realism (Fisher's Ghosts, part 4)

Thursday of this past week was my first real day off in a long time – I was off work, I didn’t have to make a day trip to handle any pressing family business, I wasn’t stuck doing chores or filling responsibilities. So, clearly, I had to waste the entire day wasting time instead of writing, or planning my class for January, or unpacking boxes that are still not-completely-unpacked from the move. No, instead, clearly, I had to waste my whole day playing video games.

I’m sorry, but any discussion of Spoon Theory just makes me think of Don Hertzfeldt’s animated short “Rejected”, which shaped my sense of humor back in the early 2000s.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love playing video games. But I made the mistake of starting one up “for just a bit” before I did any of the more difficult things that bring me fulfillment (while I’ve never been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or similar, I definitely know the feeling of Executive Dysfunction – knowing and intending to do something “productive” but being unable to make yourself turn that intent into a reality.) In my way of thinking about things, I went straight for dessert instead of eating a filling, nutritious meal. So, around 2:30, I decided to do the equivalent of eating a bunch of less-than-pleasant health food, and go get my oil changed.

I’ve been going to the same mechanic for a while, now, mostly because he’s come through in a pinch for my family, but the experience of going in to this shop is very stressful, because he has a habit of foisting his stress off on whoever he sees. Mostly, he does this by asking anyone under forty why his apple products don’t work right and complaining about other customers (implicitly signaling that, when you are replaced by the next customer, he will be complaining about you.) As someone who works in customer service, I find it unpleasant.

So, when my car temporarily dies while picking up money from the ATM to pay the mechanic, when he dismisses the fact that it’s producing a terrible petroleum-smell and says to fill it with premium gas, and when he says that nothing could possibly be wrong with the engine because the diagnostic is only returning errors on sensors (because clearly, it wouldn’t be using those sensors to perform the diagnostic,) I can feel my blood pressure going up.

All of a sudden, my day off has become the experience of being locked alone in a room with a wounded animal. Something that can’t be reasoned with and can’t think beyond its pain.

And then, on Friday, I had to try to get this all handled in the two hours I have between the opening of the mechanic’s shop and an eight hour shift at my customer service job where I have to pretend to be bright and cheerful and friendly while ignoring the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears.

Of course, as you can probably guess, it wasn’t solved. As of today it still isn’t.

People are placed in this – and many worse situations – and we claim that mental health problems are caused by chemical imbalances and electrical faults and what have you. It can’t be that we live in a culture that couldn’t possibly be designed to make us self-exterminate more effectively.

That’s right, friends, I’m addressing the intersection of Capitalism and Mental Health today. It’s another “Fisher’s Ghosts” piece. I actually took a minor in Psychology when I was in undergraduate, all of ten years ago, and while I haven’t kept up with my studies or pursued it further, I still remember a middling amount and have some thoughts on this.

Sigmund Freud. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by David Webb from Alicante, Spain - Sigmund FreudUploaded by Viejo sabio, CC BY 2.0.

One of my major beefs with a lot of contemporary critical theory is that so much of it is tied to Freud – this is a hat I’ve tried on in the past, and honestly didn’t find it to fit all that well. More than anything, I think that Freud was an amazing anthropologist or ethnographer: he wrote very thoroughly and effectively on the condition of being a Bourgeois European Man at the dawn of the 20th century. His major problem was that he thought he could universalize and essentialize his findings to the whole human race.

Instead, I think that a much more accurate (though, obviously, not 100% accurate) model of how the human mind works can be found in Cognitive psychology and in the practical application Cognitive-Behavioral therapy. Our character is defined by the way in which we talk to ourselves, and Capitalism conditions us with messages about how we need to always hustle, how we need to always save money, how we need to always aim at the condition of wealth. Meanwhile, the ladder up to this level, to reach this condition, is being pulled up — which is commonly acknowledged to be a generational issue.

I have an advanced degree in English. I make jokes about it being useless, but in all honesty, it taught me to think deeply and effectively. It taught me modes of thought which bring me great comfort and fulfillment. If I had the opportunity, I could be an editor or a writer or critic and do quite well (in part, that’s what this website is about – I want to do these things so much that I give away the product of my work. I hope, one day, to make a living this way. At least if capitalism doesn’t collapse before people go extinct.) But, because I came of age during the Great Recession, my ability to earn has been curtailed. The system, which supposedly generates prosperity for everyone to an unprecedented degree, doesn’t.

We’re told that it works, we’re told that doing all of these things should help, and we internalize this narrative. It becomes a subconscious mantra, the way that an Orthodox monk is encouraged to say the Jesus Prayer in time with his heartbeat.

cartoon of a rat offering to press a lever for food, much like a stereotypical hobo. Taken from Medium, who took it from animalearning.com, who took it from Craig Swanson’s Perspicuity. Broken Hands is now officially better at citing sources than Medium, suck it, Medium.

In short, we’ve created a Skinner Box between our ears. For those who don’t know, the Skinner Box is a hypothetical or archetypal apparatus for the shaping of behavior. B.F. Skinner, the father of Behaviorism, proposed teaching a rat to perform complex tasks through the use of Positive Reinforcement (providing a reward when it did something desired,) and Negative Reinforcement (removing an engineered discomfort when it did something desired.) He proposed a totalizing system, where the rat only ever interacted with the engineered and engineering environment.

William Gibson once said “it may be true that anything you can do to a lab rat you can do to a human being, and we can do almost anything to lab rats” (followed up, of course, with the statement that “but that doesn't mean we ought to, simply because we might discover some truth thereby, you know.”)

You see: we’ve been sold a fantasy that does not map on to reality. Human beings are smart enough that you don’t have to actually give us the reward. You just have to convince us that the reward is there.

I currently work at a job where I have access to the numbers on the back end, and I know for a fact that I’m paid 17% of what I bring in for the shop on average. Pyotr Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, lamented the fact that mine owners only paid miners two-thirds or one-half of what they brought in for the mine.

While I’m much less likely to be buried in a cave-in or suffer from black lung, I’m paid proportionally less than a 19th century Russian miner, and I’m going to guess I have more bills.

The system is a con. We are being conned.

Let’s look at what Capitalist Realism says:

“Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlate in widespread pathologies. Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic. It is the condition most dealt with by the National Health Service, and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems - treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.” (pg. 21)

While Fisher was notably averse to treating American issues, viewing them as often eclipsing concerns of his native Britain, I think that it is probable that what he says here largely applies to conditions in the United States.

Available from many sellers, including Abe Books.

George Trow (treated previously here) once wrote something to the effect of “if something can’t happen without you, it’s a con, and you should leave” (paraphrased). Of course, this is impossible: there’s no place we can go to be on the outside of Capitalism and they shoot at you if you try. The whole world is a Skinner Box, and not a particularly well-designed one at that – largely because it wasn’t designed. It just sort of Rube-Goldberg-ed together. It arose through a process much like an accelerated Darwinian selection.

And, much as an entire ecosystem of methane-breathing life was annihilated by the appearance of blue-green algae filling the atmosphere with oxygen, people are being killed by anxiety-generating systems of capital.

As I referenced on Wednesday of last week, a piece from activist group Plan C, called “We Are All Very Anxious” examines the current climate and concludes that the dominant affect of contemporary capitalism is anxiety, just as misery and boredom preceded it. This is an evolved response, the system has evolved these techniques to engender anxiety (as previously it did misery and boredom) in an effort to keep the (formerly) proletarianized and (currently) precariatized population still long enough to extract from us our energy and creativity. This culturally-evolved response has led to conditioned responses in the public, shocking, punishing, cajoling, and rewarding us into the shape it wants us to be.

Let’s look to Fisher again:

“If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users; William Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Case's amphetamine habit is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract speed). If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism - a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read - slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile magazine informational plane. 'Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate', Deleuze and Guattari argued in Anti-Oedipus. 'Electric language does not go by way of the voice or writing: data processing does without them both'. Hence the reason that many successful business people are dyslexic (but is their post-lexical efficiency a cause or effect of their success?)” (pg. 25)

Sketch of William S. Burroughs, who described “the control addict” in his writing. He, himself, was described as “A Paranoid Man Who Knows What’s Going On”. Taken from Wikimedia foundation. Originally by Origafoundation - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The figure of the Debtor-Addict (and the associated formulation of the “Control Addict” from page 22, described as “the one who is addicted to control, but also, inevitably, the one who has been taken over, possessed by Control”) fascinates me, and not just because I read the dichotomy into a schlocky horror novel and wrote about it, but also because it is the perfect explanation for how the “abstract parasite” of Capital works, as well as a description of what I’ve termed in the past the “Epistemic Crisis”. In the Neoliberal world – what, in the past, was called “the first world” – people enter the workforce by having an abstracted wound inflicted upon them, a wound that can be thought of as debt, but which takes on psychological and moral dimensions – in truth, which takes on metaphysical dimensions – and turns them into workers.

This reminds me of two examples from media of similar metaphors, different creators struggling to articulate some truth that they observe, possibly beneath the level of conscious thought. First, I’m reminded of the War Boy society in Mad Max: Fury Road (is it any surprise?): a cruel, patriarchal war-machine where the chronically-ill war-boys form a weaponized proletariat seized by a false-consciousness, thinking that they will one day be elevated to the level of the Imperators and Immortans, the healthy elders who lie to them and promise that they will live forever, riding eternal, shiny, and chrome upon the highways of Valhalla, a warrior-heaven cribbed from Norse myth. Second, I’m reminded of Intercision from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, a cruelty whereby some adults sever children from their shapeshifting daemon companions, who represent the wonder and potentiality of childhood.

Blueprint for the “Silver Guillotine” that is used to perform Intercision, image taken from the TV series trailer. A great deal could most likely be made of the use of guillotine symbolism in this plot point.

This is the emergence of a caste system, wounded Debtor-Addicts, who are convinced that they will one day be elevated to the status of the other caste, the people who are free to exercise Control. The real horror, here, is twofold. First, they are being conned if they think that such an elevation is possible. Second, even if they were to somehow make the near-impossible jump from Debtor-Addict to Freedom, they will find that they aren’t truly free: they cannot choose to stop the cycle of victimization. They can only choose to do it faster or slower.

Part of this is a con, the shell-game of the capitalist mental health industry. Now, I want to say that a lot of mental health professionals are very well-meaning. However, the structures that they inhabit and enable are geared towards making people effective workers instead of fully-rounded human beings: the idea is to get back to work, instead of to make the anxiety and boredom and misery go away. That’s because there’s a huge blind spot in the system caused by atomization: mental health is particular, in the dominant conception. It’s peculiar to the individual or, in some contexts, the couple or the family. We don’t look at things on the level of the neighborhood or the city or the country or the world.

Because if we did, if we tried to treat mental health at the very root, we wouldn’t be able to continue as we are. And we are all very tired and anxious and invested in our own annihilation.

So everything is shit. Let us presume we’re fucked. What do we do about it?

Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, at the APA convention in 2000. Each of them independently invented some of the most important tools of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Image taken from Fenichel.com.

I mean, this is a major issue that is really hobbling not just leftist political action but everyone in general. It’s easy enough to say that life should consist of more than worry about money and renting your mind, body, and soul out for precarious work. It’s easy enough to say that life should be secure and fulfilling, full of fellowship and meaningful work (and I’m a big proponent of differentiating your job from your work. My job is selling luxury goods; my work is writing, partially for this website. The one I do to enable the other.)

I see an issue, though. Let me bring in a Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy technique to refine this, and show how the Freudianism implicit in a lot of theory hobbles our efforts. The problem in the statement that “life should consist of more than worry about money and renting your mind, body, and soul out for precarious work” is the word “should.”

“Should” creates a causal and moral dimension to the statement, a feeling that there is a moral disorder, a disruption in the causal chain that requires punishment but obscures the agency that “should” make it happen as such. “Should” does nothing but make us feel bad for something that already makes us feel bad.

One of the most important techniques Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy teaches people is to edit the way they talk to themselves, and reword their self-talk to remove “should” and similar words, talking around it in a way that removes that sense that something is inevitable or morally necessary – because the vast majority of things are neither.

Probable representation of the gnostic archon, the being who supposedly created the world out of vanity and rules over is as a metaphysical prison-camp.

So, instead, let’s put desire to work (but heaven forfend giving desire a job; desire’s job is to be desire.) Let’s say “if we want to live secure and fulfilling life, we need to X.” The solution to our current plight is to solve for X. We need to figure out what we can do to find security and fulfillment, and aim at that, because a lot of the problem with anti-capitalist activism under Capitalist Realism is the fact that we have allowed the hegemonic power – the Gnostic Archon of our day – to obscure the alternatives. After all “There is no alternative.”

Never has a statement required a laugh track more. Something to mark it as the absurdity that it is.

We cannot go back, but so much of leftism in the contemporary period is simply trapped by nostalgia in a proletarian reactionary mindset: we cannot return to Keynesianism or Fordism, we definitely cannot return to pre-enclosure peasantry. We need to step into the space outside the thinkable, and find a structure that does what we need it to do.

Until then, we will dwell in the Black Iron Prison of Capital.

But I return again, like a broken record, like an addict, to our Deluzian Mantra: “There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

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