Affluenza
Oliver James Vermilion, 382pp, £17.99
ISBN 0091900107
Reading the "renowned psychologist" (it says on the cover immodestly, though not inaccurately) Oliver James's latest book, on the existential malaise afflicting the world's wealthy middle-class minority, reminded me of the case of a man who had undergone neurosurgery in order to dissociate the physical sensation of pain from the emotional impact of feeling that pain.
First highlighted in the - again renowned - neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's book The Feeling of What Happens, it seemed to prove that the human body can undergo any amount of strain and stress, but it's the emotional distress caused by our consciousness of it that will make us truly suffer. After the operation to untangle the "feeling" from the "what happens", so to speak, the man in question was still in constant pain, but it no longer bothered him in the slightest. Surgery had separated the pain from his experience of that pain.
James himself began his new project in a state of distress after realising that, despite his assumption of immunity from low-minded envy and avarice, he craved a bigger advance for his book than the one initially offered to him. Secretly quite gratified by the bidding war that ensued, he spent some of his windfall on a round-the-world trip to compare affluent societies and their richer citizens with each other. As he might have written in this matey, but scathing, account of what transpired, it's a tough old life, innit?
He set out to prove his hypothesis that what he calls Selfish Capitalism - the market- obsessed, monopolising, globalising, luxury goods-peddling form of trade that has rampaged through industrialised nations since the end of the last recession - has caused huge emotional distress in those susceptible to its bullying tendencies. The affluent middle class of most English-speaking nations, he contends, has been infected by a virus that can't be shaken off easily: a miasma of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, self-punishment and cold sadism has enveloped the most vulnerable as a result of Selfish Capitalism's systematic destruction of organic, and therefore free (as in not involving cash transactions), human relationships.
If we were to use Damasio's case study as a broad analogy, the urge to use the human body and, more recently in the post-industrial world, the human brain as fodder for economic growth has, to James, clearly caused great pain to our nerve endings. In the first section of the book, he visits New York, Sydney and Moscow to find that all three cities contain some of the most joyless and neurotic money-making machines imaginable.
Some, as in the case of Sam, the horrid multi-millionaire banker he meets in Manhattan, seem to have taken a great cauterising iron to their feelings, treating other humans in much the same way as a cat treats mice: fun as playthings, but indistinguishable from inanimate objects. Others - often women deranged by the desire to be as thin as the unrepresentative mannequins they see on television - retreat into a grim half-life of eating disorders, self-harm and drug abuse. Here, money really does seem to lie at the root of evil, because it is intrinsically bound up with consuming envy.
But then James goes to Shanghai, where millions of rural Chinese have flocked in recent years to benefit from the transformation of China's coastal cities into shiny megalopolises, where the communists have encouraged capital to run free. He meets a group of well-educated "Shanghai Gals" whose lives, on the surface, seem to be as heavily proscribed by Selfish Capitalism as those of their anglophone sisters in the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
The difference comes when the young women he interviews reason that they must accept the world as it is in its current form and take responsibility for their lives within it. They despise Selfish Capitalism, but it doesn't depress them or drive them to the point of madness. Unlike the deliberate coldness of the Manhattanites and Muscovites, their responses seem more like rational adult evaluations of events that can't, without mass effort, be changed. For them, capitalism is a pain, but not painful.
James's focus on emotional distress, which he measures through a combination of World Health Organisation statistics and a rich seam of anecdotal data, leads to his formulation of a series of "vaccines" against the Affluenza virus that are so simple, and so vital, that it's hard to credit that we ever lost sight of them in the first place.
Work out what you need, as opposed to what you want (or what brands and banks tell you that you want), and ensure those needs are met. Give your children loving, consistent, educative attention over a long period, and be big enough to let them go when they grow up so that, first, they develop a strong sense of self and, as adults, are not crushed and infantilised by your lingering hold over them. Most simply of all: don't be cruel, be kind. Only then will the pain inflicted by Selfish Capitalism cease to bother us.
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