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The Happiness Industry: How Government And Big Business Manipulate Your Moods For Profit
The following is an excerpt from William Davies' new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso Books, 2015):
Since the 1960s, Western economies have been afflicted by an acute problem in which they depend more and more on our psychological and emotional engagement (be it with work, with brands, with our own health and well-being) while finding it increasingly hard to sustain this. Forms of private disengagement, often manifest as depression and psychosomatic illnesses, do not only register in the suffering experienced by the individual; they are increasingly problematic for policy-makers and managers, becoming accounted for economically.
Yet evidence from social epidemiology paints a worrying picture of how unhappiness and depression are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values. Workplaces put a growing emphasis on community and psychological commitment, but against longer-term economic trends towards atomization and insecurity. We have an economic model which mitigates against precisely the psychological attributes it depends upon.
In this more general and historical sense, then, governments and businesses ‘created the problems that they are now trying to solve.’ Happiness science has achieved the influence it has because it promises to provide the longed-for solution. First of all, happiness economists are able to put a monetary price on the problem of misery and alienation. The opinion-polling company Gallup, for example, has estimated that unhappiness of employees costs the US economy $500 billion a year in lost productivity, lost tax receipts and health-care costs. This allows our emotions and well-being to be brought within broader calculations of economic efficiency.Positive psychology and associated techniques then play a key role in helping to restore people’s energy and drive. The hope is that a fundamental flaw in our current political economy may be surmounted, without confronting any serious political–economic questions.
Psychology is very often how societies avoid looking in the mirror. The second structural reason for the surging interest in happiness is somewhat more disturbing, and concerns technology. Until relatively recently, most scientific attempts to know or manipulate how someone else was feeling occurred within formally identifiable institutions, such as psychology laboratories, hospitals, workplaces, focus groups, or some such. This is no longer the case. In July 2014, Facebook published an academic paper containing details of how it had successfully altered hundreds of thousands of its users’ moods, by manipulating their news feeds. There was an outcry that this had been done in a clandestine fashion. But as the dust settled, the anger turned to anxiety: would Facebook bother to publish such a paper in future, or just get on with the experiment anyway and keep the results to themselves?
Monitoring our mood and feelings is becoming a function of our physical environment. In 2014, British Airways trialled a ‘happiness blanket’, which represents passenger contentment through neural monitoring. As the passenger becomes more relaxed, the blanket turns from red to blue, indicating to the airline staff that they are being well looked after. A range of consumer technologies are now on the market for measuring and analyzing well-being, from wristwatches, to smartphones, to Vessyl, a ‘smart’ cup which monitors your liquid intake in terms of its health effects. One of the foundational neoliberal arguments in favor of the market was that it served as a vast sensory device, capturing millions of individual desires, opinions and values, and converting these into prices. It is possible that we are on the cusp of a new post-neoliberal era in which the market is no longer the primary tool for this capture of mass sentiment. Once happiness monitoring tools flood our everyday lives, other ways of quantifying feelings in real time are emerging that can extend even further into our lives than markets.
Concerns about privacy have traditionally seen it as something which needs to be balanced against security. But today, we have to confront the fact that a considerable amount of surveillance occurs to increase our health, happiness, satisfaction or sensory pleasures. Regardless of the motives behind this, if we believe that there are limits to how much of our lives should be expertly administered, then there must also be limits to how much psychological and physical positivity we should aim for. Any critique of ubiquitous surveillance must now include a critique of the maximization of well-being, even at the risk of being less healthy, happy and wealthy.
To understand these trends as historical and sociological does not in itself indicate how they might be resisted or averted. But it does have one great liberating benefit of diverting our critical attention outward upon the world, and not inward upon our feelings, brains or behavior. It is often said that depression is ‘anger turned inwards.’ In many ways, happiness science is ‘critique turned inwards’, despite all of the appeals by positive psychologists to ‘notice’ the world around us. The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibly divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems. Rather than seek to alter our feelings, now would be a good time to take what we’ve turned inwards, and attempt to direct it back out again. One way to start would be by turning a skeptical eye upon the history of happiness measurement itself.
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They failed. I read ZH and know I'm doomed.
Was thinking the same. Being informed and aware is not making life any easier or more fun. I doubt I live longer than my ignorant friends.
Loose - loose on all accounts.
Pass the (nail) gun.
My mood will be elated when face fad eventually dies
"unhappiness of employees costs the US economy $500 billion a year in lost productivity"
I am certain it never occurred to any of these overpaid fucktards that raising earnings by that amount would be a wash.
What's the purpse of productivity again?
Focus on the experience itself, not the content of the experience. An infant doesn't marvel at what he sees, he marvels at the fact he's seeing.
Are you telling us to never grow up?
Anger is the proper response when one is threatened. Recognize it as a sign that something is wrong. Deterring what is wrong and take action to effect change. If enough people get behind it change will happen.
See the truth, whatever that is. Let the anger go. Don't let gloom and doom consume the room.
The Happy Worker thesis was soundly refuted by Sociologists back in the 80s. This Positive Psychology pseudo-scientific claptrap comes from the Military Industrial Complex, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Martin E.P. Seligman who is a well known dog torturer that built his reputation off of torturng dogs in a lab to create Learned Helplessness(tm) so that he could pass that on to the Central Intelligence Agency Human Torturer Psychologists like Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell who reverse engineered the USARMY Survival/Resistance/Evaison SRE programme so that they could use it to torture Muslims in CIA Blacksites during the George Bush Torture Regime. Seligman has been pushing his 'Positive Psychology(tm) since the American Government gave him a $31 Million dollar contract to train USARMY Soldiers on how to stay 'happy' when they witness their fellow American soldiers getting their heads blown off in a theater of war. Professor Seligman is such an arrogant human being that the USARMY soldiers nicknamed him 'Dr. Happy' for his prescriptions to stay 'Positive Psychology(tm)' when they find themselves in the midst of the killing fields that Seligman is attempting to familiarize them with so he can make more Petrodollars off of their collective ignorance. In brief, stay away from 'Positive Psychology' indoctrination, Z/H. Seligman is as demented as Hitler himself IMHO.
Sometimes you just have to say "What the fuck". Kid.
Know your real enemies, the ones who pumped up and hide behind the pawns they are setting up. Do it large. Find the others. JFDI
You're a schoolboy. Read this: Between Two Ages : America's Role in the Technetronic Era. Viking Press. 1970. ISBN 978-0-313-23498-9.
I admit this made me laugh hard.
Pass the Zanex please.
A real addict knows it starts with an 'X'.
Xanax (alprazolam) is a benzodiazepine medication used to treat anxiety and panic disorders.
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was a prime mover in promoting false happiness. He had to approve NBC News' spending up to 4 1/2 minutes of its news time (after commercials and bumpers) on up to two "Making A Difference" happy talk segments. What a phoney! He probably still can't figure out why his petty embellishments were going to get him fired. That $10 million a year contract was one big reason. Thanks to George Stephanopoulos' unreported $75,000 donation to the Clinton Fund (whose primary expeditures are paying the Clintons' living, politicking and travel expenses), Comcast may not be able to can him. Williams deserves to be canned, for allowing the NBC Nightly News to become an even worse cesspit of disinformation and propaganda then it was under worthless ('Greatest Generation") Tom Brokaw.
anyone really interested in behavior modification technologies has to start with facial action coding, vector modeling of personal preferences, behaviorist reinforcers, and the evolution of all of these into relationship resolution software like IBM's. it's beautifully sophisticated: take a video image in real time, process facial movements through a FACS database, get a high probability assessment of a person's mood, then adjust the values of secondary reinforcers to target whichever of the 12 primary reinforcers is causing the unwanted mood, to alter that mood gradually, imperceptibly.
i'm no Ph.D, but most of this process doesn't seem to require really high level skills in any of the fields involved. plus, most of the intellectual heavy lifting has already been accomplished.
Oh fuck that. Pass the benzos .....
Ya want to know how Govt. elevates my mood?
Every time I read that a life-long congress critter takes the big dirt nap, I'm elated!
Saw the movie Tomorrowland. Not bad. Theme was mood manipulation by the chief of Tomorrowland to create negativity on Earth.
Is that because Disney was making everyone too happy all the time?
That's what advertisers do and governments have followed suit and manipulated moods forever via Hollywood movies, etc. They're just much better and subtle at it now. Polls taken of people's attitudes are really just there to measure the effectiveness of the mind control.
"Mix a little sex and a little violence and you can sell it." -- John Madden
WTF?
......
Back here in the wooods nobody can harsh my mellow. All that propaganda is for the flat landers.
Happiness is a secondary phenomenon. Those who pursue it directly find it impossible to achieve. Those who pursue higher goals, and are successful, will experience plenty of happiness along the way. They also experience suffering and difficulities in similar proportion, but embrace the one as being worth the other.
In our sick society the majority do not have higher goals, do not respect suffering (have grown weary of it), and have been taught (by their government, religion, culture, and corporations) to pursue happiness directly. We lack higher goals due to nihilism, lack of belief in objective meaning in life, and lack of ability to formulate our own subjective meaning.
As much of our society succumbs to the futility of the pursuit of happiness, they blame their failure on others, rather than themselves, and believe that if they can successfully force their moral values on everyone else (rid the world of "evil") the world will finally turn happy. They still blindly believe that virtue is linked with happiness, despite all empirical evidence suggesting to the contrary. Or, perhaps, they enjoy the little vengeful bite of happiness obtained by interfering with and dominating those who they call immoral or "evil" (who almost always tend to be happier and better constituted than they are). That, or they finally realize that they themselves are to blame; then, they all have "mental disorders" (ie. depression) and believe that only medication can finally make them happy, or at least turn them into zombies and shut off their emotions physically, if they could not shut them off rationally.
The Eastern religions, long ago, accepted that to end suffering, happiness must also be given up. They taught the relinquishing of emotional attachments and rational acceptance and at-one-ness with the world. In the West, under the influence of Christianity, we instead came to believe in a Utopian world where happiness is possible without its opposite. Both parties operated out of weariness of the lower classes and desire to escape the world. The East at least based their philosophy on logic, reason, and relativism, while the West, theirs on blind faith in a linguistic error and/or religion, grasping for objectivity.
Finally, the term "happiness" is tricky because it's meaning has been cannibalized and obfuscated. Originally, it referred to a positive emotional state. Now, it is also used to refer to a neutral state of contentment and free of emotion. Similarly, "love" was originally a passion, but now also refers to a passionless ideal (ie. "love thy neighbor"). Is it any wonder that teenagers can't figure out what "love" is and many adults can't figure out "happiness"?
While mass pessimism of our society seemingly wants to drag humanity into the dirt and suffocate us in negativity, there are still plenty of happy human beings in our world. Not least of all, those in power in our society. As much as we may dislike those in power, at least they are not as pathetic as the whining and complaining pessimists.
It's likely that suffering and unhappiness will always necessarily predominate in some segment of humanity (ie. the losers) such that the reverse can predominate in another segment (the winners). In that case, let us try to be on the winning side. It is not surprising that the chronically unhappy would desire not only to kill themselves, but also to kill those who are happy (they are jealous and spiteful). Let's ignore the unfortunates, leave them to wallow in their misery without pity, and focus on being optimists ourselves. Otherwise, they will succeed in dragging us into their misery.
Above all, let us reject their erroneous doctrine that the world can be entirely happy by eliminating this or that "problem" that they've isolated (evil, poverty, crime, money, etc). Even sheep and ants experience unhappiness (less, perhaps, but then also less happiness). The only species that is perfectly "happy" are rocks and other inanimate objects. And it's easy enough for a human to join the inanimate objects without demanding that the rest of humanity follow him.
Happiness is Alan Greenspan tarred, feathered, and affixed to the Wall Street Bull riding it backwards for a Time Magazine cover photoshoot with Greenspan smoking a pipe attempting to look like Hugh Hefner.
yup, that's happiness, I double checked!
People only buy happy stuff when they can afford it. The profit margins are greater when you sell fear.
Buy a house now while you can't afford it 'cos prices are going up and then you will be homeless forever!
You have to give me your labour for free becoz there is a war on!
etc
My 'mood ring' let's me know how I'm feeling...
I use a watch that sliently counts out a minute. If I close my eyes and wait for a minute, when I open them I should see how close to 1 minute I was, and that tells me how focused and how happy I am at the moment. My friend thinks I'm crazy. He uses a dip-stick.
"It's easier to fool people than convince them they've been fooled"...Mark Twain...
It comes back to the fact that people confuse virtual and real world values all the time, and so does Congress and the White House. It's $180 billion dollar a year business selling consumer data. Want to lay it on thick and see the ultimate "happiness sell"..watch this Silicon Valley documentary and they have all the code writers to fool you too into happiness...look at Facebook...anymore fools than over there?
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/03/cybertopia-dreams-of-silicon-valley.html
Welcome to Duperville as the scamming and superficial crap just keeps inequality rolling...
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/05/privacy-duping-of-america-intangible.html
This is getting out of control and be very aware of United Healthcare as that's what they like to do as they own truckloads of behavior, health analytics companies and they score the crap out of patients and doctors. They use algorithms to fire non cost effective doctors, even though they are doing a great job. Kaiser in CA got fined for not enough mental health care, in walks United/Optum and the get an outsourced contract signed to take over caring for some of the mentally ill.
A couple years ago that company sued DOD to get the Tri-Care contract in the west, and they got it and nothing more was said about the lawsuit and a big former algorithm crook, a former Goldman Sachs banker runs Medicare now so see where that's going.
United and other insures use software that sends a million algorithms loose to evaluate your voice at their call centers, be aware. They all about manipulation and sometimes they stumble with their campaigns when they get too full of themselves and they sell all their scoring to other companies and banks. By the way United owns a bank under their Optum subsidiary name. They take in all your HSA dollars and loan money out on it and who knows if those bank funds help fund their big stock buy backs too.
There's a crap load of manipulating with that company, and they have been at it for years. Be aware too that we are now under the six degrees of Bob Rubin as HHS Secy was a former Bob Rubin director and hired herself a big lawyer from Citi to help her.
I have been saying this for years with manipulation and now they rig it with the news too...news rigging made simple with journobots that are programmed to write manipulating news or a knock off of a human written story.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/04/news-rigging-has-arrived-astroturf-and.html
'Shrooms may just allow you to get acquainted with ol' hippies that didn't sell out. The psyco-ologists are theoreticians. Fungii!!!
Related article from Mike Adams at Natural News:
Mind control through emotional domination: How we're all being manipulated by the "crisis of the NOW"
Don't worry, be happy...
now go out and SPEND... go out and BUY some stuff..... It's your patriotic duty.
isn't that the whole point of MOPE (management of perspective economics)? convince people 'all is well' so they'll go out and SPEND?
According to this guy, they are spying on me to make me happier:
Concerns about privacy have traditionally seen it as something which needs to be balanced against security. But today, we have to confront the fact that a considerable amount of surveillance occurs to increase our health, happiness, satisfaction or sensory pleasures.
No, just no. But nice try!
I gave everone an up vote. Feel better?
Up votes?
We don't need no stinkin' up votes.
sometimes less is more.
As I recall the USSR would broadcast porn to placate the masses.
You must be from New Orleans... Bienvenue!
First of all psychology is not a science like cooking is not science although can consistently and repeatedly provide desired results.
It is neo-scholastic type of knowledge based on statistically categorizing shallow observations with no deep understanding of underlying mechanisms or principles common to all behavioristic inquiries.
Psychology is very old field of knowledge dating from at least Greek classical period from 700 bc and have been developed as a part of control structure supporting early democratic systems.
In other words psychology, through observations and experimentation provided recipe for manipulating voters to acquire certain attitudes or acts in certain ways as a part of electoral democratic process. In oligarchic and autocratic systems psychology provided different tools and methods to control attitudes and acts combined with physical intimidation.
Psychology, including positive psychology, as a tool of rulers, is very insidious since it using against us our "confessions" about our internal feelings, conflicts and intellectual analysis of society under control of ruling elite. It has never been about well being of an individual.
To truly understand what psychology is and see through crap about happiness that is spewed among populace read : SAVING THE MODERN SOUL by Eva Illouz UC Press 2008, check it out from any college Library.
Happiness is health, stability, relationships, creativity in contribution to society. Dedication to others and appreciation from others. Happiness has nothing to do with our feelings but all to do with external social reality.
It also has to do with what you value. I was just thinking before I saw this article that happiness is overrated. There is more to life than happiness, and frankly no one knows what causes it. Happiness is always wonderful and misery is rather miserable. But if you spend your life seeking happiness, it will probably never be found.
Or read PsychoHeresy, by the Bobgans.
“As you are aware, honey bees have been suffering from something called Colony Collapse Disorder. In practice, what this means is that the bees simply vanish from their hives, leaving behind their most precious worldly possessions: honey and larvae.”
That’s what happened to me! CCD! That’s my diagnosis! Colony Collapse Disorder. I knew I was feeling blue, down in the dumps, feeling like it just wasn’t worth getting up in the morning. Fatigue? Headaches and irritability? Sexual dysfunction? Constipation? My Professional Colon Cleanser, with whom I’ve shared many hours of therapy and conversation has noticed my increasing dysphoria, but no amount of leechy extract and Himalayan salt treatments has helped.
Now I know: my Colony has fully Collapsed. (And it hurts.)
I am new to the whole financial scene. And I've spent decades wondering at news hours always reporting on "consumer confidence". I always thought: You save a little, you spend a little, you work hard and pay your bills. What's confidence got to do with it? Now of course I know that the value of the USD is based on nothing but confidence alone. That knowledge in itself has shaken my confidence.
it's called a confidenc game, or con game for short! ;)
actually it's just ol' fashion propaganda.