BENJAMIN BAS

How ideologies that promote deprivation for the goal of living a better life are appropriated by capitalism to shift blame.

What does the renouncer do? He strives for a higher world, he wants to fly further and higher than all affirmers — he throws away much that would encumber his flight, including some things that are not valueless, not disagreeable to him: he sacrifices it to his desire for the heights. This sacrificing, this throwing away, is now precisely what alone becomes visible in him and leads people to call him the renouncer, and thus he stands before us, shrouded in his hood as if he were the soul of a hairshirt. But he is quite satisfied with the impression that he makes on us: he wants to conceal from us his desire, his pride, his intention to soar beyond us. Yes, he is cleverer than we thought, and so polite towards us — this affirmer! For he is just as we are even in his renunciation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Weare living in a myth drought here in the West, all aspects of life are nowadays explained by science, which rejects myth as a way of structuring the world. But despite our success in explaining reality with this science, we seem to not be satisfied. We crave something more than this realism, even if we don’t immediately notice it. So where these myths were once grand narratives on the forefront of society, today they settle themselves more covertly and take on the form of science or philosophy. Myth building is a vital aspect of life, life is more than a direct representation in numbers or studies, we need stories to structure ourselves within a world and with that see the opportunity for change. Myths can be radical and revolutionary, but in this essay, I want to discuss particular myths within society today that seem to instil a lot of values that we are trying to escape from. These myths together are tools of what I would like to call the deprivation cult of individualism.

Myth 1 the Stoic revival

It might just be my algorithm but all over social media, I encounter video edits of people working out with quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca or Epicurus in the caption. This ancient philosophy seems to be having a revival in Western society, especially under men.

During the pandemic, Stoicism’s popularity has only grown. Print sales of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius went up 28% in the first part of 2020 compared to 201, and print sales of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic increased 42%. E-book sales of Letters from a Stoic went up 356%. Penguin Random House told The Guardian that while 16,000 copies of Meditations were sold in 2012, more than 100,000 copies were sold in 201. “We have noticed a natural (slightly mysterious) year-on-year increase in our sales of the Stoic philosophers,” the Penguin representative said.

As most of these men understand it, the Stoic attitude entails not being affected by the things you can not control and instead focusing on the things you can control. In a society where everybody feels less and less control over their own lives, this of course makes perfect sense. If you could teach yourself that whatever happens, you always have the ability to not be affected, nothing can hurt you. But this is a tool that is sold to you by the very people that do control your life.

Stoicism is a broad philosophical movement that started around 300 BC with Zeno of Citium and knew various forms and revivals till 300 AD when most Stoic schools closed their doors. The stoicism that is revived nowadays is mostly the neo-stoicism of the Romans. The movement contained many ideas like the cyclical understanding of history. Next to the 4 seasons that form a year, they also believed in a ‘grant year’ that according to one source took 3.942.000 solar years. When such a year ended, the cosmic fire would engulf the world in flames and burn it down. Out of this primaeval fire the natural elements water, fire, and air gradually constitute themselves and a new cosmos is born. Really an ancient philosophy.

But this ontology is of course not what the Stoa is known for today, their ethics is what interests most people. Stoics define emotions as false value judgments. Roughly speaking: emotions come into being when a man judges certain external or bodily things — which are in principle indifferent — as good or bad. It’s of course natural to pursue some of these things or reject them, but as soon as a human being sees them as good or bad it can become an overreaction and with that an emotion. A miser is addicted to money because he judges it as good; this judgment leads to outbursts of emotions, desire and lust, and when this money is lost it can turn into fear and sadness. This is what the Stoics are trying to avoid at all costs, emotions here are morally wrong, it is a pathology. Philosophy introduces itself as the doctor of the soul who can help cure this pathology and keep it in check. Especially Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius dedicate long passages to this form of emotional self-management. They want to purify our souls of the irrationality of emotions and gain the end goal of a totally rational soul. Yet despite all this, the goal is not to create affectless machines, there is room for some ‘positive emotions’ (eupatheiai) like wishes, cheerfulness, and carefulness, the Stoic can even fall in love albeit a specific form of love. It is a misinterpretation that the Stoics want to free us from only the heaviest emotions, the counterargument of “a little bit of emotion has never hurt anybody” is the same as saying a little bit of sickness can be helpful according to Seneca.

This philosophy boils down to a deprivation of all emotions and with that the deprivation of the body’s warning mechanism. And this is exactly how it is used today by men who are already distanced from their emotions, as a form of abstinence that will lead to a higher form of being, a way to elevate yourself above the rest. Everybody wants to see things change in this society, but people notice more and more how impossible it is to achieve any change. So, where there is no control of the outside world, people will try to control their inside world, their reactions to that outside world.

Are you unhappy with your job? This is not the fault of awful working conditions and mind-numbing tasks as you can not change those, so you just have to change the way those things affect you. The problem is that this works best for the people in society that are already in a position of privilege and power. When there is a system that favours you in a way that is not immediately noticeable for you, as it seems natural, and you practice this Stoicism and succeed in your life it becomes proof that this way of regulating your emotions is the key to success. What these people do not notice is that the system is built for them to succeed. Because these people are already in a place of privilege, they are also overrepresented in Western culture. The only thing we see are these success stories of people who through “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” have succeeded in life.

From that place, it is easy to look at others that do not succeed and blame it on their attitude. The system in turn will cheer on all forms of ideology that focuses on the self-improvement of the individual and neglects the effect of the outside world. Stoicism is the perfect ideology for Capitalism to push, as it normalizes ignoring the thing that tethers you to the external world, making it possible to create an in-world where Capitalist logic is the only thing that counts. The only thing to punish becomes the individual, and individuals who already have to fight against a system that actively oppresses them, see these successful people vouch for this philosophy. But when they try it, it doesn’t work. And now they have also lost the ability to blame anyone else but themselves for this failure.

Myth 2 Dopamine deprivation

Our next myth finds its priests in the neuroscience department of the Stanford School of Medicine, a way more modern myth. Andrew Huberman and Anna Lembke are the two shamans of neuro-reductionism, the belief that all our drives can be reduced to the influence of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation makes the claim that a lot of society’s problems can be blamed on us as a collective, being addicted to dopamine. The internet gives us a 24/7 stream of this drug straight to our veins, porn, masturbation, social media all these things are drugs that alter our minds and if we are not careful will ruin us.

Jesse Meadows has written a wonderful analysis of this neuro-reductionism in her substack post The Myth-Making of Dopamine Nation, which I will heavily rely on here. She writes:

As a psychiatrist, Lembke is well aware of the importance of narrative. “I immerse myself in story,” she writes of her work with patients, and there is one myth that she just can’t stop talking about: the brain gremlin see-saw. (Oh my god, I know, stay with me here!) It’s the idea she built all of Dopamine Nation around, but it’s not even a new idea, because she wrote about it already in Drug Dealer MD. Basically, she says there’s a see-saw in your brain with pleasure on one side and pain on the other, and when you feel too much pleasure, little gremlins hop on the pain side of the see-saw and make you feel bad again. She says overusing your “pleasure centre” can result in not being able to find anything pleasurable at all anymore.

For Lembke, dopamine and pleasure are hard to distinguish, although she does recognise that seeing dopamine as the pleasure molecule is an outdated view. Pain and pleasure simply are not this simple, Meadows references a paper from David J. Nutt which shows that dopamine is not the only chemical at play with reward and pleasure, blocking its receptor doesn’t necessarily result in lower feelings of reward or pleasure. Getting addicted to things like food, video games or masturbation can not be blamed solely on dopamine levels.

So why is this logic pushed? For the exact same reason that the Stoicist logic works in today’s society. If we look at something like addiction, which is always tangled up in material socio-economic factors, we have to conclude that is a problem that is societal and not individual. The solutions to this should then also be social solutions, like healthcare, housing, education and decriminalisation. But this does not work for the capitalist machine, the solution has to lay in the individual, so there is an urge to look at this phenomenon with a lens that retroactively lays the cause within the individual. It is the individual who has to regulate his dopamine intake in order to not get addicted. According to this logic, there is simply too much accessibility to pleasure in our lives nowadays, so in order to function we have to deprive ourselves of these pleasures, Meadows likens this to a Hedonic Calvinism. It teaches us that pain is just regulation, the see-saw going back to its neutral position. This is why nowadays you see so many influencers vouching for things like cold showers, diets, exercise, and even abstinence. Neuroscience gives us an alibi for a modern asceticism pushed by Capitalism that ignores societal problems in order to retroactively lay the cause in the individual. Drug addicts, people in debt, disabled people, the blame is always on them and not on the system that makes their lives impossible. We see the same logic used in the housing crisis, if young people would just cancel their Netflix subscription and eat less avocado toast and be on their phones less, they would be able to buy a house. The problem is not the individual, it is systemic. The point here is of course not that an individual has no real agency over his problems, the point is that often having agency is not enough to make a difference. There needs to be systemic changes and improved material conditions if we really want to change things.

Myth 3 Corporate Buddhism

“How to be more mindful at work” “How mindfulness can improve productivity” All phrases that immediately make me revulse. Mindfulness is a meditation exercise that is based on Buddhist practices. Corporations seem to love it and introduce things like mindfulness zones or seminars for their employees to participate in. If corporations seem to love it, we have to ask ourselves immediately, why?

Mindfulness teaches us that when the outside world gets too hectic and there are too many things going on, you can always retreat to the peaceful place within yourself if you just meditate. We can already see, with the help of our other two myths, how this again lays the culpability of stress, burnout and other problems on the individual. The Buddhist mantra, as understood by the West, is to liberate yourself from your earthly attachments, this perfectly lends itself to the capitalist ideology of individualism. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes on the topic:

“Western Buddhism” is such a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw.

Zizek even directly equates this Western Buddhism to the neuro-reductionism that we discussed earlier.

And does the same not hold even more for the disturbing outcome of today’s brain sciences? Doesn’t Buddhism here also provide the only consistent answer? Brain sciences are telling us that the notion of self as a free autonomous subject is a mere user’s illusion; that there is no self, just objective neuronal processes.

I want to present these myths not because I want to renounce Stoicism, neuroscience or Buddhism in its entirety. I present them in order to show how, when reappropriated by the ideology of capitalism, they can be used to perpetuate this ideology. These three myths present themselves as tools of escape, escape from work, the matrix, existential dread etc. Yet, they escape to nowhere, their paths like a Klein bottle lead into the very structure of society that it claimed it was escaping from. These myths all have the same logic, and Capitalism promotes and sells them as modes of escape to redirect the masses from real action. Whenever you see a new trend that focuses on individual self-improvement, or asceticism and puts itself forth as a solution to big societal problems, you immediately have to ask who is behind it.

We are embodied and connected beings, I am not some centralised point floating in the world. I am connected to all sorts of flows around me, I make assemblages with many friends, spaces, animals, nature and objects. What I feel is always situated within a world, within a society that has a certain structure. My problems do not only exist for me or in me, they exist within the interrelations of me and the world. The solutions are never merely individual, they are always social. If we want real change to happen in society, we have to stop reproducing the conditions of the present. Recognising these myths can help us in seeing how capitalist ideology infects seemingly harmless trends and turn them into perpetuation machines. To end, I want to quote one of my favourite texts from the French collective the invisible committee:

Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.

Becoming autonomous, could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.

Bibliography

Committee, I. (2009). The coming insurrection. Semiotext(e).

Love, S. (2021, 29 juni). The Revival of Stoicism. vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgxvmw/the-revival-of-stoicism

Meadows, J. (2023, 7 juli). The Myth-Making of Dopamine Nation. by Jesse Meadows. https://sluggish.substack.com/p/the-myth-making-of-dopamine-nation?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Nietzsche, F. (2022). The gay science. DigiCat.

Zizek, S. (2014). Philosophy in Transit Event. National Geographic Books.