The Perdition of Happiness

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Mark Greene explores why society in Britain is so miserable.

Oliver James’ new book The Selfish Capitalist, published in January, may prove to be one of the most important books of the year. It explores one of the most pressing problems facing British society in particular, and English-speaking nations in general: why are Britons and Americans and English-speaking nations so much more miserable, indebted, divorce-prone, drug-addicted and obese than our Western European counterparts? And what might we begin to do about it?

But first I need to tell you something: I’m a ‘Tigger’.

In fact, I’ve always been a ‘Tigger’. When I was ten years old my school nicknames were ‘Zebedee’ and ‘Boing’. I wasn’t called Zebedee because I was Jewish (which I was) or because I had somehow managed to pre-pubescently sire two sons (which I hadn’t), or because I was thunderous in any way. No, I was dubbed ‘Zebedee’ after the character in The Magic Roundabout who bounced around on the single spiral spring that Mother BBC had bestowed on him instead of legs. And as for ‘Boing’, well, ‘Boinnngggg’ was his signature sound effect.

I tell you this because the rest of this article could well be read as a kind of Eeyorian rant, an over-intense response to bad news that might easily be dismissed as the kind of self-indulgent wallowing in the slough of despond that Eeyores and Les Dawsons and other ‘miserables’ really rather enjoy. But I’m a Tigger. And the bad news is that there really is no doubt that we in Britain are getting unhappier almost as fast as the ice is melting in the Antarctic.

Ironically, just as happiness has declined so the academic study of ‘happiness’ has begun to burgeon. Perhaps people are rushing to examine it before it becomes as extinct as the dodo. Oliver James, however, has been interested in people’s happiness  for a long time. The Selfish Capitalist is at least his fourth book on the subject, following hard on the heels of Affluenza, an analysis of contemporary materialism; They f*** you up which looked at parenting, and Britain on the Couch which explored the psychological reasons for our growing misery. His new book’s focus is on the political reasons for the decline in our sense of wellbeing.

The question is ‘why’ have we grown so much unhappier? Why, according to the recent UNICEF study, do we have the unhappiest children in the developed world? Why do twice as many people suffer from emotional distress in the English-speaking nations compared with people in Western Europe – 23% versus 11.5%? It certainly isn’t because we are the poorest. We aren’t. By a long way. It certainly isn’t because we suffer the highest levels of unemployment. We don’t. By a long way. No, Oliver James’s hypothesis is that our comparatively much deeper levels of national distress are primarily the consequences of successive governments’ adoption of a different strain of capitalism than the rest of Europe. And that strain of capitalism has created conditions highly favourable to the more rapid growth of a more virulent, self-focused materialism than the European version.

James' view is that ‘Selfish Capitalism’ was promulgated by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1970s and then seamlessly pursued by Major, Blair and now by Brown. In terms of policy, ‘selfish capitalism’ is characterised by measures which were originally designed to facilitate globalisation, including:

• increasing labour market flexibility – ie introducing measures which decrease workers’ rights – length of contract, conditions of termination, unsocial hours;
• reducing public sector spending by allowing more privatisations and making business less regulated;
• reducing welfare provision:
• privatising welfare provision to charitable or voluntary organisations;
• shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor

You could, of course argue about the impact of any of these measures, or indeed the others that make up the key 11 shifts in social policy, but what is clear is that since their introduction in the UK:

• job security has decreased dramatically. Britain lies 117^th in a ranking of nations according to how good their legislation is at protecting employees in hiring and firing. Spain was ranked 12^th, Italy 43^rd.
• working hours have increased for most and are higher than any other EU nation
• the percentage of workers involved in unsocial working practice – evenings and weekends – has risen to 15%
• property prices have soared and we are servicing mortgages over four times the size of our annual income versus two to three times in the late 70s
• savings have radically declined, debt has soared
• there has been no rise in average wages in real terms. In fact, the oft promised trickle-down effect has simply not occurred. The rich have got richer and the rest of us haven’t. The overall rise in the standard of living has been primarily driven by the increased number of women in the workforce.

No wonder we’re unhappier: we’re working longer for the same money in real terms, have less time for our children, our spouses, our friends or our hobbies. To put it another way, we have less time for relationships and the things that feed our souls. Of course, people need food and clothes and shelter and medicine but the materialism that we have in the affluent West is ‘relative materialism’, the materialism that impels us to judge our self-worth and success on money, possessions, appearances and fame and, sadly, how it compares with other people. Misery is last year’s mobile phone.

The problem with such materialism is that it doesn’t deliver the happiness people are looking for. Indeed, as research shows, once our basic needs are met, there is no correlation between income and happiness. In fact, the opposite is often true: higher income leads to greater emotional distress. Of course, as Christians we know that you cannot serve God and Mammon, that we should not be anxious about what we should wear (Matthew 6:24 & 25) and that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). However, this teaching has not been radically applied to social policy. And if the church were to try to do so, it might be quickly dismissed as the grumpy moralising of dowdy, non-dancing, prim, Perrier-drinking, pale-faced, party poopers who don’t want anyone to have fun and who can’t tell the difference between Prada and Primark.

Indeed, the fact that we now have statistically incontrovertible evidence that materialism is bad for you, and bad for societies, is good news for those of us who might want to encourage our culture to change. As James puts it, “Materialist motivation is to ill-being what smoking is to lung cancer.” Indeed, research shows that “… in all the14 countries studied so far, regardless of gender or age, materialism increases the risk of depression , anxiety, substance abuse , narcissism and the feeling that your life is joyless.”

The reasons for this are simply explained by looking at what  the researchers’ regard as human beings four basic needs are, viz: “to feel safe and secure, to feel competent, to feel connected to others, and to feel autonomously and authentically engaged in their work and play.”

Now we might dispute the choices – where is the need for God in this – but what is clear is that materialist thinking leads to higher levels of self-doubt and fear of death, that materialists’ relationships are shorter-lasting and more negative. Indeed, if you put an inordinately high value on wealth, status and image it’s hardly surprising that you put a lower value on relationships, and are likely to give far less to the poor. Similarly, people who choose their jobs for the money are less likely to find meaning and satisfaction in it.

Furthermore, materialism like many an idolatrous addiction, is a beast that always needs feeding and tends to draw people into a downward spiral of depressive discontent. If I watch TV then the ads and the role models are likely to make me feel less delighted with my possessions and my appearance. So I buy products to address the issue but alas they don’t really. So I eat as solace for my wounded self-esteem and become fatter, increasing the gap between the advertised ideal and my own reality, so I eat more… Furthermore, the more TV I watch, the less time I spend with people which tends to make me feel more alienated and depressed. So I eat more, or drink more, or take drugs in an attempt to prevent the last wisps of my self-esteem from evanescing into the ether. Not surprisingly then, materialism’s role as an albeit ineffectual provider of emotional solace means that it is more likely to occur in people whose parents divorced when they were children. It’s an ideology that rushes into the vacuum vacated by love, parading external potions as solutions for internal problems.

So far, so predictable you might say. However, if we can prove that materialism is bad for people’s overall well-being, then it is incumbent on politicians to be doing all they can to minimise it. Sadly, according to James, government policy in the UK and the USA and more recently Australia, is doing the opposite, and is actually creating conditions which favour the growth of this corrosive disease. Indeed, by comparing UK and US policy since 1970 with the policies of other nations he demonstrates that our current situation is not the inevitable outcome of market forces, our selfish genes or our need to remain economically competitive. We had a choice.

James substantiates this theory in two main ways.

Firstly, he shows how countries that shifted from ‘unselfish’ to ‘selfish capitalism’ suffered more. Secondly, he demonstrates that countries who pursue what he calls relatively ‘unselfish capitalism’ are likely to have happier, healthier populations. Indeed, the 2007 Unicef study found that British children were the worst off, the unhappiest and unhealthiest in Europe.

What is required is a radical re-thinking of every aspect of social and political policy that has served to increase personal anxiety, attack relational richness or reduce people whose primary purpose is to consume goods to keep the selfish capitalist economy. Of course, this is much easier said than done. On an individual basis there are all kinds of anti-materialist measure we might take – try a TV fast over Lent, as I did last year, and see how enriching it might be to other aspects of your life.

However, James’ significant contribution in this book is not the challenge it makes to our personal and family lives, it is the sharp reminder that if we are serious about seeking the true prosperity of this nation  then we must not only ‘Pray to the Lord for it” (Jeremiah 29:7) and take a hard look not only at the expressions of materialist values we find in the media, in education and in our own lives but challenge the policies of the political parties that have done so much, even if unwittingly, to create such ideal conditions for an ideology that threatens to make Eeyores of us all.

This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.