Mandatory happiness

Inspired by Foucauldian philosophy, this book aims to strike a blow against the “sciences of happiness,” which have quickly become a soft power device and a tool for governing souls and bodies in the service of neoliberal ideology. The title, which recalls Huxley’s famous dystopia, sets the tone of the book by emphasizing “how the happiness industry has taken control of our lives.” The essay—for it is one—quickly sets out the authors’ objective: to highlight the vanity and danger of the self-proclaimed “sciences of happiness.”

The 50-40-10 equation

The authors are not new to this approach. Eva Illouz holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where positive psychology was born. Her research focuses on the sociology of feelings and she has long opposed the psychologization of the social and the new norms linked to the advent ofhomo psychologicus.

After having looked at the sociological dimensions of love and the making of emotional capitalism, she now looks at the “apostles” of positive psychology, in order to show that “happiness, as it is formulated today, is nothing other than the slave of the values ​​imposed by the neoliberal cultural revolution” (p. 17). For this enterprise, she chose to work with Edgar Cabanas, also a critical specialist in positive psychology, since this doctor in psychology from the University of Madrid has worked on the economic, political and social uses of happiness.

The demonstration unfolds in five chapters of lively prose. The first traces the history of the main disciplines of the “sciences of happiness” – positive psychology and the economics of happiness – focusing essentially on their two prophets, Martin Seligman and Richard Layard. Despite their “disparate, ambiguous, inconclusive and even contradictory” results (p. 45), they have managed to prescribe the idea that happiness is a measurable and objectifiable good, through the famous surveys called “subjective well-being”, so much so that “happiness has established itself as one of the main economic, political and moral compasses of our neoliberal societies” (p. 64).

The observation may seem abrupt in the French context, as television news, like public policies, remain dominated by growth and its flagship indicator, the GDP. But it is true that subjective well-being surveys are regularly put forward, presented as revealed scientific truths – which they are not – and used to justify the world as it is and to reject any desire to subvert the established order.

The second chapter tackles the content of these disciplines, to show how the happy man they propose as a model corresponds perfectly to the neoliberal ideal. Theorists of positive psychology have, in fact, proposed a “formula of happiness” according to which each person’s happiness would depend half on genes, 40% on psychological factors essentially linked to the outlook on one’s life and only 10% on “life circumstances and other external factors” (p. 83).

In other words, everyone is responsible for their happiness, which is hardly determined by society. “Highly dubious from a scientific point of view” (p. 83), this equation of happiness seems to come directly from neoliberal ideology and perfidiously invites us to abandon any desire for sociopolitical change in order to withdraw into an “inner citadel”, in order to find within ourselves the keys to well-being.

Responsible for his happiness

The third chapter deals with work. The authors convincingly show that the pseudo-consideration of employee well-being is only a new, more insidious form of domination. Thus psychologists are often used to smoothly accept layoffs, increase employee productivity or recruit them by scrutinizing “the positivity emanating from their person”, rather than their technical skills (p. 128).

Similarly, organizational transformations linked to the emerging function of Chief Happiness Officer are only cosmetic, and the speeches praising autonomy and flexibility “encourage employees and collaborators of the company to internalize the control exercised over them by the employer” (p. 132), including among employees occupying low-value subordinate functions. The benefits are immediate for the company and its managers, but much less obvious for the employee who has become responsible for organizational contradictions and social tensions.

The following chapter reviews the qualities of the happy citizen according to the sciences of happiness, to methodically destroy the injunction to “manage one’s emotions”. The sciences of happiness construct the ideal of a citizen who is an entrepreneur of himself, the “psytoyen” whose principal qualities are “emotional self-management, authenticity and personal development” (p. 155).

For these new moralists who deny the existence of unconscious psychic processes, “individuals would all be equipped with the same psychological mechanism, or internal muscle, which would allow them to govern themselves totally”, so much so that they advise “acquiring and developing these aptitudes for good self-government” (p. 156).

Guilty of being unhappy

The final chapter describes the consequences of the consecration of happiness in the normative universe and underlines that the “champions of positive psychology did not just describe what, in their eyes, happiness should be: they especially prescribed what a good life should be” (p. 224). In the process, they classified emotions into two watertight categories – positive and negative – and ordered the elimination of the negative ones.

The authors of the book show that this is impossible (positive psychology will have difficulty putting an end to illness and death, to take just one example), but also that it is not desirable, to the extent that negative emotions can have positive consequences. Above all, the construction of the ideal of the happy individual aggravates the pain of those who suffer, in a kind of double punishment: not only do they suffer, but they feel guilty about it.

In conclusion, the authors believe that the sciences of happiness will never give us the keys to happiness, but rather conceal an old fund of common sense under a particularly pernicious scientific guise. They constitute a new tool of government to produce obedience. The case against them is well constructed and coherent. The book comes at the right time to provide a counterpoint to a discourse that has become dominant. Its success in France can probably also be explained by the resistance that the ideology of happiness has encountered there, which is stronger than in other areas of the Western world.

A revolutionary goal?

However, several points deserve to be discussed. The book reminds us that the essay is to science what science fiction is to innovation: both open research programs and the echo received by this book could have the merit of launching one. To achieve this, it would be appropriate to conduct a more in-depth study of these “apostles of the sciences of happiness”, whom the authors all assimilate a little too quickly to charlatans greedy for profit; for example by launching a prosopographic or participant observation approach.

Similarly, the somewhat rapid analysis of the methods and findings of these “64,000 research studies” should perhaps be repeated in order to establish a more nuanced assessment. Of course, positive psychology can often be summed up as a new Coué method, but the nature of the human psyche is precisely its plasticity. Certain little-known psychological capacities undoubtedly deserve to be exploited, which does not mean giving up all desire for sociopolitical change: the fact that the ideology underlying the sciences of happiness is generally neoliberal does not mean that this field should be abandoned to it, quite the contrary.

Finally, the main sticking point concerns the values ​​that should guide research and action. The book’s excipit (“it is justice and knowledge, not happiness, that remain the revolutionary moral objective of our lives”) reveals an almost religious option, which undoubtedly informed the authors’ entire enterprise.

Now this old axiom seems likely to be re-examined today. Certainly, social justice must obviously prevail; but the objective of happiness is not exclusive of equality, and some jurists are currently considering a horizon of justiciability of happiness. From then on, the sometimes somewhat rapid assimilation of the individual search for happiness to a selfish and unjust ideal, as well as the explicit prohibition of any possibility of scientific knowledge in this matter, would undoubtedly require more extensive demonstrations.

As for knowledge, postulating knowledge as an end in itself poses an axiological question that can only have a democratic answer. As the authors rightly invite us not to follow the prescriptions of authority, and in the interest of balance, let us recall these verses by Anna de Noailles:

Retain, from knowledge, what is necessary for happiness;

We are deep enough for the day we die.