Happiness and the capture of subjectivity

Abstract

The happiness movement is part of a growing trend in developed capitalist societies of separating the experience of suffering and anxiety from its socio-economic context. In their recent book, Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies, Layard and Clark emphasise the genetic roots of depression and anxiety, which they want to characterise as the mental ill-health of the individual, the primary source of unhappiness and a scandal of unrecognised and untreated disease burden in the UK. The author argues that taken out of context, happiness is a facile concept that is invalid as a common good and a goal of political policy. Far more familiar in modern capitalist societies is the marketing of happiness as the ever-elusive reward of continuous consumption. Separating the subjectivity of individual suffering from the social complexities of lived experience exposes us to new possibilities of neoliberal ideological capture – social management through the marketisation of suffering as consumer dem...