For years I've debated writing a book about the self-care industry. I probably couldn't get one published, but it's fertile ground. The self-care industry is dedicated to the proposition that everyone who buys into it should live a life that is about nothing but self-actualization, self-improvement, and self-interest. The individual is sacrosanct in every sense, and anyone that suggests that what the individual desires is socially undesirable is simply an energy leech who wants to stop you from ascending to your final form. It's Ayn Rand laundered through yoga memes and clod spirituality.
There's an awful, awful lot you could say about all this - like I said, a book worth. But what seems to me to be the most obvious objection is also the most inevitably devastating to the self-care project. Consider this self-care meme, which is typical of the genre.
That you should never feel guilty is a commonplace in this world; guilt is never an appropriate response to something wrong that you've done but always a dysfunction, a failure to see the hidden righteousness in everything you've done. But please take a look at the last entry on the first line, "Saying No to Others," and the second on the second line, "Asking For Your Needs to Be Met." The immediate question is, what if what one person is saying no to is the other person asking for their needs to be met? What resolves the tie? Who does this philosophy say should be favored when these conflicts inevitably arise?
For an ethic of self-care to reign, there are two unworkable options. First is a bleak Nietzschean society where every individual asserts their own will wherever they can, where their "self-care" is actualized by relentlessly pursuing their naked self-interest at all costs. This has, I hope you'll agree, certain social drawbacks, but more importantly for our concerns here it undermines self-care's weird claim to both individualism and universality. If someone else who's self-actualizing is stepping on your neck, it's really hard to live your truth or whatever the fuck.
The other option is the one most self-care people seem to embrace, which is to simply pretend like there's no such thing as a conflict between sincere people. We can all go about our lives as busy little cauldrons of self-esteem and positive attitudes and we'll all end up fulfilling our destinies, if we only give up our guilt and our introspection. But our desires are everywhere in conflict; what I want will frequently be directly contrary to what you want. We can't both fulfill our destinies because our perceptions of our destinies conflict. Under a wiser ideology we would be able to accept that we inevitably will lose out on many of the things that we want, that in fact the default state of adult life is not getting what you want. But self-care can't countenance that; its basic conception of how the world should work is inimical to accepting disappointment.
Social justice politics are now dominant in our culture and ideas industries, like media, academia, and publishing. The inevitability of their rise in other arenas seems quite oversold to me. But they are the default language of those who write our culture, and so they are influencing our basic conceptions of what we can expect from our world. What they advance is a vision of a frictionless universe where, with better regulation of language and thought, everything can be orderly, just, and happy.
My politics ensure that I am a kind of utopian, and I think that with some easily-achievable changes society could be vastly more equal and just. But even in utopia we will live in a broken world, one where people want things that other people don't want and where unhappiness and disappointment are something like the default state of human life. I understand that a lot of people in the world walk around feeling that they don't matter, and that this is frequently because of systemic inequalities. I understand the validity and humane intentions of trying to make them see themselves in a different light. But I don't know how self-care survives in a world where we understand the inevitability of conflicts between noble desires, the ineradicable incompatibility between us all.
Ooh... I want to debate this topic. I believe it is the key to everything.
"First is a bleak Nietzschean society where every individual asserts their own will wherever they can, where their "self-care" is actualized by relentlessly pursuing their naked self-interest at all costs."
Let's start here. Correct me if I am wrong, but many of the same people that would dismiss the self-care domain would also dismiss the domain of religious faith... especially that of traditional Judea Christendom.
And that is important... very important.
Here is my simple perspective. The natural state of human behavior is to be free to pursue individual self-interest. Any system that attempts to thwart that natural state to excess will fail because nature ALWAYS wins. "Natural liberty" is an embedded and instinctual interest for the human animal that cannot be eliminated except by death.
Please meditate and think deeply about this. Most of the people that I know demanding a more collectivist and authoritarian system (we might already be there) for the reason that they see signs that freedom of individual pursuit is a race to the bottom for humanity, and that the collective needs to put up copious boundaries, rules and controls to ensure optimum outcomes for the collective... within that ideological dream they also ASSUME that they will be MORE FREE to have a wonderful life. In other words those boundaries, rules and controls will be applied to the other people, and they, the collectivist dreamer, will fly outside impact from those "simple inconveniences". In other words, the collectivist dreamer assumes that their pursuit of natural liberty will be better achieved by a system that prevents the same for others.
There is absolute historical proof that this is the fatal flaw in the collectivist dream... it ALWAYS results in a more miserable human condition for the masses... and only a small set of elite administrators lives high on the hog.
But back to the point about religion.
Capitalism is a 500-year old design that seems to have started in northern Europe. Adam Smith wrote of capitalism in Wealth of Nations as the system was proving its benefits to the world. But Adam Smith also wrote "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Individual morality is a key topic of interest for all great promoters of Capitalism. Ayn Rand, for example, got all tangled up in that domain in her Atlas Shrugged weird sex fantasies.
Capitalism relies on a "strong commitment to the soundness of the ordinary human being’s judgments, and a concern to fend off attempts, by philosophers and policy-makers, to replace those judgments with the supposedly better “systems” invented by intellectuals."
But the soundness of ordinary human being's judgement without a binding moral framework means that the individual can invent his own morality to justify almost any means to an end.
This is where we find ourselves today. We don't have a crisis in capitalism... we have a crisis in morality. And unfortunately our politicians have led the way in training the nation that individuals are moral if they get away with it.
It started with Nixon and Watergate. At least we made him pay the price. Then Bill Clinton telling his baldfaced lie on national TV, and obfuscating the definition of "Is". The secularization of the county (and the West in general) combined with a steady flow of immoral actors elected to office... has resulted in devolution in individual moral compass that would otherwise support the soundness of the ordinary human being’s judgments.
The same forces that reject foundation morality then jump to the opportunity to blame capitalism as being responsible for the mess... and demand collectivist remedies... instead of waking up to the truth that it is the loss of foundation moral compass that is the source of most of our troubles.
This is argumentative stuff. However, the simplifying fact is that everything boils down to this simple truth that a democratic capitalist system, however flawed, is better than any other system in terms of supporting the overall human condition.
I think this is wrong, at least in practice:
“We can all go about our lives as busy little cauldrons of self-esteem and positive attitudes and we'll all end up fulfilling our destinies, if we only give up our guilt and our introspection.”
Endless introspection seems to be huge part of this movement. The messaging might say to let it go, but the endless torrent of Instagram posts and books and podcasts suggests that spending time thinking about how to live better is more important than actually living better.
Maybe that’s for the book?