Category: Non fiction

  • Affluenza

    Oliver James

    The title grabbed my attention, but the book remained on ‘want to read’ for a while. But the moment I started Affluenza, I knew I would be biased. For starters, it was echoing my own worldview, and that too, quoting Erich Fromm, whose Fear of Freedom was in my favourites list in 2022. However, here’s the kicker – when I showed an excerpt to a couple of people whom I thought would especially benefit from it, they immediately acknowledged that it was a great insight for the current times. Except, this book is from 2007. That could fill you with hope or despair.

    Oliver James introduces Affluenza as a virus that inculcates a set of values that increase the chance of emotional distress. Its source – a political economy that he calls Selfish Capitalism, a mix of unregulated capitalism and consumerism. The book is a critical examination of the impact of consumerism and materialism on society and individuals.

    In eight of the chapters, he uses research from multiple countries to highlight the psychological, social, and environmental consequences of the pursuit of material wealth and argues that affluence, rather than bringing happiness and fulfilment, can actually lead to a range of psychological problems and social ills. Advertising and marketing campaigns are designed to exploit our insecurities and desires in order to create an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. As a result, people become obsessed with their own image and status, constantly seeking validation through the acquisition of new and more expensive possessions. A vicious cycle, creating in addition to the familiar haves and have-nots, the have-mores! The end result, as Fromm also predicted, is person-as-commodity, and thus unbridled self-promotion.

    The chapters move from personal to familial and then societal, and offer a point of view at the end (of each) called ‘vaccines’. At the individual level, ironically, as we make all efforts for attaining more material wealth, the impact of affluence on our psychological well-being is not automatically great. He argues that material wealth can lead to a range of mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, and addiction. This is because the constant pursuit of material possessions can never truly satisfy our deeper emotional needs, leading to a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness in our lives. In fact he sees emotional stress as a rational response to sick societies. The chapter on motives and goals is the one I found to be critical to break out of the ‘zombie existence’.

    At the familial level, the focus is a lot on parenting and parenthood. This is particularly important because childhood circumstances have a huge impact on our wiring – motives and goals. Given where we are, he recommends understanding them and replacing them systematically. He does have a few controversial views on motherhood and career orientation, but I think they are up for an objective debate. (The case of a 3 year old in China with the packed schedule was appalling)

    At the societal level, it is not just about the selves we present to each other, and the ‘keep up with (and overtake) the Joneses’. It is also about the kind of education and priorities we pass on to the next generation. Additionally, there is also the impact of consumer culture on the environment. James argues that our obsession with material possessions is leading to the depletion of natural resources and the degradation of the environment. He suggests that we need to adopt a more sustainable and responsible approach to consumption in order to protect the planet for future generations. He also takes a sharp shot at what Selfish Capitalism has done to the ideas of neoliberalism – meritocracy, egalitarianism, female emancipation and democracy (see excerpt below)

    The book has its fair share of criticism, but I think by asking us to question our own values and priorities, and to consider whether there might be more fulfilling and sustainable paths to happiness and well-being, he is on to something. “The solution is to think hard about what you really enjoy. The chances are that you have not done this, truly, for a very long time.” I think that’s a good place to start.

    Excerpts

    Modern education has been sold under a false prospectus containing three untruths. The first is that it will bring meritocracy, which it has not; and the pretence of it, requiring absurdly long hours devoted to passing mind-sapping, pathology-inducing exams, is hugely harmful to our children’s (and especially our daughters’) well-being. The second is that by enabling people to rise up the system, it will confer well-being, which it does not. The third is that exam results are crucial for our individual and national economic prosperity, and that is simply not true.

    Let’s look at the four basic, closely related, defining political ideals of modern social organisation which my travels call into question, at least in their present form: meritocracy, egalitarianism, female emancipation and democracy itself. I want to examine them not because I doubt their desirability, but because I fear they have been hijacked by Selfish Capitalism. All the ideals have been rock-solid vote-winners: what majority of Western electorates would not want to be able to advance through merit rather than class, to have equality of opportunity and to liberate women from their traditional role? As time passed, both ruling parties subtly perverted the use of these words to refer to Virus values, rather than their true meanings. Insidiously, meritocracy became a method for educating the workforce and selecting the most promising managers of an economy increasingly geared to making the rich richer and consumers carry on consuming. Opportunity became a mantra for becoming rich, for the material aspiration of everyone to better themselves, so that consumption would flourish. Female emancipation became a cracking good stunt for increasing the size and quality of the workforce and enabling employers to smash the unions in an economy with gender- neutral jobs. Democracy became the right to vote for people who would make you richer and better able to pleasure yourself. All these changes were invariably served up with lavish helpings of the word ‘freedom’, which must have set George Orwell turning in his grave, muttering ‘remember double- think, remember doublethink’. The problem was not with the four ideals but with what was done in their name. If they had been implemented to increase our emotional well-being, rather than the wealth of a tiny minority, they would have taken very different forms.

    Affluenza

  • Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind

    Judson Brewer

    The book descriptor is what drew me in – ‘train your brain to heal your mind’. in “Unwinding Anxiety”, Dr. Judson Brewer attempts to do this with a three act structure – set up, confrontation, resolution. In this context, identifying the triggers, understanding the why behind the cycles and updating the brain’s reward networks, and then tapping into the brain’s learning centres to break the cycles.

    The book begins on point with the dictionary definition of anxiety – ‘a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome’, born when our brain doesn’t have enough information to predict the future. Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety. An early example of the author’s mother-in-law manifesting anxiety in the form of snapping (irritability) was something I could relate to (in my own behaviour!)

    In the first part, the book also covers why the typical weapons against habits don’t work- willpower, immediate substitution, environment priming, and mindfulness. In the second part, I found the idea of changing behaviour by addressing ‘the felt experience of the rewards’ useful. This is different from thinking our way out of a behaviour, something that has failed for me in the past. Another reinforcement was about how reliving the past doesn’t really fix it, what we have is the present. In this section, the twenty one day habit-building timeframe is also debunked. The third section has useful frameworks like RAIN (Recognise, Allow/Accept, Investigate, Note) and a little part on meta worry – worrying about the next time you’ll worry. A final useful bit was not focusing on the ‘why’ of the anxiety, but instead on resolving it.

    While the title says anxiety, I felt that a lot of the book was about addiction and bad habits (smoking, overeating, alcoholism etc) and the habit changing methods that you would find in other books like The Power of Habit, or Atomic Habits. If it’s specifically anti-anxiety tips that you’re reading this for, I am not sure how useful it would be. It is arguable that anxiety is a habit, and what works for changing other habits can work for this as well. Somehow, I think that might be a superficial cure, and we don’t really know how to fix the real problem yet.

    Unwinding Anxiety

  • Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

    Claire L. Evans

    I had a sense of deja vu while reading this, and later realised that it was thanks to Maria Popova’s Figuring. The books are very different in terms of scope, but are connected by the women-oriented narrative, the idea of intellectual successors, and the presence of what one could call a ‘crossover character’ – Maria Mitchell.

    When we think about the internet’s history, and its current pantheon, the names that pop up are all, or at least mostly, male. But Claire Evans points out that the origin stories are actually mostly female. Their contributions are practically invisible both in the public eye, and while we use the web.

    (more…)

  • Home in the world

    Amartya Sen

    It’s really difficult to write anything about a memoir because while it is written for an audience, it is also intensely personal. But I think the perspectives are such that it deserves a larger audience, and I hope even this drop in the ocean can help in that!

    The book is more about the life, and less about the work. They obviously intermingle to a large extent, but the focus is on the relationships and the exchange of thoughts. In some cases, the subjects of discussion also manage to creep in, but they aren’t inaccessible, except on a couple of occasions.
    In the beginning, when I started reading about his background, and his family’s relationship with Tagore, I thought he was privileged. What added to it was the seemingly casual mention of historical figures, Gandhi downwards! It would be easy to think of this as incessant name-dropping, but Amartya Sen bends over backwards in acknowledging the privilege, and luck, that shaped his life.

    (more…)

  • The Shock Doctrine

    Naomi Klein

    One would think that when a disaster happened, everyone would do their best to help the victims. But it turns out that there are many who seek to profit. And such is the greed that sometimes disasters are created so that profits can be made. Naomi Klein calls it disaster capitalism, and this book is its ‘biography’ to date.

    She begins the narrative in New Orleans after Katrina struck, referring to an an op-ed penned by the high priest of the fundamentalist version of capitalism – Milton Friedman. His school of thought earned him disciples that consisted of everyone from IMF chiefs and Fed chiefs to Russian oligarchs and the Chinese Communist Party. The shock doctrine is simple – when a crisis occurs, there is an opportunity to effect change, because people are disoriented. Act decisively and administer economic shocks i.e. radical free-market “reforms” that will advance capitalism.

    The shocks and their perpetrators abound in history- Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War in 1982, Tiananmen Square in 1989, Boris Yeltsin in 1993, NATO attack on Belgrade in 1999 against Yugoslavia, the ‘War on Terror’ and even a homecoming in America after 9/11! And these days, the shocks go beyond the economic.

    Klein begins at an individual level, when in the 1950s and 60s, Ewen Cameron, with CIA backing, set out to find a way to erase the human mind and then remake it, using physical and mental shocks. (Now available in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq!) This led to a training manual to be used against enemies, called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. Around the same time, in the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, Friedman dreamt of its scaled version – de-patterning entire societies and taking them back to pure capitalism – free of regulations, trade barriers and public interests.

    Milton’s belief was that history got off on the wrong foot after the world wars when politicians listened to Keynes and started building the welfare state. The path to true freedom, according to him, was free markets. The original version had three conditions – governments should remove regulations that stand in the way of profits, they should sell off state assets to corporations who could make them profitable, and they should cut back on state subsidies and social programs. This was the Chicago School of thought, the Chicago Boys then set about implementing across the globe, helped by institution-building assistance from the likes of Ford Foundation! (Klein does a great little deep dive on this)

    They got their first chance to implement his ideology of unfettered capitalism in the 70s in Latin America. Klein quotes Eduardo Galeano “The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet.” Pinochet toppled the democratically elected, socialist Allende and in a dictatorial regime, began implementing not just Friedman’s ideas, but Cameron’s as well, making torture an instrument of the state. In the 80s, Margaret Thatcher used the Falklands War as a political tool against unions, who stood between her and Friedmania, in the process proving that implementation did not require dictatorships. In 1985, Jeffrey Sachs one-upped this in Bolivia by helping create an economic transformation plan that was implemented right after elections. NYT described Sachs as an “evangelist of democratic capitalism”. Behind the scenes, regimes used Cameron’s methods to full effect to control uprisings.

    Soon the IMF and the World Bank became allies to this ’cause’. Countries that were in an emergency needed to stabilise currencies. Financial bailouts came attached with strings of privatisation and free-trade policies. The Carvallo plan in Argentina is a classic example. Years later, Davison Budhoo turned whistleblower on this approach, disclosing that books were cooked to doom the economy of a poor but strong-willed country. This approach also provides context to Fukuyama’s “end of history” speech in 1989 in which he stated that free markets and free people were inseparable. (Personally, this was an eye-opener for me, as I had never read his books through this lens!)

    Meanwhile, in China, this was being proven wrong as Deng was pushing free markets but not really ‘free people’. In addition, party officials were using the former to become business tycoons. Friedman, during his visit, asked the government to increase the shock therapy! This created a crisis of layoffs and unemployment, the background for the Tiananmen Square protests and the following massacre. On the same day, the socialist Solidarity Party won the elections in Poland, following which shock therapy was implemented, leading to a full blown depression that lasted years.

    In 1994, the ANC in South Africa had a unique opportunity to reject free-market orthodoxy and create a nationalised economy. They even created a Freedom Charter, but their focus on removing apartheid and gaining political control caused them to underestimate the importance of economic control, which the white government, with support from IMF, World Bank, and GATT cannily seized. Meanwhile, in Russia, Yeltsin’s implementation of the playbook led to such protests that the regime became effectively dictatorial, leading to the rise of oligarchs and ultimately Putin.

    Also in the early 90s, the Asian Tigers – Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand were all growing rapidly even with their protectionist policies. The big corporations wanted in, and in the mid 90s, the IMF and the newly formed WTO, pressured the governments into lifting barriers in financial sectors, leading to a surge of (legal) speculative investment. And a crisis. And the vultures started buying local giants at garage sale prices. Samsung, Daewoo, LG and so on were split up and parts were sold. 24 million people lost their jobs in 2 years, and its imprint is now evident in religious extremism to child sex trade.

    And then it all came home to roost after 2001. Ironically, Rumsfeld’s speech on outsourcing all except war fighting to private parties happened on 10 September, 2001! In many ways, the privatisation of multiple government functions were the reason for the security failures behind 9/11. Abroad, ‘logistical support’ was extended until it reached a McMilitary experience, first displayed in the Balkans. Gated suburbs, movie experiences, fast food outlets, all part of fighting a war! Inside the US, Homeland Security is the classic example – politicians create the dead with rhetoric and policies, and private industry fulfils it. People like Cheney and Rumsfeld have made fortunes despite being supposed to serve the people.

    In the guise of getting Saddam pay back the debts to Kuwait, the US created a corporatist state of Iraq, after putting its civilians and citizens through the shock process. This time, not just economic, but physical and mental torture. An anti-Marshall Plan. With temp agencies running the business of war, and making money. Lockheed makes both the weapons and fighter jets as well as owns healthcare companies that treat people injured from the use of these weapons! It writes more code than Microsoft since it handles IT divisions of the government and its data management.

    Wars are not the only shocks. As shown in Sri Lanka, even tsunamis offer an opportunity for disaster capitalism. Fishermen turned out of their land so big hotels could get beachside properties for cheap and politicians and bureaucrats could make money.

    The dystopian future is already playing out in Israel – a corporatist government and a market that rewards a climate of war, because there are companies that make weapons, security systems, surveillance systems and so on.

    The good news is that societies are pushing back. Countries in Latin America, for example, are rejecting IMF and World Bank loans. People are electing politicians who are working on the common good.
    Naomi Klein does a stellar job of unveiling the thinking and execution of disaster capitalism. Thoroughly researched, well documented, and accessible, this book does provide a shock to the reader as well, because it shows how depraved humanity can be. But as she says, so long as we have the collective memory, our disorientation can be made minimal, and we can push back on vulture capitalism. And that’s why it’s important to read this book.

    The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein