The British Malaise – a 40 year case-study of neoliberalism

The last post made the rather tongue-in-cheek suggestion that my failure to include psychology in a list of intellectual disciplines was a Freudian slip – revealing an inbuilt Presbyterian suspicion of the subject. But that can’t be quite true because, at University, an influential Politics tutor had been the Romanian Zevedei Barbu who had in 1956 just produced his “Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life” and, subsequently, I became a fan of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and his On Becoming a Person (1961). So let’s just say that, from 1968, politics was for me the predominant force – and it was the late 1980s before some bouts of depression gave me cause to think about psychological factors. In those days, you didn’t own up to such a condition and the only book I could find on the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – the way out of your prison (1983)

This, of course, was the point at which Britain was being subjected the early stages of what is now a 40 year period of neoliberalism and James Davies’ Sedated – how modern capitalism created our mental health crisis (2021) is one of the first books to deal with that experiment from the psychological point of view. He starts with an important point about DEBT

Up until the 1970s, having personal debt beyond a mortgage held a certain stigma. If you took on any debt at all, it had to be for investment purposes. Other forms of debt (to consume, to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ or to ‘make ends meet’) were largely considered off-limits. A combination of tight cultural mores and credit regulations therefore kept household debt low throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. But owing to deregulatory and structural changes to the economy, public attitudes soon liberalised, making the adoption of debt almost essential to modern living. From the 1980s onwards, as borrowing became more ubiquitous, young adults in their twenties and thirties were 50 per cent more likely to take on debt than their equivalents living in the three previous decades. Being indebted was quickly being normalised. And with this, the very psychological outlook of those indebted began changing too. Owning increasing amounts of debt was altering the complexion of how people envisaged themselves and their future, creating mass shifts in attitude and behaviour not seen before.

I very much belong to that older generation for whom debt was unacceptable. Davies then moves on to explore how the world of work has been affected – with horrific statistics on the mental stress produced by the new performance culture of largely meaningless jobs

A History of Modern Psychology Duane and Sydney Schulz (2011) is a fascinating and well-written account of the development of the discipline – with a strong focus on the US – but written by an historian and psychologist. It’s very strong on the role of intellectual currents and social context in introducing and then challenging fashionable ideas. Interestingly, it’s p 300 before Freud makes his entrance!