What Ails Us - A Review of ‘Affluenza’ by Oliver James

Sam is a New Yorker with a whole host of problems. He is heir to a billion pound fortune and is on his way to creating a similar one in his own name. He lives alone in a gigantic Manhattan apartment over five floors (with one bedroom). He frequently sleeps with stunning Russian models, specially procured for him, one so perfect she appears as if she is ‘hatched directly from an egg’. But his biggest problem is that he is an asshole and has no friends. He is miserable, bitter, and resentful and withdraws from personable society, choosing to fester instead in the self absorbed slough of his own vast wealth.

Oliver James would have us believe that Sam is indicative of the way in which life in Western democratic societies has slipped into some uncomfortable registers in the last few decades. We are obsessed by fame, money and our own image to the extent that we cannot enjoy the things that matter. He compares the plight of Sam with that of Chet, a Nigerian taxi driver also living New York. Chet is who is an amiable man holding homespun Christian beliefs and earns less than a thousand times Sam’s income. He is frequently attacked by his passengers and has serious health problems, and there is no safety net for him in the America he has chosen to live in as he is a semi illegal immigrant, not entitled to a Green Card. Yet for all this, Chet appears to be content, or at least, far more content with his life than Sam.

It is easy to be sceptical of such findings. As a well known American actress once said, I’ve been poor and miserable and rich and miserable and rich is better. But James’s prognosis is another addition to the large corpus of literature that diagnoses the curious mental state of the richest upper quartile members of the richest societies in the world. The novels and non-fiction of writers as diverse as J.G. Ballard, Will Self (who features prominently on the blurb of this book), Barbara Eichenreich, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Joan Didion, Alain de Botton, Nick Hornby, Florian Zeller, Michel Houellebecq and Martin Amis have all chronicled the gnawing angst at the core of the Western European and American middle classes. Tendencies such as the fame surge, the susceptibility to addiction, the paralysis of choice, the inability to hold on to tender emotional commitments. James lays out his case as follows. People in ‘selfish capitalist’ countries –The USA, Australia and the UK, not Denmark or New Zealand which are ‘unselfish’ capitalist countries - are on a treadmill pretty much from the moment they hit puberty. Children are pressured to achieve high academic results at school, and are made to feel bad even if they achieve them as they could do better. University choices are increasingly predicated on choosing subjects that have some technical merit in securing a high paying job. Careers are chosen not for intrinsic job satisfaction but on grounds such as how well they pay or how much status or proximity to fame and celebrity they bring us.

This is a familiar life arc to many living in urban societies. Graduates will take frighteningly tedious jobs in things such as media sales, lured into them by the pious and fake promise that it could be an opportunity to break into bigger things in the media. A staggering 80% of UK graduates want to work in the media and many bright and talented people will forsake more rewarding careers in other sectors. A huge number of contemporary graduates seem to be working either in soulless City, corporate ladder jobs they hate, and are only doing it for the money, or in unstable, bitty jobs in the lower echelons of journalism, publishing or broadcasting with no guarantee of future progression. The majority of these people are miserable. Beyond this, adults are working longer hours than ever just to support themselves and their overstretched mortgages. The value of parenting and family life has plummeted as young women are increasingly reluctant to make the commitment to child rearing and instead choose pursue high pressure careers in a twisted fulfilment of the 1960s feminist dream. No wonder that mental anxiety and illness is far higher than it was than the far more austere 1950s.

What to do? James spends much of this chunky book (500 pages including appendices) adumbrating solutions. We must reject the mawkish psychobabble pedalled by the Orwellian ‘positive think’ merchants – those charlatan magazine columnists and psychotherapists (often American) who exhort us to put a positive spin on things and suppress negative emotions. When things are fucked up, it is time to face them directly. This means stripping away many of the materialist urges we are suffused with. Don’t spend your whole life pining for a bigger house, a faster car, a better looking partner, a higher paying job, a flashier set of golf clubs. Don’t think that the answer to emotional problems lies at the bottom of a bottle or in the release of toxins contained in a pill. Instead it is important to meet your needs, not your wants. This means closely monitoring your emotional needs as you go through life (which means doing a job that absorbs you intrinsically, irrespective of the money or status attached to it) and free time, which means making time for yourself and your interests, and bringing up children properly if you have them.

A word on the critical reception to Affluenza. It is, of course, impossible to write a bestselling book (4th in the WH Smith charts on the last check) about toning down desires for fame and status. The predictable attacks are as certain as those directed at wealthy and/or successful people who profess egalitarian sentiments. You will be accused of being a hypocrite, a champagne socialist, a Bolly Bolshevik. James bears the full brunt of such kneejerk rebarbative posturing. Amazon website reviews (always a reliable corkboard for ill informed opinion) accuse James of, variously: ingratiating himself with media figures, being a media tart, knowing all the answers before he sets the questions, being a self-publicist, having his book published by a capitalist publishing company (as if he could promote his work any other way), a self aggrandizing authorial style (this, to be fair does grate: there are nauseating tics of taxi driver telling you what is good for you guv type prose).

What about the long term context of the kind of thinking Oliver James embodies? There are signs that the culture is changing. Many schools now incorporate a large component of PHSE into the curriculum, with lessons on wellbeing and emotional intelligence. But progress will almost certainly be slow. The vast majority of people, it seems, are not yet ready to undertake what James asks of them: to completely reappraise the values and lights by which they lead their life. It is easy to dismiss such a polemic as psychobabble cynically manufactured to enrich another media psychiatrist. But the reality hits a lot harder. If you look closely, the signs of affluenza are all around: stacked up on the tube escalators are posters promoting holidays, beauty products, mobile phones, Mp3 players, personal computers, cars, bestselling books(including, of course, Affluenza - the slogan, with delicious lack of irony, proclaiming ‘this book could change your life’), blockbuster movies, the next bright young thing. For the average citizen, struggling back exhausted through the throng after a day at work which may or may not have been satisfactory, the daily assault of these images is bound to hold an unflattering mirror up to their condition, automatically lowering their self perception unless they have enough inner resources to fight it.

James explains that repeatedly comparing ourselves to others is a classic instance of modern life. Through the forces of the internet and globalization, we are aware of the lives of hundreds of people we do not know. This is something very new in human life. A far cry from the hermetic village cultures of most of human history. No wonder it is so difficult these days to form any kind of conception of a self, a soul. The affluenza virus is riddled throughout the modern political and media class. Every newspaper, from the formerly respectable tabloids to the piss poor free sheet rags handed out by benighted shivering anoraked figures on street corners, is laced with celebrity gossip –tales of people whose lives are perceived to have a lustre and gloss that far exceeds our own, lists of up and coming people – a new CEO, an up and coming actress, a billboard face. Of course, much of the wealth in the current economy ends up in the hands of this tiny group of people. Some may be genuinely talented and deserve it, the vast majority are photogenic mediocrities who have shaken out fortuitously at the top of a random lottery. The people who suffer most from all of this, as James points out, are those already vulnerable to emotional instability – people from poor educational backgrounds, from broken homes and so on. The gap between the wealthiest few and the poorest many, grows ever wider.

If we look to our elected politicians for some powerful gravitas, some statesmanlike derobing of all this hype, what do we get? Downing Street parties filled with the same celebrities. Peter Mandleson’s nauseating pronouncement that New Labour (the Labour Party remember) is ‘seriously relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. Towards the end of the book, James goes to the heart of government to find that senior New Labour figures are some of the worst afflicted of all! A very high powered female frontbencher on a thwacking salary and a job invested with huge potential to make a difference to people’s lives admits she can never be fully contented because she can now never be the first female Prime Minister. James reports that the daughter of someone at the very heart of the New Labour project recently made a suicide attempt. Gordon Brown is rumoured to be privately uncomfortable with this sham glitzy wrecked beach resort of contemporary culture, but he has done little about it in terms of pronouncements or policy.

We shouldn’t be seriously relaxed about all of this at all. And that is why Oliver James’s book, with his well researched diagnoses of the causes of the affluenza virus, and a route map out of it, deserves a close and thorough read.

By Fred Bosanquet

Affluenza