Capitalist Ideology as SocioCultural Trauma
How our individualistic culture makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories
Brief disclaimer
This is a bit of a side-quest from my usual writing. I originally wrote this as a paper for a University rhetoric course.
I have broken it into two parts and made efforts to edit it to make it easier to read, but have left the page numbers from my references for those who might be interested in reading further.
Capitalism, isolation, and loneliness (part one)
Living in a capitalist society sets off a series of related consequences, including social isolation, leading increasingly vulnerable people to become susceptible to disinformation, harmful ideology, and conspiracy theories.
Our necessary separation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted some of the risks isolation poses to our physical and psychological health, however this has been a growing social issue since the mid-1700s.
As Hannah Arendt concluded more than seventy years ago,
“uprootedness and superfluousness have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution” (p. 475).
In his book Trolling Ourselves to Death, Dr. Jason Hannan dedicates a chapter to connecting the dots between capitalism, alienation, and conspiracy (pp. 82–101). Drawing from Marx, Arendt, MacIntyre — among many other philosophers and social scientists — Hannan explains how a capitalist society which requires us to compete with one another serves to isolate us and leads to an intense loneliness.
Competition for resources causes us to view one another as impediments to our success, rather than collaborators as part of a community working together for everyone’s benefit.
We seek answers to existential questions without the benefit of perspective — perspective which can only come from sharing our ideas with others. It is in the sharing and explaining of our ideas to someone we respect and trust that we elucidate and critically evaluate our own thoughts for ourselves and others. Those trusted others, in turn, help us challenge our beliefs and organize our opinions, knowledge, and experience into a cohesive narrative.
This is precisely what MacIntyre argued in After Virtue when he lamented the difficulty deciphering the intentions of others amidst the “inauthenticity of conventionalized social relationships” (p. 205). As MacIntyre later explains, “There is no such thing as ‘behavior’ to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs, and settings” (p. 208). He argues that because “modernity partitions each human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behaviors” (p. 204), we lose our ability to form a clear and intelligible narrative, which is essential for “the characterization of human actions” (p. 208).
In other words, when behaviour is compartmentalized according to various disconnected role and environmental expectations, we are required to understand and interpret one another’s actions without the necessary historical and contextual information. It is this lack of a unified narrative, argues MacIntyre, which makes us vulnerable to manipulation.
Manipulation and misinformation
Manipulation and disinformation have been key themes of the very recent past and of the present, including fear-mongering around mask mandates and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the height of pandemic shut-downs, where many of the world’s citizens were required by health regulations to remain isolated from one another, Samantha Rose Hill wrote an essay about the risks of loneliness based on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this essay, Rose Hill takes Arendt’s concept of loneliness as an “everyday experience” (p. 478) one step further:
“Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.” — Samantha Rose Hill
What these works all have in common is they highlight the ways in which our individualistic, capitalist society makes us more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and create fertile ground for the rise of totalitarian regimes by isolating us from protective social connections. More than physical isolation, the distrust generated by the competitive nature of capitalism (p. 83), where our neighbours become barriers to our success — even to our survival — causes us to be socially and psychologically secluded.
What is missing from these and other works is a deeper exploration of how this social structure causes a type of cultural trauma. We are living in a society where we must work in order to survive while our labour continues to fatten the pockets of the already wealthy, and where we’re cut off from connecting with our communities in meaningful ways.
We are separated from the products and profits of our labour, and from the ability to form authentic relationships without competition or manipulation. These conditions cause a psychological trauma which impacts our ability to relate to others in healthy ways, to form the cohesive narrative required to make sense of — and to learn from — our experiences, and the ability to trust ourselves and others.
I will add to the aforementioned concepts by connecting each of the key vulnerabilities to conspiracy with our understanding of the nature and impacts of trauma.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk teaches us that trauma causes mental inflexibility, a loss of one’s sense of self, difficulty trusting ourselves and others, and a fragmentation of one’s narrative memory.
Building on theories by Arendt, MacIntyre, and Hannan, fusing these with works by Paulo Freire and Bessel van der Kolk, I will argue that trauma is the missing piece linking these interrelated social phenomena.
Sociocultural trauma
In order to demonstrate that the similarities between alienation and trauma are not simply correlational, I must first briefly describe the root cause of trauma symptoms, and show how this relates to capitalism.
A primary cause of trauma is learned helplessness or a lack of agency: being exposed to something distressing or painful with no way to escape it. While it’s impossible to predict how individuals will respond to an event, or which experiences they will find traumatic, the underlying theme is that of being in a terrifying situation and unable to either change one’s circumstances or flee to safety.
Research has shown that neoliberal capitalism negatively impacts our mental health. Some reasons identified are less worker control of how and when work is performed, as well as a shift from an acceptance of collective virtues to favouring individualism, competition, and self-reliance.
Nations which have adapted neoliberal capitalist policies have seen increased rates of emotional distress, death by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic cirrhosis. In addition to a lack of control over one’s work, intergenerational social mobility has also decreased under capitalism, leaving workers feeling helpless without meaningful agency over their lives.
Unsurprisingly, the number of people who describe themselves as lonely has dramatically increased over the past forty years. A loss of control, feeling helpless, disconnected from our communities, and alienated from one another are all symptoms of the trauma inflicted upon modern society by neoliberal capitalist ideology.
Bessel van der Kolk has taught us that trauma causes alterations to one’s biological threat perception and one’s self-concept. It can lead to an inability to trust oneself and others, hypervigilence, and self-hatred (pp. 7–9).
As a matter of self-protection, traumatic memories become split off from our everyday awareness, preventing us from creating a narrative memory of the event(s). Without a linear story, these experiences are reenacted in other ways, such as intense emotional reactions and aggressive behaviour (p. 11).
MacIntyre argues we need an intelligible history in order to understand ourselves and our experiences, and we need our memories of those experiences to form a cohesive narrative in order to accurately interpret and understand the actions of others (p. 212). We need conversation and connection with trusting and trustworthy people to make sense of our own stories and thoughts, and to keep reality in perspective (p. 476).
Hannan agrees. The trauma of capitalism keeps us tucked neatly in our designated roles and locations, throwing up a veil of suspicion between ourselves and others, all of which leads to distrust and eventually paranoia (p.94). In this state we are ripe for manipulation.
Stay tuned for part two…
© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB
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Media has traditionally inflamed this problem, since outlets tend not to use or accept any sort of "unified narrative" unless there clearly is no other. While this division can be traced back to the creation of print media in the 17th century, current media, with its emphasis on sub-dividing audiences into neat and controllable units of thought, has only made things worse.
That's a fascinating book; a distant early warning for now. Postman would not be pleased with the current media landscape...