The personality of our time is flexible and hobbled at the same time. Exactly what the neoliberal world demands: individualistic to the extreme, focused on consumption and collecting impressions, without a fixed place, forming numerous but superficial relationships and fragile ties.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
When I was in college, everyone read The Neurotic Personality of Our Time by Karen Horney. You could diagnose lecturers and colleagues, and have a little laugh at the way they fit so much into the picture. But not only that: the idea that social conditions can shape dominant psychological types was getting through. It was 1990, we didn't yet know what capitalism was.
I thought of that experience when Lola López Mondéjar's book Invulnerables e invertebrados (Barcelona, Anagrama 2022), published two years ago, fell into my hands. López Mondéjar asks what kind of personality modern, noeliberal capitalism produces. The answer is contained in the title: "invulnerables" means as much as not susceptible to injury, and "invertebrados" means "spineless."
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It seems that postmodernity has become too difficult for people. We know more and more about the world, while at the same time the information coming from all sides only intensifies the feeling of helplessness. Didn't you by any chance have this feeling? Eco-cooperatives, bicycles, fights with shopkeepers over plastic bags and reusable water bottles, and underneath the feeling that, after all, it won't change anything anyway, and that canceling a vacation or selling a car would just be donkishness anymore.
As a result, we act as if we don't know anything, or we place the pain associated with what we do know in a place that protects us from paralysis and allows us to live as if we don't know. Negation and dissociation - two basic mechanisms that protect us from the suffering associated with helplessness and the feeling that we are vulnerable.
In Freud's time, the escape from tension was through denial, which produced a series of symptoms. The Salpêtrière hospital was full of women reacting with hysteria to the pressures of a patriarchal environment. Today, we are more likely to see multitudes of the adjusted, who, in their own minds, do not need help and do not trouble their surroundings.
Dissociation is an evasion, allowing you to quickly and easily distance yourself, separate yourself from the conflict, get out of the relationship and not feel anxious about the contradictions in your own actions and attitudes. In short: to adapt to everything, but especially to the market. The personality of our time is flexible and at the same time hobbled. It is exactly what the neoliberal world demands: individualistic to the extreme, focused on consumption and gathering impressions, without a fixed place, forming numerous but superficial relationships and fragile ties.
Speaking of "backbone," López Mondéjar has in mind an integrating principle of the self, an idea of the ideal self that can conflict with what we actually do and the world we live in. It allows us to compare our aspirations and desires with the opportunities offered by society to realize them. This leads to conflicts, which is not convenient, but remains a condition for contact with reality. Otherwise, fragments of the self coexist side by side without causing problems or guilt.
Beyond the reality principle
The problem is that this kind of avoidance does not lead to solving problems. More: it makes it impossible to confront them. It seems that no danger will reach us, but in order to make any real difference at all, one must first feel the danger. Meanwhile, the personality of our time effectively protects against this. López Mondéjar believes that this mechanism is generated by the socioeconomic system and reinforces it at the same time. We fantasize that here we have become an invincible Achilles, who cannot be hurt.
Meanwhile, one can. Modern societies that have abandoned or consistently abandoned the ethos of the welfare state are like quicksand. Under precarious conditions, people feel increasingly insecure on them, and the fear and discomfort associated with it remain, albeit swept under the rug.
A good example is the obesity epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, the number of obese people has doubled since 1980 (2016 data). Twenty-five years ago, 7.4 percent of the population over the age of eighteen crossed the obesity line, and in 2012 it was already 17 percent. If we look at the data on overweight, the rate reaches 53.7 percent.
We are dealing with a serious problem, and on a social scale, which translates into the health of society and specific people, not to mention the cost of health care. The causes of obesity vary, although psychological factors seem to predominate among them. Losing control over one's diet becomes a way of coping with emotions that have no place in one's life.
However, something else is also interesting. When obesity starts to be treated only as a manifestation of diversity, the real problem disappears, and talking about it turns out to be a caesura and a manifestation of discrimination. López Mondéjar sees the criticism of fatphobia also (but not only) as a gesture of refusal to recognize the limits set by reality. Obesity is unhealthy, and it's not all about how we look. Not for aesthetic reasons, but because of the problems behind it that should be confronted.
Today's beauty role models create no small amount of pressure. And yet statistics say that adaptation is neither the only nor the most important strategy for responding to it. Problems with anorexia, that is, with destructive adaptation to imposed norms, are only a small margin compared to the scale of the obesity problem. The overwhelming majority of the population chooses to equate the ideal with its opposite. Behind this is the belief that everything is possible and of equal value, and that there are no real boundaries. The tension between what is socially recommended and our choices should create conflict, but this conflict disappears as if by magic.
With dissociation, everything becomes possible. "Fulfill your dreams" and "be yourself" exactly as the ads suggest. Only consumption remains unchanged.
Functional psychopath
Unrelenting activity is a way of reinforcing the fantasy of one's all-powerful and causal self while escaping the needs, sadness and disappointment that are impossible to accept. At the same time, the choice of activity coincides with the demands of neoliberalism and the market. It fits in with the ideal of competitiveness and efficiency. Entrepreneurship is combined with extreme individualism - another is just an opponent to be defeated, often at any cost.
The values of modern capitalism and the mechanisms associated with the type of personality they produce push towards aggression. In an act of violence, the perpetrator regains a shaken sense of control over others and the situation. Violent action makes him feel powerful instead of helpless, dependent and vulnerable to injury. In doing so, it deflects the feeling of powerlessness and nips in the bud the frustration that is building up inside him. It is very easy to deny its existence, because the repair of the self-image is immediate. Difficult emotions do not enter consciousness, for the pleasure associated with the discharge is very strong.
The fantasy of omnipotence and independence also makes it difficult to see one's own mistakes and experience the associated conflict between self-image and reality. The goals of action justify, and rationalization completes the rest: responsibility and blame disappear from the horizon.
This is accompanied by a phenomenon that López Mondéjar calls the pandemic of functional psychopathy. In apocalyptic capitalism, the psychopath feels like a fish in water, and the bosses only praise him. Hard skin, insensitivity to his own and others' pain, instrumental treatment of people and relationships, and alienation allow him to not worry about any boundaries.
For others, cycles of intense activity alternate with periods of depression. The diseases of our time are depression and bipolar disorder. The narcissistic self-image also includes the imperative for happiness. Eulogizing with images of happiness, which seems to embrace all of life, becomes an obligation and at the same time plants the concealment of real problems. The young, joyful, active and dynamic falls under the weight of these demands. Chronic loneliness and emptiness are the other side of the same coin.
Tinder model
Escaping conflict also applies to intimate relationships. López Mondéjar believes that today the need for affection is more embarrassing than sex. The imperative of happiness favors falling in love, in which there is no room for differences of opinion, instead desires are satisfied almost one hundred percent. When difficulties begin between people, there is a feeling that love is over or insufficient. So one looks for it elsewhere and according to the list of one's own needs. Dating portals suggest and indicate the characteristics of potential partners, according to which you can choose the most suitable ones.
They do not anticipate the effort necessary to create a more lasting bond, the commitment without which trust is difficult, loyalty, responsibility, agreement to the demands made by another or acceptance of his limitations. As a result, bonds are not formed that can satisfy the need for intimacy. In addition to escaping into a new relationship, the way out may be the multiplicity of polyamorous relationships, which ensures that there is always someone available who will respond to our expectations.
The price of adaptive practices and fantasies is the weakening of already inefficient social ties, which are the only remedy for powerlessness. "Go away. Run away, change address, lover, job is often a form of defense against frustration [...]. And at the same time a form of adaptation to the requirements of the production system, which wants us to have no place of our own, to be free, light and without obligations."
