Book: What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe
The following seems like an interesting book: What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe, published March 2014, https://www.amazon.com/What-about-Me-struggle-market-based-ebook/dp/B00IO8KZH8.
From the book description in the amazon link above:
According to current thinking, anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy is taking a heavy toll, resulting in a warped view of the self, disorientation, and despair. People are lonelier than ever before. Today’s pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals into businesses — even individuals are being made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises. Love is increasingly hard to find, and we struggle to lead meaningful lives.
In What about Me?, Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of 30 years of neoliberalism, free-market forces, privatisation, and the relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live.
From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist, Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism. Can we once again become masters of our fate?
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Ravi: I came to know of the book from a recent article in The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-stories-in-our-heads/article9119191.ece. The article has a quote from the book in relation to what the book seems to describe as neo-liberalism, "People are competitive beings focussed on their own profit. This benefits society as a whole because competition entails everyone doing their best to come out on top. As a result, we get better and cheaper products and more efficient services within a single free market, unhampered by government intervention. This is ethically right because success or failure in that competition depends entirely on individual effort".
...
(For the first time ever,) “religion, ethics, and society are subservient to ‘the market’.”
From the book description in the amazon link above:
According to current thinking, anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy is taking a heavy toll, resulting in a warped view of the self, disorientation, and despair. People are lonelier than ever before. Today’s pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals into businesses — even individuals are being made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises. Love is increasingly hard to find, and we struggle to lead meaningful lives.
In What about Me?, Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of 30 years of neoliberalism, free-market forces, privatisation, and the relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live.
From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist, Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism. Can we once again become masters of our fate?
--- end book description ---
Ravi: I came to know of the book from a recent article in The Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-stories-in-our-heads/article9119191.ece. The article has a quote from the book in relation to what the book seems to describe as neo-liberalism, "People are competitive beings focussed on their own profit. This benefits society as a whole because competition entails everyone doing their best to come out on top. As a result, we get better and cheaper products and more efficient services within a single free market, unhampered by government intervention. This is ethically right because success or failure in that competition depends entirely on individual effort".
...
(For the first time ever,) “religion, ethics, and society are subservient to ‘the market’.”
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