Over the last few decades, unprecedented levels
of job scarcity, inequality rates, wage stagnation
and refugee crises have afflicted our society.
As a result, rates of depression and anxiety
have skyrocketed.
The collapse
of society has been a backdrop for the modern
mania of clean eating, self care kits, yoga
retreats, and the insistence that downward
facing dog is a radical political position.
Hashtags of self love, self care, and putting
yourself first make a prominent appearance
in Instagram captions, reminding us that freedom
looks like a thin, able-bodied woman undertaking
a vacation. And we are constantly told that
despite all evidence to the contrary, you
can achieve anything if only you have a positive
attitude. Presenting themselves as solutions to these crises. Two parallel movements have emerged: self-care and self-help.
I want to make clear that I'm not opposed
to self-help or self-care inherently. The
neoliberal version of these subcultures is
profoundly different from self care and self-help
rooted in radical political thought and
this distinction is incredibly important to make.
I want to discuss today, the ways in which
the neoliberal version of both subcultures have become commercialised and corporatized, hijacked by capitalism
to promote the idea that these are the
mechanisms through which we can overcome the
problems of capitalist society. After that I want to 
discuss how we can begin to decolonise and
challenge these subcultures and bring
back the more radical conceptualisations of
self care and self-help.
part one – crafting the ideal worker
Capitalism benefits from productive workers.
Without productive workers that accept working
conditions and the unequal distribution of
labour and wages, capitalism will not function.
The self-help subculture is one way in which
it is able to produce productive workers.
Because within this subculture we are taught
to fetishise work and overvalue productivity
and achievement. We are supposed to utilise
every minute of our time effectively, while
just existing is lazy and wasteful. The mantra
of no pain, no gain teaches us that you’re
not working hard enough unless you’re in discomfort.
Instead of promoting an intrinsic
sense of self-worth, the self-help subculture
tells us to judge the worth of people by their
achievements and what they produce.
Almost every self-help book teaches tells
us to take 100 per cent resonsiblility for
our lives. So, instead of blaming companies
for precarious working conditions, or austerity
measures by our governments, we blame ourselves
for feeling inadequate. The more inadequate
we feel, the harder we work to relinquish
this feeling. If we are burnt out, it’s
our own fault, so we don’t challenge the
system or organisation. And nothing changes.
Instead we give up our free time to take on
unpaid projects for our resume,
and accept
terrible zero hour working conditions in order to succeed.
All of this can naturally lead to insecurity
over our work. Research from Harvard found
that job recruiters deliberately set out to
identify and recruit insecure overachievers.
Because, as a result of their profound sense
of inadequacy, they are hard self-motivated,
self-disciplined and hard-working, and consequently extremely attractive to organizations. So once again, self-helps
focus on success and achievement helps manufacture
a productive labor force.
It’s also become more and more common today
for companies to engage their workers through
self-care benefits such as meditation and
gyms. Companies have a vested interest in
keeping over-worked and stressed workers productive
with things like positive thinking and meditation
in order to ensure increased productivity.
So instead of actually changing the working
conditions that lead to over stressed, over
worked employees, these types of self-care
measures serve to numb the pain of precarious
working conditions and this can passify us from
doing things like  unionizing and organising
to change the working conditions.
The values that are prescribed in self-help
books are almost always relevant to market
values so that we can mould ourselves into
a more desirable and marketable product.
They demand us to continually reinvent ourselves
to be able to keep up with the changing demands
and tasks of working life, increase our value
so we become more competent members of society.
Rather than questioning and challenging conditions
in society, we are taught to mould ourselves into people
who are able to deal with these conditions.
At Uni it was really common for friends to not feel
like they were really working when if we were
revising for subjects that we really enjoyed,
because there was the feeling that work was
supposed to require some form of discomfort.
And this of course is very convenient for people in power
because we expect work to make us unhappy
so we don’t complain about it.
In my opinion, one of the most problematic elements of self-help is that it gives us a skewered idea of
the types of things we should value and find
important in life. As free market economics
is applied to everything, only successful
artefacts and people are deemed
worthwhile.
We can easily see this through some of the
titles of the most popular self-help books:
‘Think and Grow Rich’, 'Power: How to Get
it, How to Use it', 'Looking out for Number One',
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive.
The message is clear, be selfish, get money,
and get power.
Through this, other values relating to kindness,
compassion, and helping our neighbours are
pushed to the side-lines because these things
aren’t considered real success. Goals are
almost always self-centred, get a house, get
money, get a good job, get possessions. It
frames life as a struggle and society as a
competition. Each human is framed as an antagonist
rather than part of a community. Some people
have written about how self-improvement fosters
a culture of narcissism. Because when you’re
absorbed trying to achieve these goals, you don’t do anything
for others unless it directly benefits yourself.
The need to have continuous productivity and
improvement also can lead us to feel completely
dissatisfied with our lives. The constant constructions
of 'taking responsibility', 'be a better you'  ‘take action’ , 'improve yourself'
closes
down the possibility that you are already
satisfied with life. Even if you don’t want
success simply by not wanting it you’re
considered deficient too. Since we constantly
need to improve, we are constantly living
in the future waiting for the next success
to fill the empty void within us.
We are essentially a constantly failing
subject.
And teaching us to base our self-worth on external
achievements instead of having an intrinsic sense of self worth
can have detrimental impacts
It can easily lead to heightened mental illness, rational disconnection, loneliness and obsession with comparison.
And the fact that we are made to feel like we
should be doing self-care and self-help continuously
can easily lead to another form of guilt and stress!
It can also be incredibly detrimental for
people who can’t be productive for reasons such as a
disability of mental illness. And the unhappiness
that comes from all this way can easily
lead us to engaging in self-help andself-care consumption activities.
Part 2 - Crafting the Ideal Consumer
Whilst these subcultures help create
the ideal productive worker, they also help craft
the ideal consumer citizen.
Because they sell us the idea
that consumption is self-care and self-help
Our capitalist society is based off of endless
growth. It needs us to keep buying more and more stuff continuously in order to finance
its continued existence. So in our quest to improve
ourselves and become better versions of ourselves and
take care of ourselves we are taught to keep
consuming more in order to achieve this goal.
Self-help and self-care has become an industry
under capitalism, with thousands of "coaches"
and "gurus" selling their services to teach
you how to be better. Mantras such as ‘treat
yourself’ and ‘you deserve it’ promotes
splurging. Even something as anticonsumerist
as mindfulness and meditation has been rebranded
and used to peddle consumer products.
Marketing schemes of global corporations sell
self-care and self-help to make a profit. Coca-cola convinces us to choose happiness. Kit
Kat’s “Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat”
tells us to treat ourselves, L’Oréal insists
‘you’re worth it’. McDonalds tells us
we deserve a break today.
Despite the fact that millennials have less disposable
income than babyboomers they spent twice as
much on self care products, which means it culminates into a 10 billion dollar industry.
The products associated with self-care
and self-help slots in neatly with capitalism
by passifying us because it sells us the idea that societal problems and our mental health is an
individual
problem.
The
solutions are completely divorced from systemic
causes and can only be solved by pulling ourselves
up by our bootstraps and spending money on
self-care. One really good example of this is the way in which self-care and self-help
reinforces misogynistic practices and oppressive ideas about female beauty onto
women, policing our bodies, appearance, age
under the guise of self-care and ‘spoiling
yourself,’ for the sake of making us more
sexually appealing and attractiveness to men.
Not only does this again promote more consumerism
as we are coerced to buy more fashion, makeup,
plastic surgery etc. but
the more people, especially people identifying
as female, become distracted by and focus on their appearance,
and make physical, financial and emotional sacrifices in order to achieve this so-called 'beauty'
the more , more important issues such as
climate change, nuclear weapons, feminist
issues go unchallenged and become a lesser priority, and our ambitions
in life reduce and the current state of our
system goes unchallenged.
Part 3 – Crafting meritocratic and individualistic
ideals
The core concepts of most self-help and self-care
ideas are
intimately tied up and help to reinforce and sustain the concept of meritocracy. This is because a central assumption in self-
help books is that anyone that works hard
can succeed at anything, regardless of whether
the odds are astronomical that it would happen.
And if you don’t believe this and you’re not
achieving success, self- help books teach us that success has absolutely nothing to do with
inheritance, nepotism or any other factors, you’re
simply not driven enough, not trying hard enough
enough, you don’t have the correct attitude.
Self-help is also intimately tied
up with individualism. Every single self-help book
that I've read is adamant that 100% responsibility
for everything that happens in your life
should be unceremoniously dumped on your shoulders
Words like ‘take action’
‘work on the self’ ‘take personal responsibility’
are littered throughout these books. If you
are depressed, sick, exhausted, no matter
how hard life is or has been, no matter where
you start from, you should work on fixing
your life yourself. And you have no one else
to blame but yourself if you fail to achieve
goals or make ends meet.
The meritocratic and individualistic thinking
inherent in self-help and self-care subcultures
helps to reinforce the status quo, it's deeply
depoliticizing and prevents the type of collective
action needed to create meaningful change
in the world .
It obscures the role of structural, historical,
contextual, socio-economic and political
reasons for mental illness, the global economy,
war, dying planet, hunger, poor health-care,
xenophobia and poverty. This has been called
responsibilisation or the privatization of responsibility
where one’s well-being and the wellbeing
of society is considered to be our own individual responsibility, rather than the responsibility
of society to create structures than facilitate
and ensure the health and wellbeing of people
and society at large. Societal influences
are ignored, and we as individuals are rendered
solely responsible for managing the problems
in our lives.
This can also lead us to ignore and legitimise inequalities because those who are poor deserve it and those who are
rich earnt it due to their
merits. Never mind that Jeff Bezos, founder
of Amazon has enough money to buy every single
homeless person in America a new house and
still have 19.2 billion dollars left over.
It gets us to accept these hierarchies in the
world without questioning them. It can
also lead those of us with privileges to completely
ignore the benefits we have gained from that
privilege. And in failing to recognise our privileges
it’s easy to perpetuate
them. Meritocratic thinking can also foster
a sense of entitlement among the rich). If
the government tries to tax their wealth,
they regard it as theft. And because we justify
and rationalize and blame people for their
poverty, mental illness, unemployment people
begin to reject more and more a welfare state
model and social services because if anyone
is poor it’s their own fault.
For example, meritocracy has been resuscitated
by many right-wing politicians. Theresa May
promised to make Britain the worlds greatest
meritocracy by reinstating grammar schools
in the UK and trump justified his tighter
immigration policies on the basis that it
was apparently a merit based system.
If we believe
the meritocracy inherent in self-help books,
it’s not hard for us to make the jump to
justify the unjust policies promoted
by these politicians.
This can also completely reshape how we view
social ills because if we believe that billionaires
deserve their success, the implication
is also that poor people starving deserve
their starvation. We are all taught we are
‘responsible for our own misery and therefore
deserve it,’ as opposed to recognising we
are obstructed by a system which benefits
some at the expense of others.
If anyone can succeed regardless of their
circumstances, then clearly factors like race
gender, social structures, class don’t in any way impact our abilities to succeed
We are encouraged not to focus on
changing the world and its systems, but instead
on changing yourself. It prevents us from
considering coming together, to protest and organise
or have any kind of broader, collective sollution to societies problems.
In my opinion the self-help and self-care
subcultures have also served to de-radicalise
the progressive ideals of social justice movements.
This is because individual solutions as opposed to
collective movements are considered to be the solutions to these inequalities. For example, people of colour are taught to rise to the
top in their jobs, women are taught to change
themselves to better obtain their own needs.
So these issues are completely divorced from
the structures of patriarchal dominance, or
racial power, or privilege. Self-help gurus
often argue anecdotally - using examples of
people who went from rags to riches.
They hold these people
up as examples telling us, if they can do
it and they came from nothing, then so can
we. This can triviliase and invisibalise
the very real inequalities experienced by marginalised
groups. And maybe most importantly, as Mexie
goes into in her video that I’ll link below,
it doesn’t take into account that in a capitalist
system it’s impossible for everyone to get
rich and succeed. Capitalism relies on some
people failing.
The language of self help books is also riddled
with capitalist realism. Mark Fisher came
up with the term capitalist realism to describe
the idea that capitalism is the only viable
economic and political system, and there is
no imaginable alternative. By encouraging
us to think in terms of changing ourselves
rather than the system, the self-help and
self-care narratives can constrain our thoughts
and actions from challenging capitalism. Others
have referred to this as psychological colonisation.
Our hearts and minds have become so colonised
by this narrative of meritocracy and individualism that we don’t think an alternative
to systemic issues is possible.
I think most of us recognise that a society
in which Boris Johnson and Donald Trump hold
the positions they do, isn’t reflective
of where the best and brightest have made
it to the top through their hard work and
personal responsibility. And I think most
of us recognise that a system where 8 men
have as much wealth as the poorest 50 per
cent of the world is unjust. And yet, it’s things
like self-care and self-help subcultures that help to legitimise meritocratic and individualistic thinking
as powerful forces within our society.
Part four: decolonising self-selp and self-care.
Within these subcultures we are given a very
narrow, pre-defined, prescribed idea of what self-help
and self-care looks like.
I think we need to begin to challenge
these prescribed ideas and recognise the fluidity
of self care and self help and that it isn’t
necessarily a linear process. Self-care may
consist of lighting candles, being relaxed
and calm, or it may be allowing yourself to
feel the intensity of your grief, engaging
in self-defense classes, engaging in mass
protests. And self-help may look like working
towards set goals of getting a job or a house.
Or it may be about disrupting the idea of
a goal-orientated means to an end and just
completely accepting ourselves as we are.
How to be well and care for ourselves can
differ between communities and people, so
we should decide what this means for ourselves.
I think it’s also about discarding the notion
that there is a self we must get to, and the
current versions of ourselves isn’t good
enough. It’s important that we stop seeing
our self worth in terms of what is good for
the market, and training ourselves to cope
with society. And instead, we can try and bring about a 
society that can mould itself to our needs.
It really
frustrates me that there is a trend amongst
leftists of a complete diavowel and rejection
of any form of self-care and self-help, and a fetishization
of despair. Because I think we're just going to be it’s far more effective at creating change,
if we are maintaining hope and our health and taking care of ourselves
And whilst I don't think there's anything inherenlty wrong with the neoliberal version of self-care and self-help and that they
can have positive effects, for the most part I think they function
to ameliorate the effects of capitalism. In
other words, unemployment, poverty
climate change, austerity  is not going to get better
by us looking inwards and focusing on improving ourselves, and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
This is because we aren’t talking about
a self that is decoupled from political histories
and present vulnerability and violence.
Self-care and self-help in a world that denies
certain selves care and help, requires us
to revolt against the inequitable distribution
of suffering, wellbeing, employment, health
and other systems of oppression and exploitation.
So we need to historicise and politicise the
‘self’ and the ‘care’. If we want
true transformation in societal health and
wellbeing we need to provide everyone with
the means to live a healthy life,
with shelter, food, water, stable employment,
and a reduced workweek. In other words, building
community and collective care structures. In this way self-help
and self-care would no longer be a way to
recover from societal ills, but they would be ends in themselves.
As a result, I think a fundamental part of
self-help and self-care is
challenging our social, economic and political
situation.
I think we also need to reclaim the forms
of self care and self help rooted in radical
political thought and activism. For example,
self care Audre Lorde argued in the 1980s,
was an “act of political warfare” against
the neoliberal state. During this time, marginalised
groups used putting themselves first as a
deeply politicised form of self care against
a society attempting to devalue their bodies,
pleasure, or very existence. And under our
oppressive system, self care can continue
to serve this purpose today. Similarly, since
self-help has been co-opted to become such an individualised that that's all about how we can successful,
it can be a radical political act to ask ourselves how can we
improve ourselves to become more compassionate,
to acknowledge our privileges and fight against
them and help out in our communities.
As should be clear by now, I’ve argued that
self-help and self-care have been co-opted
by capitalist society to promote capitalist
values and pacify us from creating change.
But I think it’s also important to recognize
that the co-optation of leftist concepts,
ideas and practices by the neoliberal project
is pervasive throughout the entirety of society.
Feminism, empowerment, spirituality, climate
change, have all been co-opted in service
of capitalism.
And I've linked in the description box other people who I'd highly recommend checking out who discuss similar issues
including Thouthg Slime, P.D Morrin, Mad Blender,
Combabe Clem, Mexie- the Vegan Vanguard podcast,
Thank you so much for watching and if you'd like to support my work it would really help me out if you
shared this video, liked it, subscribed and you could consider becoming a patreon.
And I just want to say I'm incredibly grateful for all my patreons and thank you so much to anyone
who likes and subscribes and shares my videos. It's really appreciated
