Dr Eilís Ward: Where the self meets political economy

On a very gloomy February afternoon some years ago, a young graduate student sat in my office in the university in Galway and spoke pessimistically about her future. During a recent night out with friends, deep confessions had, in time, emerged. None had glittering careers in business, social media or online enterprise. None had become a social entrepreneur. They were, they felt, already failures although their adult lives had barely begun.

I was struck that afternoon by the fact that the model of the entrepreneur was the standard against which these students measured success, that is, their success as humans. It seemed to me that they were exemplifying, painfully, what has been called the neoliberal self – a self that is quintessentially emptied out of the social and defined by an idea of the entrepreneur.

The phenomenon described was not new. Nickolas Rose, a sociologist writing in the time of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, had noted British people beginning to speak about themselves as if they were projects or enterprises in a sea of enterprises. Their life work was to maximise the value of their existence for themselves. It was, he claimed, a revolutionary change in human affairs.

My conversation with that young student, some 30 years on, seemed to eerily prove the degree to which the entrepreneurial self had taken up lodgings in young bodies in Ireland. There, perhaps, should have been no surprise. Much commentary on neoliberalism points up that its “out there” (globalisation, state-shrinkage, privatisation, austerity) inevitably requires an “in here”: a different kind of human subjectivity. A particular account of a self is required for survival in a world of rapid change, insecurity of jobs, intense competition for resources, housing, education and the rise of the self-employed as the norm.

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A desire to understand this space where the self meets political economy was the spark behind my book Self, published recently by Cork University Press. I was keen, however, to not simply criticise but to provide an alternative vision. As a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, it seemed to me that its understanding of what it means to be human offered an interesting potential for dialogue and a compelling vision of the human. If Buddhism does nothing else, it stands squarely in contradiction to the notion of selfhood that has driven European history, and Europe’s expansion outwards through colonial adventurism, since modernity; that is individualism, now on stilts in the era of late capitalism.

Responsibilisation and social justice

Self sets out a typology of the neoliberal self conveniently encapsulated by the acronym CARRPP. The neoliberal self is competitive, autonomous, resilient, responsibilised, perfectible and, always, positive. I suggest that the first two provide the sine qua non, all others coming afterwards but all interrelated. If we understand responsibilisation as a remaking of social justice problems (such as inequality) as resolved now by personal effort and responsibility, we can see its neat fit with the idea of perfectibility – that we can all be whatever we wish, once we work hard enough – and resilience, an ability to not just bounce back but to believe that life’s cuts and blows make us stronger, better.

The normalisation of private health insurance contains the idea that we are each responsible for our health and that we are “in control” of our bodies which, with the right foods, exercise and mental attitude we can keep in peak fitness.

Alongside and co-creating the rise of this selfhood has been “therapy culture”, a soft but insistent circulation of vaguely therapeutic ideas within the wider culture, largely taken from cognitive therapies and functioning outside the intimate relationship of actual psychological therapies.

Positive thinking, elevation of the personal story self-mastery in the pursuit of happiness (because you "deserve it"), all feed the new self, as does a stripped-down version of mindfulness, sometimes called "McMindfulness"

Positive thinking, elevation of the personal story self-mastery in the pursuit of happiness (because you “deserve it”) all feed the new self, as does a stripped-down version of mindfulness, sometimes called in the literature “McMindfulness”. None of us can have escaped the exhortation that our problems are caused by incorrect thinking. In her memoir, Irish academic Emilie Pine describes how a mindfulness course was recommended to her and other colleagues for work-related stress. What they met was an invitation to further “cannibalise” themselves. The problem was not faulty thought processes or weak regulation but a high-pressure work environment.

‘Stable’ self

In the past two decades or so, these ideas have reached hegemonic status in Ireland and elsewhere. Their flip side needs consideration too: an acceptance that those those who “fail” to flourish in this new world have only themselves to blame because they did not follow the new rules, did not try hard enough or invest enough in themselves. And critically, under neoliberalism, collective responsibility acts as a break on what is believed to be central to human life: freedom. That is freedom “from” others, or from taxation, or the consequences of unsustainable economic development.

In this context, how could ideas first expounded in Iron Age India, have anything to offer us? Zen Buddhism, the school of Buddhism which I know best, is founded on a radical account of the self. It says that there is no permanent, abiding, stable self, that “self” is empty of such features but is full of just about everything else. If we pay very close attention to our minds, in stillness, we will see that we are human becomings, or, in the words of Tich Naht Hanh, we “inter-be”.

Moreover, classical Buddhism suggests a very specific account of how we are deluded into thinking that there is a stable “I” that is separate from all other Is. This is, according to Buddhism, the greatest delusion and the one that causes us the greatest amount of suffering.

Similar ideas are found in deep ecology, in the work of Carl Jung, in relational psychology and some feminisms and are the stuff of the poetic imagination. From this account of the self flows an understanding that our collective and individual suffering are deeply and irreducibly bound together. An account that is surely the right medicine for our current many sicknesses.

Dr Eilís Ward taught for many years in the school of political science and sociology, NUIG, is author of Self (Cork University Press, 2021) and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism