The Tyranny of Wellbeing

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye critiques the modern obsession with material consumption, arguing that it leads to the erosion of cultural diversity, the rise of economic totalitarianism, and the reduction of individuals and societies to mere components in a globalized, homogenized system.

This essay was first published in the magazine Éléments, 28 (1979).

When Aldous Huxley set his Brave New World in the third millennium, he thought he was writing a work of fiction. He died knowing that a society without suffering unmet need was becoming the sad reality of our time, and that, as in his Brave New World, every person free or capable of original thought was already suspected of ill intent by the masses conditioned by what the socio-anthropologist Arnold Gehlen has called the tyranny of wellbeing. For the religion of wellbeing has well and truly become a tyranny.

Moreover, this ubiquitously asserted will to satisfy material desire and contemporary man’s thirst for consumption is in itself unsurprising: it is intrinsically linked to the very existence of the productive function as societies of Indo-European origin understand it. But in the tripartite system of the Indo-European world, as Georges Dumézil has outlined it, it is necessary that the productive function remain subordinate to the warrior function and, above all, the sovereign function. Now, the drama is that we are witnessing an inversion of this relation of subordination; society as a whole finds itself governed by consumerist necessities; and the economy has claimed for itself the power to solve all human problems.

By reducing all social factors to the economy, mercantile society has turned the latter into the instrument of global development motivated by a false conception of happiness, an illusory mixture of material abundance and more or less organized leisure. This leads one to believe that needs or desires are always material; that these are always individual, always quantitative and always possible to overcome. Meanwhile, certain business leaders go so far as to claim that “business makes the world go round.” According to Entreprise et Progrès, intended as a thorn in the side of the Conseil National du Patronat Français (National Council of French Employers), changes in the business world determine changes in the social world; business is what governs society, albeit something to which the French will have some trouble adapting, on account of their “cultural flaws” (sic).

Worst, without question, is that most people let themselves be taken in by the apparent generosity of this economic totalitarianism. Arguments from common sense are not lacking. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wrote:

Only market economies truly serve the consumer. If we set ideas to one side and consider only the facts, we cannot help but notice the following: economic systems whose regulation is guaranteed by central planning offer the consumer satisfactions incomparably poorer in quantity and quality than those that rely on the free play of the market.¹

But in the name of the freedom of the individual to access mass consumption, this totalitarianism spreads a mindless individualism — the hypersubjectivism of which Arnold Gehlen speaks — which decomposes human groups by dissolving the social and organic bonds of their members, proscribing any collective, historic or national project.

Nevertheless, by promising happiness for all and at once, mercantile liberalism ends up breeding vain hopes and an atmosphere of collective dissatisfaction. The egalitarian myth of necessary happiness is here coupled to that of infinite improvement at the level of individual life, whatever the health of the economy. Paradoxically, every quantitative increase at this level of existence intensifies the psychological dissatisfaction that it strives to eliminate, provoking in the social body an almost physiological dependence on economic desires, with all the pathological consequences that entrain. “The false liberation of wellbeing,” writes Pasolini, “has created a situation just as insane, and perhaps more so, than that in times of poverty” (Corsair Writings).²

The expectation of automatically and mechanically achievable progress renders men slaves to the system and excuses them from developing imagination and will. The tyranny of wellbeing begins by using sensations and ends up using man himself. Konrad Lorenz wrote, “In remote antiquity, sages realized that it was not to man’s advantage if his striving for pleasure and avoidance of unpleasurable experience met with too much success.”³ Pleasure dulled by habituation necessitates a permanent escalation and leads to perversion. Modern consumers impatiently desire everything and at once; but this hypersensitivity to lack, in fact, renders them incapable of savouring the joys of acquisition. Again, Konrad Lorenz explains, “Pleasure is only the act of consummation, and joy is pleasure in the act of creation.”⁴

Arnold Gehlen called pleonexia that psychological alienation by which the satisfaction of an egalitarian demand provokes an increase of egalitarian desire; and he named neophilia that profound incapacity of minds which have submitted to the mercantile spirit to satisfy themselves with an acquired situation. This leads the system to maintain a permanent state of rebellion, as much more intense as this dissatisfaction seems all the more unbearable. It is a bottomless spiral. The indefinite raising of the quality of life, promised and demanded whatever the economic circumstances, is a condition of crisis, to the extent that this tyranny of wellbeing must ultimately imperil the very system that has engendered it, while alienating its subjects ever more profoundly.

Consumers, enslaved to the egalitarian myth of wellbeing, are rapidly becoming domesticated. From ethology, we learn of the Sacculina carcini, an apparently ordinary crayfish which, once it has attached itself parasitically to a crab, loses its eyes, limbs and joints and becomes a creature in the form of a sac — or fungus — whose supple tentacles sink into the body of its host-animal. A “horrible degeneration,” writes Konrad Lorenz, who does not shrink from noting such “physical manifestations of domestication in man.”⁵ Thus, man is heading towards a sort of Brave New World populated by “vulgarized” parasites, allowing him to survive while stripping him of his sensibility.

This mental bondage to the illusory benefits of continuous progress produces, according to Raymond Ruyer, short-living peoples.⁶ Wrapped in their cosy cocoons and sheltered from the outside world, these peoples cling to short-term values and content themselves with actions of immediate and directly measurable or quantifiable consequence, expressed in consensus-based economic values. This leads our statesmen to consider themselves “good managers of the France project,” turning the country into a sort of “shareholder-ballot limited company.”

A short-living individual no longer thinks of his heritage or his after-death: his descent and lineage have become concepts incomprehensible to him. He manages his narrow and limited destiny day to day, content to keep the accounts of the managers above him. He navigates by sight, even — thanks to the nouveaux économistes, for whom nothing is impossible — pricing in the cost of his children up to their coming-of-age. Affection, not being susceptible to measurement, is replaced with contractual bonds.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx wrote:

The bourgeoisie […] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. […] It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

How best to describe the destructive effects on cultures of the mercantile spirit propagated by the bourgeoisie? It reduces cultures to mere habits of consumption; and the only language understood is the language of purchasing power, potentially equal between all peoples and across all the earth.

A single mode of life’s will to spread inevitably ends up endangering the cultural richness of humanity. Just as borders and diversity of morals were intolerable obstacles for the merchants of times past, now, for mercantile society, ethnic, cultural, national, social and even personal differences must be inexorably dissolved. The universalist dream of a vast and homogeneous global consumer market announces the advent of homo oeconomicus.

Thereby largely surpassing the function of satisfying essential material needs, the economy has become the very foundation of the new universal “culture.” This mutation has reduced man to nothing more than what he buys: to use a fashionable word, it has reified him. And the political project of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing can be defined in these terms: “To promote an immense middle class of consumers.” Tyranny of wellbeing? Already in 1927, Drieu La Rochelle was warning us:

The smothering of desires by the satisfaction of means: machines, overwhelming us with opportunities, give rise to this sordid economy, which will do away with our races. Abundance in the grocery kills the passions. In man’s mouth, stuffed with preserves, an evil chemical reaction corrupts his speech. More religions, more arts, more languages. Stunned, man can express nothing [Le Jeune Européen].

(This essay has been translated from the French.)

1. Le Monde (24 January 1978). All notes are the translator’s.

2. Corriere della Sera (19 January 1975), collected in Scritti Corsari (Milan, 1975). The French Faye cites speaks of “fausse libération” where Pasolini speaks of a “falsa liberalizzazione.”

3. Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (New York, 1974), p. 36.

4. New York Times (5 July 1970).

5. Faye is paraphrasing. Cf. The Waning of Humaneness (Boston, 1987), pp. 41, 98–103. Lorenz explicitly avoids the terms “involution,” “decadence,” “degeneration,” preferring his new coinages, “abbauende Evolution” (imperfectly translated by R. W. Kickert as “retrograde evolution”) and “sacculinization.”

6. Les cent prochains siècles (Paris, 1977).