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.