Part Five of a Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions
When the desire of the self becomes self-desire we become addicted to what Hari calls “junk values,” theologically, false loves. Here desire for life becomes envy, greed, lust, covetousness. As opposed to goodwill taking sympathetic joy in others, envy transforms others into enemy competitors for the scarce social resource of glory/recognition. As opposed to the ecstasy of the soul when self-consciousness fades away in the joy of being purely present with others in the fellowship of common work for common good, self-desire instrumentalizes others as stepping stones on the way to ephemeral but costly victories of ego-recognition. Curating and marketing one’s own ego in the consumerist treadmill of insatiable greed for the accumulation of material goods as status symbols only momentarily satisfies in the never-ending game of oneupsmanship.
These junk values are like junk food, says Hari: “materialism is KFC for the soul” (105). “You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture – but those standards can badly misjudge what a human being actually needs in order to have a good or even tolerable life. The culture can create a picture of what you “need” to be happy – through all the junk values I had been taught about – that doesn’t fit with what you actually need.” (151). Once again we see how the crucial assumption surfaces that there is a natural and proper humanity of humble, animal needs underlying an alienated state of humanity awash in a culture of envy. But again the troubling question arises: how are idol worshipers to recognize the clay feet undergirding their symbolizations of self-desire? How are they to break out?
“For thousands of years, philosophers have been suggesting that if you overvalue money and possessions, or if you think about life mainly in terms of how you look to other people, you will be unhappy…” (93) Unhappy? Is that all? It is true of course that Socrates’ love of wisdom, as Plato tells the tale, distracted young careerists in Athens from the lucrative path which parents had put them on and that this “corruption of the morals of youth” led the Athenians to condemn Socrates’ to death– not exactly a “happy” ending in the perspective of the Athenian culture. Augustine in his Confessions tells a similar story about the intervention of a “severe mercy:” how he had climbed to the pinnacle of worldly success as a rhetorician in the splendid Milan of Imperial Rome but found himself miserable, at the mercy of corrupt desires he could not overcome -- until supernatural grace extinguished lust by the gift of a new heart with new desires and true values. Also not, need it be said, a “happy” outcome by the lights of contemporary values as also our modern lights.
Thus I think it doubtful it that such the Socratic or Augustinian models can be sold, or ever were sold, as a ticket to “happiness,” especially as happiness is culturally defined by the junk values at work in “polluting advertising:” “happiness mean[s] being able to buy lots of the things on display.” It is not the utility or beauty of the merchandise in any case but the power of the purchaser as a source of social recognition that is sought here as “happiness.” Such pursuit of happiness by the self curved into itself is at the root of our cultural malaise. Hari himself sees this here as elsewhere when he echoes, probably unconsciously, not the philosophers so much as The Sermon On The Mount with its Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (99). Yet the object of desire here is precisely not “happiness,” but blessedness in relation to the kingdom of heaven as the value (“treasure”) of all values. In any case, the Sermon on the Mount juxtaposes its rule for blessedness to a competitor, the junk value, as Hari puts it, of the “I-want-golden things” rule. Either/or! As the Sermon says: “No one can serve two masters. He will love one and hate the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
Does this either/or map the path to breakout for the demoralized soul imprisoned in a corrupt culture just because it makes clear that mortal “happiness” is not the ultimate value? A severe mercy indeed! The objection sounds: must we serve masters at all? Is there a perverse desire underlying this either/or for one’s own subjugation? The sovereign self of modernity does not give up its dream of mastery so easily, not even to the imperatives of The Sermon on the Mount. To disbelieve the idols is to become a creature again, no longer a would-be deity striding on the earth victorious in the fantasy of its idols. But how can an alienated creature breakout of its false loves and love properly?