Part Six of
A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions
“We’re such an utterly disconnected culture, we just don’t get human suffering,” tells one of Hari’s researchers into the “grief exception” (43). As we have seen, the most basic connection that has been lost to modern consciousness for Hari is that there can be no brain without its body, no organism without its environment, no mind without other minds, no individual without its society. We are earthlings and cannot transcend this state of embodiment, even though it entails by the law of entropy our final dissolution in death and return to the earth. “You are dust and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3: 19). A corollary of this connection of human being to the humus from which we come, and to which we return, is an ineradicable state of vulnerability that attends any conceivable creature and so along with vulnerability, the problem of pain. Pain is a signal, a rough but vital indicator of danger for embodied earthlings. Imagine, if you will, that by reason alone a parent tried to persuade its child not to put its hand in the pretty blue flame; apart from the acute involuntary pain reaction, the lesson of reason would never be learned in time.
So to become a creature again in connection with one’s own body and through it to the social and natural webs of life, Hari admonishes in conclusion: “You are not a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have the community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated… Pain isn’t your enemy, however much it hurts (and Jesus, I know how much it hurts). It’s your ally – leading you away from a wasted life and pointing the way toward a more fulfilling one” (256-7). “You need your nausea. You need your pain. It’s a message, and we must listen to the message… Stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain” (261).
The particular pain of loneliness precedes depression. Loneliness is an aversive state that can motivate to connect in a shared project in the world that will be meaningful to all involved – just as the Creator observed that it was not good for the man to be alone (Genesis 2: 18), that in all the animal kingdom there was not found for him a suitable partner (Genesis 1:20). And the man at last rejoiced in the Creator’s gift of the woman as “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 1:23). Absent such connection as here provided, loneliness descends into depression as an understandable generalization of hopelessness.
But our contemporary “loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now” (78). This begins with labor where we spend most of our waking hours. People say, Hari reports, that they shut themselves down to get through the work day since in any case they are irrelevant and no one cares what they do. In the former Soviet bloc, the cynical saying was everywhere popular, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Such obsequious cynicism is a “submission response” to the “sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us” who are in a state of “constant status anxiety” (120) since we work as readily replaceable cogs in a vast, impersonal machine of dubious purposes. According to a Gallup poll Hari cites from 2011-12 studying millions of workers across 142 countries, only 13% reported being engaged in their work, 63% said they were not engaged, and a further 23% claimed to be actively disengaged – a far cry from the idyllic tilling of the garden in which the creator placed the first couple.
The alternative, if we would become creatures again, would be to transform the station in life into a vocation of socially meaningful service and production, where one’s voice counts in collaborative projects for purposes of genuine, not junk value. The pertinent example of junk values corrupting economic life according to Hari’s research is seen in the role of big Pharma. “The vast majority of research into whether drugs work or not is funded by big pharmaceutical companies, and they do this research for a specific reason: they want to be able to market those drugs so they can make a profit out of them. That’s why the drug companies conduct their scientific studies in secret, and afterward, they only publish the results that make their drugs look good or make their rivals drugs look worse” (22). Junk values and economy produce junk science. Hari reports how, confronted with the “unvarnished” data he had uncovered, “one group of researchers wrote [to him] that had it had been a “dirty little secret” in the field for a long time that the effects of these drugs on depression itself were in reality tiny” (24).
Assuming the desire for honest science and meaningful vocation, Hari argues that we have a choice for work that would minimize hierarchy and maximize equal participation as opposed to ramping up the humiliation inflicted upon labor as we are doing today. Such a choice exists theoretically, but Hari himself acknowledges here a “huge obstacle,” the “mountain at the center of almost all our lives:” “meaningless work has to be done” (201). Indeed it is “essential” to the world of modernity.
Can drudgery be sugarcoated? Can we “infuse” it with meaning? Can we restore dignity to cogs in the machine? Or is top-down wage slavery with all the humiliation it inflicts upon laborers the necessary price of modernity? What an “amazing victory for their propaganda system,” in any case, “to make you work in an environment you often can’t stand, and to do it for most of your waking life, and see the proceeds of your labor get siphoned off by somebody at the top, and then to make you “think of yourself as a free person.”” (209). The ravenous appetite of neoliberal corporate capitalism for profit extraction as the supreme value reveals the operative deity, the omniscient hyper-efficient processor of information by unregulated markets facilitating the exchange of goods and services. This new Leviathan reduces “many middle-class people” to work “from task to task, without any contract or security,” and Leviathan’s propaganda system gives it “fancy name: we call it being “self-employed” or the “gig economy” and as a stable sense of the future dissolves before their eyes workers are told “to see it as a form of liberation.” (141).
We can see with Hari’s help what the need is, not only of individuals in depression but of a demoralized culture, if we would become creatures again: satisfying intergenerational families, labor as vocation, each and every fragile life as equally precious, and a politics that values these pre-political forms of human culture and protects them with parental persuasion more than coercive bullying. But we have no idea how to get there from here, in so far as it is a broken and demoralized culture which shapes the perceptions of need (150). Hari puts forward some piecemeal solutions, small steps that can be taken. Fundamentally people can move from private to public understandings of their personal problems (177) and this reconnection with others empowers individuals to fight together (178) for better futures. When we grasp that depression and demoralization are not the fault of diseased brains or moral turpitude, but of a broken culture we see the need for “big changes” (151). One such big change Hari discusses would be universal basic income which would alleviate the constant stress and humiliation the poor experience and better enable the human agency needed to overcome the disconnections endemic to poverty. Big changes needed but how do the paralyzed, the depressed, the demoralized, the hopeless of today arise to affect such big change? Really, to become creatures again?