A Short Thought on the Authority of Capitalism (Neoliberalism)

Psychology is the study of individual differences in happiness.
Why is one person happier or unhappier than another? — that question is the core task.
Psychology pays attention to the sense of relative deprivation an individual feels, and the experiential lacks that trigger that deprivation.

The problem is that if we focus on individual differences in happiness, we cannot get close to the eye of the typhoon — society and institutions.
This, I think, is exactly where the authority of capitalism begins.

Even though capitalism expanded, transformed, and developed on the base of freedom and diversity, it does not allow any questioning of the system itself. The part about the individual is wide open — endless room for debate — but the part about the system allows not an inch of doubt. Even more so, after communism and socialism weakened and capitalism effectively achieved global institutional monopoly, its authority and terms have only tightened.

Looking back, I suspect the era when psychology was fashionable was the ceiling of that authority.
These days, economics seems to have taken over the role that psychology and philosophy once played.

I can't shake the suspicion that an ideology and system built for freedom and independence from external forces has quietly changed its surface into voluntary surveillance and management from within.
Individual freedom breeds every-man-for-himself, every-man-for-himself breeds an economic law of the jungle, and to survive that, the individual suppresses their own freedom. And to loosen that suffocation a bit, suppressing other people's freedom stops being taboo and actually becomes affirmed — evaluated as a person's capacity, their ability — and that is the irony we set in motion.

An individual who won freedom from the dictatorship or oppression of the state and of society is now using that freedom to control another (individual)'s freedom.
And we evaluate this individual-supervising-individual arrangement not as oppression or injustice, but as the result of effort and ability — and everyone wants to get there. Even the ones being supervised accept this arrangement quietly.

As a result, the financial upper class that dominates capitalist society (largely hereditary, now three generations in) owns, manages, and monopolizes others, while continuously educating and preaching the following to everyone else: poverty is laziness and lack of ability, suicide is weak will, depression is a lack of something. In the end, it's either your fault or the cumulative result of your childhood environment.

On that basis, the modern social standard of sincerity collapses into endless self-improvement and achievement.

The system as a whole keeps pushing happiness-via-consumption, yet the individual ends up chasing a life of constant restraint and self-control — the irony. And the consumer goods that an exhausted self-controlling individual occasionally spends on for sheer survival end up back in the pockets of the ruling class, and the vicious cycle loops again.

Recently at least, success stories and case studies of individuals who have broken this loop, or who were able to, are being shared on social media.. and looking at them.. unfortunately, the way they broke out is also, in the end, to become a new — small-scale — new ruler, a new controller.

And so.. the pyramid of capitalism gets thinner and taller.

I suspect the background to all these problems is the absence of sociology.
For a mature commons to form, psychology, philosophy, and sociology have to grow together, evenly and continuously. But in reality they have a stepwise character, almost like philosophy (metaphysics, concepts) -> sociology (ideology and institutions) -> psychology (individual maturity or attitude adjustment). Touching the earlier stages feels like challenging the foundations of the present, so people become afraid and defensive — that, I suspect, is the problem.

If democracy and communism are philosophical ideals, I think socialism and capitalism are sociological solutions. In other words, they belong to different categories.

The problem, I think, is that individuals who built their dominance through this, and the individuals who are dependent on them (a new group, a new class), spend enormous resources to keep brainwashing? — training? — us into the frame that communism = socialism and that democracy = capitalism, to preserve their authority.

Left or right, whether you admit it or not, a single individual trying to survive inside modern society is already being dictated to on several fronts.
Already dominated by organizations for the sake of acquiring capital.
Already — though you believe it is your own will — suppressing and managing yourself to reach and maintain the level that the organization, the society, or the family you belong to expects.

Because psychology leaned so far one way, modern psychology inadvertently stepped into the domain of self-improvement. It fuels a competition for happiness and defines your unhappiness and emotions as self-improvement-deficiencies, as something you ought to race harder to overcome.
A psychology that has already tilted writes "don't compete, focus on yourself," and the individual (reader), already exhausted, reads this as "don't stop self-improving, so that you can live a life that 'looks more normal? more common-sense?' — focusing on yourself, 'just like the people in the book do.'"

Back in the old days, there was a resisting? voice: "happiness isn't in the order of your grades, you know." These days, by contrast, the voice seems to be: "if I can make money, grades don't matter."

If the former has a collective, societal undercurrent, the latter mixes in individualism and a results-based theory of happiness.

In the end, the recognition that balance is needed — not stopping at personal mental-victories of the self or the individual, but interest in sociology, which is built on the relationships between individuals that likewise begin from the individual, and the interactions between those relationships — that's what we need, I think.