After reading only a few pages of Affluenza I was fascinated to see how well articulated and strongly argued James’s position was on the topic of affluence and the constant struggle to gain money in today’s society. I had done a lot of reading on the same topic before, but I really didn’t seem to find such strong evidence for things that I can now see are almost self evident.

The negative effects of advertising and the importance of being authentic and replacing wants with needs seem so trivial to think about, but they can actually affect the way we live and the way we behave in an immense way. While reading the book, you not only start to understand why people cannot seem to find happiness in whatever they do (and this includes becoming a millionaire), but it will also give you valuable tools to start analyzing yourself and improve your own thought patterns.

I think the aim of the book is to explain why so many of us find ourselves so unhappy in our society, but what distinguishes it from other books, is that it actually gives practical vaccines so that we can fight off the virus of materialism and find happiness.

The best way to really know what the book is about is of course to actually read it. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand what is happening to their emotional wellbeing and how to protect it while living in the 21st century.

I was able to set up an interview with James which is shown below:

At what point do we become unhappy when we earn a lot of money and can we possibly be rich and happy at the same time?

“It’s estimated that you only need £20,000 a year to be able to meet your needs in a developed nation like this one. Any money you earn over that does not increase your chances of being mentally healthy, so it’s not really about the absolute quantity of money that is the issue here, it’s about how much you’re intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and a sense of relative deprivation. I have interviewed many, many millionaires who are deeply dissatisfied. They don’t have a concept of enough. Equally I have interviewed people who do not have much money and who are absolutely fine. So once again on the treadmill of always moving the goalpost and always wanting more, you’re always going to be in trouble. And of course you can be rich and happy; my argument in affluenza or the selfish capitalist is not that being rich makes you unhappy, what makes you unhappy is having the wrong values. If you place a high value on money, possessions, appearances or fame when you’re rich or poor you’re at a greater risk of being mentally ill. It’s not about happiness, it’s about mental health.

Some people may say that we are genetically programmed into being “greedy” is greed really in our nature?

“The answer to that question is, if you look at a baby, a baby has a concept of enough. When it’s fed and you give it enough milk, it no longer wants anymore. I would say we are born with a very good sense of what our needs are and once their met we no longer seek more. It’s only if we are deprived that we do seek more. Another example of that of course is attachment, if a child has unreliable parents who are unresponsive to it when it was a toddler it will become what’s called anxiously attached which means it’s constantly nervous and anxious and constantly looking for people to cling on to. Or else very scared of getting attached to anyone because it fears that we will reject it. These things are culturally created; it is not at all in our nature to be greedy. You can argue that at a very fundamental level, there is a component of human beings that depending on their childhood history and the society they’re in, human beings have the potential to become totalitarian. There is a very ugly side to human beings and they have the capacity for cruelty that is not found in other species. So the genetic potential is there, but the key thing is what kind of nurture you have in early years and subsequently what kind of society you’re in.

How can we separate our needs from our wants?

“Psychologists agree really, that there are four basic needs that human beings have. The first is for security. That’s emotional security and also a sense of feeling safe and also feeling materially safe. If you are very worried that you do not have enough food, a roof over your head, you will feel very insecure. The second need is for intimacy and to feel part of a social network. The third need is to feel effective and the fourth need is to feel autonomous or authentic. Now you do not need a six bedroom house and three cars to meet any of those needs. So if you really learn those fourth needs off by heart and every time you’re about to make a purchase ask yourself do I need this or do I want it? And go through the checklist of four fundamental needs that I described and you’ll find in an awful lot of times you don’t actually need to thing you’re about to buy. You don’t need this crunchy bar. We say ‘I need a coffee’ as you go into Starbucks, but you don’t need it. You’re addicted to caffeine. You could easily stop being addicted to caffeine and you wouldn’t have that need. It is a want that was created by the social system.”

How can we protect small children from affluenza?

“I think the short answer is to meet their needs when they are very small. What they need most of all is love, if you are a woman and you got a small child and you work then that child needs to have the equivalent of a mother as a substitute care. One on one  before the age of three, day care is a good idea… try to find a minder or if you can afford it (which is unlikely) but a nanny. Children need love and they obviously need boundaries set for them as they get older, once they get past three. They need to be encouraged to follow their own wishes. It is important that they way you pass your values to them,you are not passing the materialistic affluenza virus values, but the way they acquire their values from you is ideally out of choice…what’s called identification rather than coercion (what’s called introjections) so rather than forcing children to do what you want, you hopefully have a good relationship with them so they do it because they want to do it. If those things are the case they’ll be much less vulnerable to the lures of materialism.”

What would you tell someone who says they do not “need” alcohol, but then goes on to binge drink? What do you think of alcohol in general?

“Alcohol would be a banned substance if it didn’t exist in this society and was suddenly introduced. It’s a major cause of cancer, it’s a major cause of obesity and it’s of course a major cause of violence and bad behaviour. That’s what I think of alcohol in general… it’s very difficult…god knows when I was a student I used to drink, but I think it might seem very tyrannical to say that there should be no alcohol at all, but I don’t think getting the world rid of it all would make it a worse place.

If somebody says they don’t need alcohol, but then goes on to binge drink, obviously they need to reflect on how happy they are, on how secure they are, what their relationships are like. And of course most of us as students feel shy and anxious and hardly any students have sex without having first drunk, sex is a very big part of being a student in the sense that you are constantly looking for people and they are looking for you. It plays a big part in your life, and it’s also a way of bonding with your peers, but if you’re binge drinking, you’re probably feeling a bit depressed or anxious and you maybe need to go and see a cognitive analytic therapist or some therapist of that kind who will help you get to the bottom of what’s troubling you at the moment… and get you on the right track, so that you can drink moderately. There is obviously nothing wrong with drinking moderately, but it’s a very hard thing to do, especially when you’re young.

What happens when our interests are not monetary related such as art? How can we survive?

“In this society it seems like an impossible problem…especially if you are a student today you will rack up all that debt, you are then not going to get on to the property ladder unless your parents are rich, to then say to yourself that I want to do work that interests me, and be paid for it, and have enough money to live and perhaps eventually have a family and somewhere to live. It’s difficult. The truth is though I have noticed that some people manage to solve the problem by getting a skill that brings in enough money, working nine to five at a job that they quite enjoy, they’ll get into a business or social environment, become a social worker, or work in a bank or whatever it is and they don’t get paid that much money and they do their work and that’s fine. It’s difficult to do, and that’s one way of doing it. And then they have their hobby…they’ll live basically for the rest of the time where they have most of their pleasure…with their partner, family, hobbies and all the rest of it. But obviously, if you want to try to combine your hobby… essentially what you’re trying to do if you’re an artist is combine your hobby with the way you earn your living.

Now on that subject I guess my advice would be that you do have to try to be canny, and often the sort of people who do that are the exactly the sort of people who aren’t canny. Although I am not remotely suggesting that you become a marketing character. I’m actually writing a book this very moment about office politics and in the book I am trying to suggest that it really isn’t a good idea to say I refuse to get my hands grubby with that sort of stuff, interest do not always coincide. You have to get smart. That is true whether you live in Denmark or here or in America. But obviously in America it’s even worse. In America and this society you do have to understand about  sucking up to people, flattery, self promotion, and you have to be willing to talk yourself up to a certain degree and all that crap which your generation are very well aware of. But I think if anything, the tendencies for your generation to go too far in that direction. The difficulty is to remain true to yourself. And I guess it’s something you have to work with, as you get out into the work force, you’ll have to struggle with that and slowly you’ll find sort of things your good at that society are prepared to pay you to do and if your very lucky it might be the things that you really find interesting. But I think you might have to allow for the fact that it might take you till your thirty at least to really find that out. I would try lots of different carriers…do everything you can…keep moving around…trying things out until you find something that suits you.

What would happen if we moved away from a monetary system and into a resource based society and thus designing society instead?

“Well if we move from a monetary system into a resource based society as the new economics foundation and the green party has tried to explain, a zero growth economy is a real possibility. I personally maintain that it is inevitable that it’s going to happen. Climate change means that within your lifetimes, people in their early twenties or whatever, you’re going to see this happen. It’ll become the new orthodoxy because people will say ‘thank god the economy didn’t grow last year, that means we used less resources, which means that all other countries won’t disappear underwater…’ I think in terms of the practicalities of it, what would happen is certainly our values would become very different  and we would be much less materialistic. We spend much less time working and we wouldn’t have to work so hard because we finally make the connection between ‘if you don’t have so many possession, you don’t have to spend so much time working in order to afford to consume.’

If you keep it simple, keep it down to food, shelter, transport, you know basic stuff and…don’t allow those things to become ways of conspicuous consumption. You can keep your costs down and I think that will be the norm in the not too distant future. As well I would say it’s coming sooner rather than later.Hard though that may be to believe, but we’re looking at a two hundred dollar barrel of oil in the not so distant future. And we’re probably looking at some major climatic problems, which will mean that eventually the ruling elite will have to stop imagining that we can consume our way out of our problems. We’re still some way from that but it’ll happen.

For further information about Affluenza and Oliver James, please visit his website below:

http://www.selfishcapitalist.com/

4 Comments »

Leave your response!