Social networks are causing the largest epidemic of depression and anxiety in living memory

2024-05-06 20:10:02

We live in times of apology for the discourse of self-esteem, personal valuation, individuality and self-help, this means that the feeling of belonging to a community has disappeared (and, therefore, mutual collaboration and collective struggle) to consider ourselves now all exceptionally unique. That is the thesis that Alejandro Pérez Polo developed in his book “You are not special. Pets, selfies and psychologists.”

We have come to the individual conviction that we are unique and, of course, we have nothing in common with the fifth-floor neighbor who meets us in the elevator, nor with our co-workers on the assembly line, nor with all those workers with those of us who meet on the subway.

In his work, Pérez Polo reviews all the elements of this new profile of the modern citizen and thus, throughout the pages, we will find all those disturbing characteristics that are already the majority and, it seems, are going to become more.

You are not special by Alejandro Pérez Polo.

In this interview he explains and advances some of its content.

Perhaps the most irreverent part of your book -and there are many- is the idea that encouraging self-esteem or valuing yourself is the result of a neoliberal individualist ideology and, as such, cultivates citizens who are distant from collective projects and struggles. Can you explain that?

There is an explicit project aimed at breaking any collective bond. Every human being different from oneself should be considered suspicious. Through the idea that he is a competitor, a threat, that other is presented as a limit to your personal expression, to your most essential freedom, and can also be the cause of your deepest discomfort.

This system causes enormous discomfort and deep existential unease. The trick that those in power present is that you redirect that discomfort towards your most direct neighbor. Whether it’s your father, your “toxic” friend or anyone you meet on the street. And the candy in which they wrap it is the idea of ​​self-esteem, of caring for the Self. Since you are screwed, frustrated because your expectations have not been met or you simply feel an indeterminate boredom, or an anger that you do not know very well where to direct, what they are going to sell you is that you forget about everyone else, focus on yourself yourself, go to the psychologist, find your inner voice, get rid of the harmful elements that surround you, even if it is your own brother, and get lost in the internal labyrinths of the self trying to find that reason to smile again.

The system crushes you, and the alternative could only be a return to the collective, in an encounter with the other whom you pointed out as the cause of your discomfort, but all this is blocked with the fashion of the Self, of self-help. This, furthermore, serves to justify and glorify those who are above, who would be so because of their individual merits. Neoliberalism, more than an ideology, is a way of inhabiting our world.

The subtitle of your book is “pets, selfies and psychologists”. Can you briefly point out the role of those three elements in the world you describe?

By losing contact with the other, by criminalizing them, demonizing them or simply placing them as a threat to our own lives, we lose a series of basic emotional elements for our survival. At the end of the day, no matter how much the Self, the individual, is celebrated, we are nothing without others.. And we are in need of affection, attention, care. Pets then come to make up for the absence of the other Human. The emotional deficiencies derived from having broken with our community of reference have to be made up for in some way. Dogs and cats are then postulated as the best substitutes for the Other: they do not rebel, and if they do, they are usually castrated, sacrificed or whatever so that they become more docile.

Pets are there to meet our affection needs. They are a symptom, not a cause, of contemporary individualism. They constitute a kind of light commitment once the possibility of truly committing to other humans has fallen. And they don’t demand as many responsibilities as a child.

On the other hand, in the triad that I mention in the subtitle, there are selfies. The imperative of having to build personal brands to have value in the market. Entrepreneurs of ourselves, products for a showcase very well defined by the algorithm of the networks. A demand for exacerbated exhibitionism without which we directly die, Without social networks today we are social corpses. But it reinforces to the nth degree all the narcissistic tendencies that are already installed and that come from afar. We believe we are idols, semi-gods, and, above all, very important in our particular profiles.

Finally, to complete this triad, there are The psychologists. The new prophets of the religion of the Self. Having no collective structures or institutions to cling to, nor a human community of reference to hold us, we have to turn to the professional of the Self to try to cure the anxieties caused precisely by this individualistic system. It is the literal privatization of discomfort, as Mark Fisher would say. Paying a supposedly scientific professional who knows better than anyone the tools of our consciousness to cure our existential ailments.

The problem is that a psychologist is never going to point out the structural causes of your discomfort, he is not going to say that the fault that you are in shit is a capitalist system that exploits you both economically and emotionally, but rather a trauma that you had in your life. childhood because dad didn’t pay enough attention to you. He places the guilt of that discomfort back on you, instead of looking for the solution outside the internal labyrinth of the Self. That’s why his only solutions will be new patterns of individual behavior. Do this, stop doing that, express those repressed emotions, recognize the anger caused by this thing or that, etc.

There is no doubt about the role of the Internet and social networks in this panorama that you criticize. My question is if this has happened before or is it really so new.

All of these trends have been going on for more than 50 years. In fact, in my essay, I refer a lot to two essential works to understand contemporary individualism: the culture of narcissismde Christopher Lasch y the era of emptiness by Gilles Lipovestsky. The first is from 1979, the second from 1983. Forty years have passed since those two essays that already identified the new incipient narcissistic culture. Networks only elevate to the nth degree, in fact entering another dimension, everything that was already caused by a system that puts enormous pressure on the market to be the only institution on which to build the human community. That is, an institution in which there are consumers and non-citizens, and we are all atoms competing under the laws of supply and demand.

Social networks reproduce all these social and systemic inertias that were already present. However, they are making visible the inherent tragedy that they harbor. That very exhibition, those social mandates of exhibition, are causing the largest epidemic of depression and anxiety in memory. We are more aware that all this does not lead to any good outcome. Being more aware does not mean that anything will be transformed, but at least it places the problem at the political forefront.

With my essay, I try to place some tools to try to get out of this quagmire.

There is another chapter that I found very interesting and, above all, how you have managed to connect it to the theme of this book, because it seemed unrelated. It is about the defense of the Nation-State. What is that relationship?

We must mend the collective ties destroyed by capitalism. To do this, it is important to place not only a defense of the community in the abstract, but to land with something tangible, something visible, something available, this human community that can be a lever to make us collectively stronger. Hence my proposal to recover the republicanism inherent in the construction of the Nation-State.

The nation is the most powerful available and universal element to weave an idea of ​​a republican and democratic community. It forges an open identity for us, but one that unites us in an instant communion, in addition to constructing an idea of ​​secular transcendence different from that of the individual. Nation and common republican institutions, such as our public parks, the library, the hospitals, the schools… all of this always works in collective logic that breaks at its roots the individualistic idea of ​​the self castellated and isolated from others.

Milei and turbocapitalism are based solely and exclusively on a savage, individualistic conception of the human being, where only individual affections and preferences are of value above those of the common people. This reinforces the powerful, since in the market only those who have more money and can therefore buy more things can assert themselves, including people’s wills. On the other hand, in the democratic nation the community as a whole is affirmed, for example at the time of voting. But also in the defense of the public sphere as a space for the construction of the common. Then, all of this is what makes us stronger on a personal level. Knowing that those next to you are there to take care of you and not to step on you.

Taken from Don’t close your eyes