Religion

Industrial psychology aims to mask our alienation  

By only helping people accept their exploitation more silently, we perpetuate our real core grievances with capitalism 

by Michael Nenonen  

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I’ve worked in the human services sector for about eighteen years. One of the biggest problems in this field is worker burnout: psychological exhaustion and emotional trauma are inevitable hazards of the job. I’ve been to quite a few professional workshops on burnout, but there’s one that sticks out in my mind.

Twelve years ago I was employed at a day treatment program for people with moderate to severe developmental disabilities. The pay and benefits were meager, the workplace was non-unionized, and the working conditions were emotionally trying. Our clients were often physically aggressive, many had poor bowel and bladder control, and some simply spent the day screaming. Of course, they had it worse than we did. Our clients were powerless within this psychologically toxic setting, and the more highly-functioning clients were forced to participate in make-work projects such as delivering junk mail door-to-door and stuffing endless envelopes for various businesses. These projects were supposed to give them a sense of pride and productivity, but their true purpose was probably to funnel money into the cash-strapped organization.

Both the workers and the clients were being exploited, and neither group appreciated it very much. The clients responded in the only ways open to them: by throwing tantrums, disobeying the workers, and having fights with one another. The workers didn’t throw tantrums quite as often, but we squabbled frequently, we weren’t terribly enthusiastic about our work, and almost all of us felt depressed.

To deal with their workers’ misery, management had us all attend an unpaid, after-hours in-service where we were advised to think positively and make use of “aroma therapy.” To my amazement, my colleagues thought the in-service was wonderful. Several days later, while I was stuffing envelopes at a crowded table with half a dozen aggravated clients, an anxious co-worker asked if I’d like to sniff the vial of lavender she was passing beneath our charges’ noses. I said, “No, I don’t want to sniff any goddamn lavender.” My resignation was submitted before the week was done.

While my colleagues were popping scented oils, I was reading Diana Ralph’s book, Work and Madness: The Rise of Community Psychiatry (Black Rose Books, 1983). Ralph gave me the perspective I needed to understand the superficiality of my employers’ response to their workers’ suffering, as well as the eagerness with which my co-workers swallowed their drivel.

Ralph argues that the development of mental health services in the Western world has been funded and guided primarily by big business. By the early 20th Century, capitalists were discovering that their profits were being drained by two related phenomena. First, the labor force was becoming increasingly militant in its demands for such things as higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and job security; second, their workers’ productivity was being compromised by widespread emotional problems. Employers were caught in a bind: they had to soothe their workers’ emotional pain while simultaneously discouraging them from organizing to defend their interests. Since many of their workers’ emotional problems were either caused or aggravated by the economic exploitation at the core of the capitalist system, and since capitalists were unwilling to address this exploitation, they had to resort to psychological manipulation and anaesthetization to placate and control their laborers. This gave rise to industrial psychology, which remains one of the most influential fields in psychology today.

The goal of industrial psychology is to make workers feel better about being exploited in ever-more efficient ways. It treats the symptoms of suffering without ever addressing its underlying causes. For all the pain it temporarily soothes, industrial psychology is in essence a powerful technology of managerial control.

Ralph believes that the anti-psychiatry movement is fundamentally mistaken in its assumption that capitalism maintains its ideological hegemony through the institutions and services that work with the severely and chronically mentally ill. If that were so, then this area would be the best-funded and most comprehensive part of the mental health system, which clearly isn’t the case. Capitalism isn’t terribly concerned about people whose mental health issues prevent them from competing in the labor market. Within a capitalist system, services for such people will necessarily be both threatening and threadbare, not because the system wants to enforce a consensual reality upon them but rather because it’s only worried about them to the degree that they can interfere with the accumulation of profit. This is the reason why the seriously psychiatrically ill are sleeping in our shelters and flophouses, our streets and prisons. The system pays far more attention to indoctrinating and anaesthetizing the people within the labor force, a function it’s willing to spend enormous amounts of private money on.

Beyond its caustic effects on workers and the severely mentally ill, industrial psychology has a wider cultural influence that Ralph overlooks. By dissociating the psychological expression of suffering from its origins in the ethical relationships that structure our lives, industrial psychology warps our understanding of what suffering really is. This has very negative social consequences.

As Karen Armstrong demonstrates in The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Knopf Canada, 2006), each of our major religious traditions is founded upon a sophisticated awareness of suffering, an awareness that reaches below the emotions associated with suffering to address its ethical foundations. The story of Siddhartha Guatama, the historical Buddha, illustrates this point rather nicely.

According to legend, Guatama was raised in a pleasure palace constructed by his father, a powerful king. An ascetic had prophesied that Guatama would someday either become a great king or a great holy man. His father didn’t want him to become a holy man, so he did his best to keep Guatama in a state of perpetual happiness, free from the miseries of human existence. Guatama eventually found his way outside and encountered examples of illness, old age, and death. Realizing the inevitability of these evils, he recognized the futility of living within the unsatisfying illusions of the palace. He became an ascetic in order to learn the truth about the nature of suffering, as well as the means of liberation from suffering. Gutama learned that this liberation required commitment to ethical principles that he systematized in his eight-fold path. Armstrong shows that the Buddha, just like the sages of China, the Brahmins of India, and the prophets of the Middle East, realized that the only way to truly address suffering is through existential clarity and ethical vision. Or as many a protestor has pointed out, “No justice, no peace.”

Far from following Guatama’s example, industrial psychology distracts people from the reality of suffering through the creation of internal pleasure palaces. The more value our culture places on these palaces, the more we confuse their construction with psychological and spiritual growth, the more we avoid seriously addressing the suffering around and within us, and the worse this suffering becomes. Regardless of how many research dollars are poured into it, escapism can’t escape its own futility.

But back at my old workplace, I’m sure downtrodden employees are still sniffing lavender and wondering when it will finally start doing the trick.

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