Belonging in Late Stage Capitalism

We all, as the creatures that evolution made us, have a need for belonging. Belonging is a deep, primal need because our safety depended on it.

We are naked, soft, intelligent, social apes. Our mental health depends on feeling part of a bigger human constellation. This need is deeply embedded in the core of what makes us human. We crave belonging, and that craving exerts a strong influence on our behaviour.

In the hyper-individualised society of the UK and ‘the West’, we’re operating from a belonging -deficit due to the atomisation that emerged from capitalism (and other systems of oppression, like patriarchy). Belonging is often mediated by social status and the ability to ‘fit in’ to the tightly constrained confines of ‘normal’. Children learn that from very early on; a lesson that is heightened by access to social media and digitally mediated communication. Feeling estranged and alienated is a central effect of a society that is separated into stratified classes and in which individuals are rendered dependent on the market for survival.

The cultural hegemony of neoliberalism over the last decades inscribed the concept of competition and entrepreneurialism even stronger into our collective consciousness. And technological advancements have led to an ever increasing flow of information and to platforms on which we can constantly compare ourselves to others. ‘Fitting in’ has become more complex: you can ‘be who you want’ (neoliberalism-tolerated social liberalisation, e.g LGBTQIA+ rights) – as long as you are ‘successful’. No wonder mental health has plummeted; young people are the most impacted within our society: nearly a quarter (23.5%) describe their mental health as either bad or the worst it’s ever been.

This fits with how Belgian psychiatrist Paul Verhaeghe, in his book Identeit, critiques the mainstream way of conceptualising poor mental health as a pathology of the individual. Typical psychological pathologies vary from society to society. They change throughout time as culture changes, e.g., women’s hysteria of the Victorian era was a specific manifestation of their position in society and the specific social constraints of that culture. Nowadays our chronically unmet needs manifest as eating disorders, porn addiction and media-induced ADHD.

We can understand more about our society and how people relate to each other from looking at the mental illnesses that it produces. The pathology of the individual is really just a manifestation of system-level behaviour.

Fitting in (as opposed to belonging) has been the norm for a long time, formatting human behaviours in very specific ways. It can (at least partially) explain the mental health crisis we’re experiencing at the moment, which dramatically limits people’s autonomy and flourishing. So maybe, contrary to what neoliberalism has been claiming, our lives in this society are actually more tightly constrained than a century ago, not less?

This would link the question of belonging to C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle model of how complex systems develop: In late stage capitalism, we’re in the ‘mature’ phase where connections between agents (people, ideas, organisations, norms, tools, etc.) are densely connected in a rigid and highly constraining way. The system becomes too interconnected, and there is little room to adapt. This includes overly constraining people’s imaginations (e.g. capitalist realism, the idea that there is no alternative to the society we have now). In a world where everything is connected, there is little room to manoeuvre, and a failure in one part of the system can cause devastating cascades throughout. (For an example of this, think of how a blockage of the Suez canal dramatically impacted trade almost everywhere.) Our global systems and our mental health are both fragile.

Sadly, this society and the requirement to fit in are normal for Gen Alpha, and increasingly normalised for the rest of us. Verhaeghe argues that mental health providers supporting individual clients will never be a scalable solution to address this crisis.

So what shall we do? Finding ways to belong to each other that don’t involve being ‘normal’, high status or fitting in? Finding ways to collectivise ourselves? Or, again following Holling, maybe it’s time for the system to go into the next phase, into ‘release’: where connections are cut, structures collapse, and resources are freed up again to recombine into something new. Maybe it’s time, in the words of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, to hospice modernity.

The idea for this post arose whilst eating falafel on a park bench in Manchester as the sun set. The day after having the idea for it, Lucas and I visited the natural history museum in Manchester and stumbled across this: