Affluenza by Oliver James
Observing that there is an inverse correlation between the psychological health of a population and the magnitude of the gulf between its highest and lowest paid, television psychologist Oliver James contends that many people living in the western world have been infected by the ‘Affluenza virus’. This virus is a set of values that leaves us at increased risk of emotional distress and entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous.
To prove his point, James sets out on a quest across industrialized nations, whereupon he is disgusted by the unrestricted greed of a New York banker, and then bats away tears engendered by the purity of the Nigerian taxi driver who drives him home. After America he seeks out equally polarized people in Russia, Singapore and Australia. Global infection proven, James then seeks to construct us ‘vaccines’ against our temptations and finally demands our genuflection as he bestows on us a ‘blunt unsparing statement of what needs to change’.
‘Affluenza’ is then part travelogue, part psychological profile and part self-help guide. I don’t disagree with the, rather unoriginal, central premise but the problem is that this is a dull, turgid and overlong book. ‘Affluenza’ is a great title, but the neatness of this neologism is restrictive, as the analogy with a virus is actually very limited, necessitating tedious semantic work-arounds whereby people are, for instance, pardoned if they have ‘virus goals’ without the dreaded ‘virus motives’. James also stretches indulgence by referring to ‘Affluenza’ throughout as if this rhetorical construct had an independent life of its own beyond his work.
His ‘vaccines’ are banal, such as ‘consume what you need, (not what advertisers want you to want)’, and the insights of this book do not justify its 500 page length. In the final gloves off section, James contends that 75% of us require dynamic psychotherapy to examine our childhoods, an experience which seems to have failed to improve the psychological health of the rich New Yorkers he happily disparages earlier in the book.
It’s not entirely without merit; James’s strength is in psychological analysis and he does provide some neat interpretations of the behaviour of his subjects. But within the book’s sweeping scope, encompassing all of modernity, he fails in bringing convincing analysis to the societies over whom he places his microscope, the problems of whom are as much to do with barely examined gender-politics and socio-economics as psychology.
Affluenza reviewed in The Times
More Oliver James: A psychological diagnosis of the banking crisis theguardian 18 September 2008. I don’t wish to turn this site into a OliverJameswatch site, but I don’t think that you can categorize the failure of government to regulate banks effectively as evidence of psychopathology in our leader and members of his cabinet. The current crisis is the result of a complex and widely based web of motivations, the identifications of the origins of which need not draw on the language of mental disorders.
I found this book intensely irritating.
It was full of argumentation of the type: “One established school of thought says X about this issue, and another, equally well-established approach is Y. I don’t like the sound of either though, so I’m going to come up with some convoluted, self-justifying anecdotal crap to support my opinion of my lovely new approach Z. I’m then going to continue, taking that Z has now been proved incontrovertibly, as if I’d had a series of earth-shaking articles published in Nature, and wibble endlessly about how society is so unpleasant in general and wave my hands about.”
I wanted to go round to his with a hardback copy of Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics and smack him over the head with it, repeatedly.
He’s also very fond of if not the sound of his own voice, the colour of his own pen. I may seem aggrieved, but I wasted close to a tenner on this doorstop!
That’s a shame about the wasted money, but you’ve put James’s approach to evidence very nicely!
You can claw some money back if you sell the book on amazon.co.uk marketplace, which is what I do with unsatisfactory books….
Good tip! Actually, I gave it to Barnados, so they can make some money off it for a good cause, along with some chick lit I don’t want anyone knowing I read (Candace Bushnell and the like
and Sharon Osbourne’s autobiog (don’t waste your money, it’s dire, luckily I bought this from Barnado’s in the first place for a quid).
What a god awful book, full of misogyny and self-importance. Worst book I’ve ever read
Catchy title though.