Unease

Verhaeghe opens with a childhood memory: when a scout club was set up in his village he begged to join, but soon quit, because joining a group within an organisational framework did not come easily to him. Years later he understood the forces at work: our strongest drive is to belong to a group, while on the other side lies the desire for autonomy, to be single and original. The friction between the two plays out in childhood, in love relationships and between society and the individual. The whole book is built on this tension.

The author states his starting points openly, and this is the book's most honest feature. He admits he leans on no overarching ideology — socialism, eco-modernism or conservatism — but also that science is never truly neutral and cannot settle ethical questions. His view of human nature starts from the everyday experience of the bathroom mirror each morning: we look at ourselves and judge ourselves. «We are divided beings» — the one judging and the one judged are both «me». Unease comes from within as well as from without.

In chapter one Verhaeghe plays «an anthropologist in his own country», describing Flemish society up to the mid-twentieth century: two sexes as God created them, lifelong marriage, kinship policed through church registers, class hierarchy and a religious authority that deemed this order «natural». His analogy from beekeeping is memorable: a hive runs on unwritten laws without any recognised authority — the «queen» is really just an egg-laying machine. A human hive cannot work that way: large groups do not organise without authority; the only question is how that authority functions.

Chapter five, the book's core, opens with a radio bulletin: «Australia is about to approve same-sex marriage, which is expected to give the economy a 335-million-euro boost.» For Verhaeghe this sentence says it all: an ethical advance is reduced to economic growth, and almost nobody notices. Citizens become «customers», hospitals «healthcare companies», young researchers are judged on «output», and relationships become «investments». Karl Polanyi's 1944 The Great Transformation — the prediction that economics would replace politics — is the starting point of his analysis.

He traces step by step how the neoliberal narrative spread: the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Reagan's «government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem», and the «Greed is good» speech in Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Ironically, the director meant the film as a warning, yet many young Americans took its protagonist as a role model. The account of how the Reagan administration delayed a scientific report on acid rain is a striking case of the political manipulation of science. The section showing, via Orwell's «Newspeak», how economic jargon has colonised everyday language is also noteworthy.

The weakness is that the critique is sometimes one-sided: neoliberalism is presented as almost the sole cause of every social problem, and alternative explanations get little discussion. Even so, by combining his experience as a psychotherapist with sociological analysis, Verhaeghe offers a serious and thought-provoking answer to the question «why are we all so uneasy?»

• Essayistic style opening with personal memories
• Analysis through historical examples, films and novels
• Extensive endnotes