Hey Marcel. Hey. Should we tell our listeners about the big trip we have coming up? Hannah, I think we have to. Mostly because we're taking this trip so that we can hang out with our listeners. So we should probably tell them about it. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. But my understanding was the trip was also to celebrate my book. Of course.
And who better to celebrate your book with than our listeners. Great point. Okay, everybody. We are going to be in the Stunning City of Chicago, Illinois on October 11th at Women and Children First Bookstore. That sounds like a gay bookstore. It is. We've already seen so many Chicago listeners comment that this bookstore is the perfect place for me to be joined by you Marcel.
In conversation about my book, Clever Girl. Well, right. Because your book is about the monstrous lady dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic. Pretty gay listeners. We want to see you there. Book your flight, plan your drive, start your walk and meet us in Chicago on October 11th at Women and Children First Bookstore. That's to help you remember. It's the opposite of who gets eaten in Jurassic Park.
That does help me remember. It's going to be so fun. Coach and Zoe and Gabby will also be there. I will probably cry. I will also cry. Come cry with us. Yay. Yay. Crying is gay. I need a friend. I need a friend. I want to take a ride on a mini train. You can have it all at the shopping. Hello and welcome to Material Girls. A pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitface. I'm Marcel Cosmon.
And I'm Hannah McGregor. And you know if I'm hosting an episode, it's either because I'm plugging a book I've written or I've insisted that we have a guest who I'm fascinated by. And luckily for everyone today, it's the latter. So Jesse Meadows, pronouns they them is a writer, artist and creator of a weekly newsletter called Sluggish, which focuses on disability, capitalism and culture. Welcome, Jesse. Thank you. I'm excited.
So we're going to be talking today about the way contemporary self-improvement influencer culture has gotten really obsessed with the neurotransmitter dopamine. And we have so much to say about it. So we're going to have to keep this opening real tight. But folks, I really want to know since we're talking about self-help and wellness scams, if you've ever gotten sucked into a wellness scam, I know I have. Jesse, you want to start us off?
Yeah, I took mushroom pills for my depression or not like fun, like the fun kind, but just like lion's mane. I don't know. It was like a mix of mushrooms and a supplement because my therapist had like recommended me to this like naturopath.
I was trying to take psych meds and they weren't working and I was like, I don't know what to do. And she was like, maybe try like natural medicine and I did try them. And I was like, I believed in them. You know, I was like, I have everything's going to be okay because I have my mushroom pills and I would like take them with me everywhere like in my back. But they did not in the long run and so I went back to Uncle Sam's government medicine.
I love your emotional support mushroom pills just coming everywhere with you like as long as I've got these mushrooms out of me will be fine. Martha, what about you? It's tricky because my mom rents a health food store. And so I have been long familiar with a lot of kukku bananas, different kinds of health and wellness scams. Some of them I'm still really into right like when I feel cold coming on I get hard into oil of oregano. Oh, yes, same. You know it hurts. So it must be working.
Exactly. Right. Right. I think maybe homeopathy is probably the one that I tried and then really turned against really hard like like this is bullshit. And I'm angry that I ever wasted time and money on these sugar pills. I was also raised by hippies and homeopathy was a major part of the landscape of my childhood medical treatment. I spent a lot of years trying to cure my panic attacks with rescue remedy. Oh, I'm less familiar with rescue remedy.
Lessy rescue remedy but you got nothing on the left. Is that like essential oils or something or it's like a tincture? A tincture. It's a tincture. That's a tincture. Yes. And like one of the main ingredients is grape alcohol. So it's like you're taking a microscopic amount of booze. A tiny shot. That's what I always use for my panic attacks. Until I discovered conapen. Yeah, you're right. Works way better.
Our first segment as always is why this why now we're in we ask the materialist question what are or were the historical ideological and material conditions for our objective study to become zeitgeist. And today we are talking about how a humble little neurotransmitter called dopamine made its way into the zeitgeist. But I suspect we might want to start by talking about what dopamine actually is before we get too far into the made up nonsense about what people think it is.
So Jesse, you're a dopamine expert. Could you start us off with a little dopamine 101 explainer? Yeah, just a disclaimer. I am not an expert. I am just a writer that has like, you know, obsessive tendencies. And I have been reading about this and research for a while. But yeah, scientists feel free to like factor. We do consider people who have exhaustively researched things to be experts.
Cool. I'm an expert, I guess. So dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical that transmits impulses between neurons in the brain. It's how the neurons communicate with other neurons, but also like other cells in your body. So like muscles and stuff. It's actually one of the oldest and evolutionary terms. It's been found in like all kinds of organisms across time. So it's very important.
Most neurotransmitters have multiple functions and dopamine does actually a lot of things, but its function depends like where in the brain it is and which of the five dopamine receptors it's activating. So it's very complex and it's involved in stuff like movement, motor control, attention, learning, motivation, lactation.
Oh, the majority of cognitive processes and mammals actually involve dopamine in some way. So I do think it makes a lot of sense that it's become this like pop culture phenomenon. Just because like if you're talking about some aspect of cognition, dopamine is very likely involved in that. Jesse, just a curiosity. What got you so interested in dopamine in anyway? Well, I have ADHD or I guess odd, the kids are saying and I was making a lot of content about it on Instagram for a while.
And I got really interested in critical ADHD studies, which is an emerging field that looks at it kind of more like socially politically. And I noticed that like a lot of ADHD influencers who were more like wellness adjacent kind of like self help, they had this tendency to talk about dopamine like it was a drug that your brain makes that like controls you.
And I'm also really interested in drug history and just drugs in general. So I recognize this as like a huge trope from 20th century anti drug propaganda. There's this tendency and pop culture to sort of reduce ADHD down to a chemical level. So people will say, you know, it's just a dopamine deficiency. And then the way that you treat ADHD is just learning how to manage your dopamine. And I thought this was really interesting because it's not really how I think about disability in general.
It's relational, it's political. The designer Sarah Hendren says that it's how your body meets the built world. But yeah, this oversimplification of dopamine has really taken over and I first noticed it in ADHD spaces. But now it's really like everywhere. Okay, so I feel like I'm learning for the first time that despite what TikTok says, despite what everybody says dopamine isn't just your brain's pleasure chemical. There's more to it than that.
It is not okay. And do neuroscientists know this because they haven't told me. Yeah, I mean, the neuroscientists, I think are pretty frustrated about it. And they have known for a really long time. They call it the dopamine pleasure hypothesis. It was introduced in 1980 by a Canadian scientist named Roy Wise. Not so wise, Roy.
He did revise the theory by the late 90s, he was like, no, actually, I don't think pleasure is directly related to the amount of dopamine in your brain. And then subsequent studies found that you don't actually need it to feel pleasure. You do need it to like want things. So now we're in this era of like wanting not liking. And that's how it's usually explained. The science word for that is incentive salience of basically just like you want something and you're going to go get it.
Yeah, from like everything I was reading, it has more to do with like reward like your brain pursuing reward rather than pleasure incentive rather than feeling good. Yeah. And the salience part of that is like what is important? Like what should you pay attention to? And so that's why it like plays a big role in learning will be like, hey, look at this thing. Go like pay attention to this thing. And then you like learn habits and just learn in general.
Okay, wait. So just to clarify, so dopamine is about wanting not about pleasure. And so when you don't have dopamine, you don't feel incentivized or it's harder to be incentivized to do things. That's like the current conceptualization of it. I would make a prediction though that like this is going to change because just looking at like the history of science and like dopamine in particular like it's always progressing and we're like learning new things. Yeah. So it's constantly being updated.
And I think like a big problem with this in pop culture is that people talk about it as if it's like we can know of this now. And this is like the final word on this thing. And so it's like some studies suggest or like we think. Yeah. We'll get more into this in a bit. But I think a lot of this has to do with FMR eyes and the way that neurotransmitters show light up in our brains in a way that makes people go like, well, that's cool. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Yeah, I also think that a lot of us just really like to have rational answers to the mysteries of our lives, especially when it's like about our pain and suffering. And in marketing, they talk about like pain points. That's like marketing 101. If you want to sell shit, you like, what's the pain point? And then they provide a solution to that.
So the idea that dopamine is problem in your life or that it's the thing that causes all the problems in your life. And you can fix that by just learning to manage it by doing like X, Y and Z. It's just a really useful sales tactic. 100%. So when we're trying to understand how dopamine entered the zeitgeist, we've got to understand like wellness and productivity influencer culture.
Because that's a big part of how it gets sort of marketed as the thing that is wrong with your brain that you can fix through these three easy steps. And to understand that, I think we also need to talk a little bit about the relationship between Silicon Valley and tech bro culture and practices like biohacking.
Because that's where a lot of this idea that you can like hack your own brain emerges from. So Marcel, I'm wondering if you could please read this paragraph from an extremely unsettling article in the Guardian about millionaire and billionaire biohackers, please. I'd do anything for you, Hannah.
Quote, Sarah's Fagway intends to live forever merging with robots and becoming an ultra human. If that goal sounds creepy, laughable or unrealistic, it's helpful to remember that it is one shared by many influential figures in Silicon Valley. Tesla's Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that humans need to become cyborgs to survive the inevitable robot uprising and hopes to usher in an era of transhumanism with his new brain computer interface company, NURLINK.
Harris, founder and former CEO of Google Ventures, the search giants venture capital arm went on to launch Calico an acronym for California life company, the sole aim of which is to solve death. In November, Sean Parker, the former Facebook president, described his vision of the future, thus, because I'm a billionaire, I'm going to have access to better health care. So I'm going to be like 160 and I'm going to be part of this class of immortal overlords.
As much as Fagway likes to think of himself as a rebel pioneer, he's an emblem of a far wider movement in the wealthy world he inhabits. End quote, wow, wow. Horrifying so that article is from 2018, which is the same year as the video that is generally linked to the rise of dopamine hacking. So Jesse, what can you tell us about the YouTube channel improvement pill and the viral video, how do you get your life back together dopamine fast.
Yeah, so improvement pill is a YouTuber that makes content for aspirational young men when you look at his required reading list is like how to inference and influence people and rich dad pull for dad, which are kind of like seminal texts in the neoliberal self help lit world. Yeah, seminal is I would normally veto that word, but it's very appropriate here for listeners that comes from the word semen.
He does claim to have invented dopamine fasting in the video, but I think that he was just kind of like having the same idea as other similar dudes around the same time. The idea that you can like reset your dopamine levels if you abstained from pleasure had been kind of floating around like self improvement message boards for a long time. And it was already a practice that these like high performing startup guys in Silicon Valley or into.
Okay, so one solid connection to tech bros absolutely to this does kind of remind me about all the myths that we used to I don't know people might still circulate them, but like I feel like when I was a teenager and learning about my body being able to experience pleasure there was a lot of like, oh, but if you have an orgasm using a vibrator you won't be able to have an orgasm with your penis partner or whatever and anyway sounds like the same that process.
As your is dangerous pleasure is dangerous and you should only be able to do it with another person otherwise you'll never be able to do that with another person because the only appropriate way to do that is with this particular person I digress let's go back to the dude bros there's a really good piece about this and a magazine from 2019 it's called are the tech bros who don't mean fast full of shit which like yes and no I would say title okay the classic answer they sort of like trace the origins.
Back to an ebook called a 48 dopamine fast by a Canadian guy who says that he wrote the book while he was living in Cambodia and drinking too much which like if you know anything about like expat in Southeast Asia culture like really tracks yeah and this is a common theme improvement pills also framing the dopamine fastest way he was like I was partying too much in college so I invented this ritual so I can get my shit back together.
And I love these as a word ritual I think that's like a keyword yeah a lot of what's appealing about dopamine fasting is this like virtual aspect of it. It's very similar to a static practices and like all kinds of religions but it's like a secular ritual for men who love science right dopamine fasting secular ritual for men who like science you should publish that book you're going to make so much funny.
No but like a lot of this wellness stuff is just self care but it has to be framed in this way for men so it's like hard and like action on looking at the science and doing with the science as but really it's just like you need a break you're over simulated your overwhelms you need a break you don't have to make up all this stuff about your neurotransmit.
It's a lot of us party to have heard in college do that yeah stop drinking for a week so it is like importantly it also is not what's happening when you take a break you're not dopamine fasting right like that's a misunderstanding of how dopamine works yeah no it's not really possible because you need it to move so.
If you didn't have any dopamine you would just be like stuff and that's what happens when like they've done experiments blocking dopamine fully and yeah like you just can't move it's also like Parkinson's all the tremors of Parkinson's are dopamine dysfunction.
Oh interesting yeah so there are different versions of this so improvement pill was really strict about it he was like you can't have any fun you can't listen to music you can't read books don't talk to your friends basically just like sit in a room and do not.
And in 2019 a less strict version of this one viral on LinkedIn by a psychologist named Dr Cameron Cepa and he is an executive psychologist is what he calls himself he coaches like CEOs in the Bay area he also runs a company called Maximus where he sells supplements that help men optimize their testosterone he tried to add some more like reason I guess rationality to the practice he was like
yes this is just a metaphor you can't actually fast from an endogenous brain chemical that you need to function it's just an exercise in stimulus control and he was like just focus on the stimuli that have a problem for you not like all stimuli in general because that's not possible.
I think I understand how dopamine fasting fits into bio hacking and why would get taken up by optimization influencers and especially tech rooms but does that make it psych I see I'd say no that makes it like a niche interest and from my reading and Jesse you're as established the expert here so feel free to disagree with me on this but I think the thing that takes dopamine from niche to mainstream is probably an alarm keys 20.
21 book dopamine nation finding balance in the age of indulgence because it's like a huge bestseller pop science book that really spreads like we see it getting reviewed and taken up a tons of mainstream media outlets. Now Jesse you have a whole newsletter summarizing and critiquing this book but I've taken the liberty of pasting the TLDR section from the end of that post here and I thought maybe you could read it and then we can just unpack it together.
What dopamine nation is a hedonic Calvinist manifesto that uses federally funded research on the neuroscience of drug addiction and behavioral economics to argue that pleasure is a limited resource that always carries a physiological price and that the way to treat addiction is to tighten social rules and become more vigilant in our own self management.
This is history of prohibitionist activism and experience as a medical professional who previously wrote a book describing some of her disabled patients as drug seeking malinger is informs the conservative world view of dopamine nation which is marked by a fear of deviance and seeks to normalize readers through scientific rationality and self help strategies less they become free writers on society.
This is a process of cultural anxieties about becoming soft and can be seen as an example of what sociologist Robert Crawford has argued about health practices becoming a way to manage a contradiction of capitalism the inner conflict between work and pleasure and. So I for one would like to spend some time talking about Lemke and her work as the medical director of Stanford addiction medicine and her links to the national institute on drug abuse and it stands on addiction.
Jesse, what can you tell us about doctor Anna Lemke. Yeah, so she is a psychiatrist and a professor at Stanford, which is in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco called palo Alto actually a couple of the patients she features in dopamine nation are Silicon Valley tech rose.
So I think that context is really important to understand because the book is sort of trying to diagnose all of society's problems and even like climate change she says at one point is caused by pleasure seeking heat and it's up.
But she's writing from a very particular class position and she's also drawing on a lot of research funded by the US national institute on drug abuse or needa and I don't say that to be like conspiratorial federal funding is like one of the main sources for medical research and drug development. So it's not surprising to me but it did give me somewhere to start looking to answer this psychites question so like very briefly like what is need up to.
Yeah, needa has considered addiction to be a chronic relapsing brain disease since at least the 1980s and in the 90s the US government declared the decade of the brain which was like basically just a public commitment to fund more neuroscience research and George for senior actually said explicitly in a speech in 1990 that he hoped this would help the government with their war on drugs.
So the hope being like maybe if we can find out what is going on in the brain that causes addiction we can develop some kind of like individual treatments for it and then win the war on drugs without having to change anything. So surely about society. Okay, so like this is what people mean when they talk about the social determinants of health right like if you focus only on individual treatment you ignore key systemic factors right yes.
So during the decade of the brain needa is putting out press releases their funding a bunch of research in 1995 one of these press releases says a cure for cocaine addiction is quote the biggest need in the country's battle against drugs and quote.
And they think that if they do more experiments with stimulants which act directly on dopamine in the brain they can figure out what's going on that causes addiction by 2000 but another press release that says basically we think addiction is caused by repeated spikes in dopamine that desensitized the brain to dopamine over time.
Which is interesting because it's like they're using these drugs that act directly on dopamine and then kind of facing the theory of addiction as a whole on that is not all drugs spike dopamine right. So we get this sort of oversized emphasis on dopamine in addiction even though it's a oversimplification yeah and then if you look at what happens in the press after that dopamine very quickly gets equated to a drug itself.
It's starting about dopamine hits and then the idea expands beyond drugs to behavior is like sex and eating falling in love. So okay fast forward to an olympia and the opioid crisis she is running the addiction medicine clinic at Stanford she also is on the board of physicians for responsible opioid prescribing which is an advocacy group that's done a lot of work to basically make opioids harder for pain patients.
So the car pain community is aware of her very much not fans there's a quote from a TED talk olympia did in 2017 that I think is a really good example of the major themes across her work. She said quote can we bring back narratives from 150 years ago people are resilient the body can heal itself pain is inevitable I can serve a useful purpose in our lives and quote. So we're all getting soft being to suffer more.
And I think it's really interesting to look at her first book drug dealer and D from 2016 she argued that the opioid crisis was caused by big pharma of course but also doctors who were like tonight.
That's about like narcissistic injuries and and start with she psychoanalyzes like why doctors were over prescribing sort of and she also says there's this culture of like quick fixes to people's problems and so fair she does say the opioid crisis was a symptom of a failing system but then at the end of the book she says the solution is just to train doctors to treat addiction better federally find addiction medicine fellowships like the one that she runs at Stanford.
And find some way for doctors to spend more time with their patients so they're not forced to just fall back on prescribing drugs but that's also never going to happen in a system of our health care is commodity and hospitals are for proper businesses because time is money you know so I think like what really frustrates me.
Well, I'm he's right because that she's sort of like gestures at systemic material problems but then she always ends up giving psychological or like otherwise individual solutions instead of like really focusing on the systemic problems yeah and it's so frustrating to see something that's so obviously systemic like people injure themselves at work they can't live if they're not working.
They don't have any protections to actually give them time to heal so of course they end up seeking out pharmaceutical solutions like the entire systems designed to incentivize that. So I keep coming back Jesse to something you wrote in your dopamine dispatches series quote if productivity is the soul of dopamine fasting drug addiction is the conceptual skeleton that holds the whole thing up and quote.
And we've talked in previous episodes for example our episode on us leisure with Anne Helen Peterson about productivity and optimization as 21st century at words but something we've never really dipped into before is our cultural conceptual framing of drug addiction particularly that profoundly individualizing impulse to make a diction like a function of brain chemistry rather than talking about structural.
So and you talk a little bit more about what we culturally in the west think about drug addiction. Yeah, I do think that optimization productivity are a big part of it because of this like neoliberal turn that happened in the 80s you know everything got privatized and our bodies are now like we're all little entrepreneurs of our own health.
But the idea of like addiction as a brain disease goes way back actually I've been reading a lot of drug historians to try to understand this and you know our modern conception of addiction as like a loss of control caused by substances is actually fairly new. It came around like the end of the 1800s the concept is a modern thing and the temperance movement is kind of like the most famous example from this period in America.
Some people say that they viewed alcoholism as a personal moral failing and they did but they also saw it as like a disease that was caused by alcohol still the moral and the medical sort of coexisted there and the historian Nancy Campbell actually has a book about drug abuse research in the US called discovering addiction and she traces the chronic relapsing brain disease frame back to the 1930s when the US government. And actually funded what they called narcotic farms what where they would.
Block drug users up and like rehabilitate them but really they were using them for research. And Campbell has this quote from FDR who wrote in a 1933 letter saying he was really stoked to the government was able to fund these narcotic farms so that what the terms of the opium habits will be restored to usefulness and quote usefulness. I love a sinisterly capitalist way to talk about humans.
Yeah usefulness is definitely like the key word there and I think everyone should hold on their minds because we're going to come back to it. We really are and we're going to talk a lot more about capitalism and its role in all of these conceptions but I've one last little piece of context that I want to add in here just to you know flesh out our why this why now.
For dopamine so I was reading more and more about the mainstreaming of neuroscience and I found myself wanting like a little bit about why that why now like how did neuroscience get so mainstream in general. And in the process of trying to understand that I found a 2012 piece in the New Yorker by NYU cognitive science professor Gary Marcus called neuroscience fiction.
So this is 2012 this is before dopamine fasting goes mainstream but obviously after the decade of the brain and it turns out that sort of around 2012 is another moment of cultural concern over the widespread over simplification of neuroscience. There's like a whole sort of group of people who identify as neuro skeptics and are like really critical of the way neuroscience is becoming this sort of simplistic explainer for everything about humans.
And Dr. Marcus's argument is that it has a lot to do with the rise of FMR eyes and their ability to make very pretty pictures of brains lighting up when we do different things. And those pictures he argues quote lulled people into a false sense of comprehension and quote so Marcel would you read a little bit more from Marcus for us I sure will quote as the philosopher Alvin know a wrote.
It is easy to overlook the fact that images made by FMR eye and PET are not actually pictures of the brain in action and quote with an quote the quote continues instead brain images are elaborate reconstructions that depend on complex mathematical assumptions that can as one study earlier this year showed sometimes yield slightly different results when analyzed on different types of computer.
And quote okay hold on wait whoa okay whoa FMR eyes are not a picture of your brain they're like an artist's rendering of your brain based on mathematical calculations. Yeah it's like a mass interpretation.
Okay but math very famously has like two plus two always equals four and what Gary Marcus is saying is that different computers will turn out different images and so people are mistaking FMR eyes for precise images of the brain but they're actually just representations they're not two plus two equals four they're like a vibe.
Yeah and the colors also I've read like having really bright colors makes it look like there's really big differences but the math is like super super tiny numbers actually they just use bright colors so you can see it better but it gives a solution like oh there's something really big happening here like look at this lighting up the dopamine in your brain right we all hear that light stuff in your brain nothing light related is happening they are using colors to indicate.
The numbers that they are finding and those numbers as is the case for any complex experiments those numbers shift depending on how you interpret them so it's surely interpretive also some of the neuroscientists I read are like actually we probably just are currently putting way too much stock in neurotransmitters in general because we can quote unquote see them and that actually neurons are the important thing but we can see that.
We have no way of seeing neurons so we can't talk about what they're up to so we're just going to talk about neurotransmitters as we can measure them and we fucking love things we can measure well that's a really good point about how like technology has a huge influence on science and then also how what we believe about ourselves because we're able to look at these things because
we're not going to be able to see the same technology is yeah there's a mean it's like the ultimate truth it's just what we can do exactly and while lots of neuroscientists have been trying to rain in these misunderstandings the misunderstandings of continued to escalate fueled by flashy media headlines which you know have a tendency to really oversimplify actual scientific findings and then like the dubious public scholarship of neuroscientists like Lemke and Andrew Huberman.
So riddle me this folks what does a fixation on the perfect ability of the body and insistence that health is an individual problem and responsibility divorced from social factors the fetishization of scientific knowledge as objective and transparent and dismissal of those who are inadequately productive as free riders on society having common. Okay I'm not even going to guess because I believe in my heart that you're going to tell us in the next segment I'm going to try.
And this is it this is the next segment it's called the theory we need and Hannah I think we need some theory.
I couldn't agree more so it's important to me to note that all of the theory that I have drawn in here came via my close and extensive reading of Jesse's work on dopamine addiction and ableism so even when I am taking the lead it's truly a deeply collaborative segment I love collaboration me too and why don't we start off in a collaborative spirit with you telling me what you remember about Protestant work ethic.
Okay so what I think I understand about the Protestant work ethic is that as long as you work hard and seek to do good you will be rewarded after death by going to heaven. So it doesn't really matter how hard life is because life is just one stop along the way to the incredible here after but the only way you can get to the incredible here after is if you like really pull up those bootstraps and just suck it up and fucking do it.
Okay I'm going to clarify the theology and then Jesse I'm going to hand it over to you to historicize the the author so theologically what's really key about how the is the form of Protestantism that the Protestant work ethic is referring to this is a concept that comes from German sociologist named Max I call him Max Weber because I am English.
So what's really key about Calvinism is this belief in predestination so as a like way of rejecting pathosism and the model of being able to buy your way into heaven essentially via indulgences the Calvinists are like no you can't buy your way into heaven actually nothing you do on earth and change God's mind about whether or not you are saved God has already decided in advance who is saved and who is saved.
And who is not and so if you are one of the saved and you believe you are one of the saved it is your job on earth to act as though you are already saved and so you are constantly trying to perform being good while also doing the sort of intense inward self evaluation looking for signs that you are saved.
So like if you are lazy if you don't feel like working that is a sign coming from within you indicating that you are not a recipient of God's grace because if you are a recipient of God's grace you would love working hard.
And so we get the rise of autobiographical traditions we get the rise of this kind of like self evaluation as part of a spiritual tradition and we get this very strong idea that liking work and not liking sinful pleasurable things is a sign that you are an inherently an intrinsically good person. And max Weber is like hey that got along really well with capitalism.
Yeah and also like your success in business was supposedly like a sign that you are on the list to get into heaven if you like we're wealthy and made a bunch of money. And American entrepreneurs like an industrialists really take this up to be like yeah actually if my business is successful it means that God chose me so the richer I am the more chosen I am.
And the spirit of capitalism which like everybody learns in sociology 101 I read I didn't take that but maybe and he comes actually from a Protestant family in Germany a wealthy Protestant family and he actually was trying to provide an alternative theory to Marx where Marx was like this is where capitalism came from he was focusing mostly on like
economic stuff and Weber was like well Marx didn't focus on the cultural and so he was more of an idealist he was like let's look at the ideas first not the like material conditions.
And there's this book called Weber sociologist of empire that's really good by Karen Allen and he writes that they bear quote leaves out the brutal role of force and accumulating capital and imposing new disciplines on labor and it's objecting the colonies to the economic needs of the metropolitan countries and quote so criticisms to keep in mind about the bear he wasn't wrong to connect Protestant values with capitalism.
Protestants are very good business people but he was wrong to attribute capitalism's origins like entirely to those ideas. Yeah so he's both like getting at something cultural that really sort of contributes to capitalism and also there's kind of this idea of like wow everybody just spontaneously embraced capitalism because of their Calvinist ideology as though like the rise of capitalism didn't involve the world.
And it was and didn't involve a lot of violence. Yeah I know we're pressed for time but is it okay for me to ask what he don't Calvinism is please. Yes so that's a term I got from a 1997 paper by George S. Coobe who was for a time the director of the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism and he also appears in the bibliography of dopamine nation so I was kind of like digging through that to see like you know what are these influences.
And Hedonic is just like a big word for something that has to do with pleasure so Coobe thought pleasure was a limited resource in the brain that you could use up if you weren't careful. And so in his paper he calls it he don't it Calvinism like it's a biological Calvinism that's like a fact about the human brain.
Yeah and I was really interested in that because I've found Lemke did like a bunch of interviews with pastors Christian pastors loved dopamine nation and in this one interview I found she tells this pastor like you know neuroscience is confirming now what the Bible has been teaching us about pleasure all along. Yeah which is like it shows us that actually pleasure is really bad for you just like the Bible says.
Yeah but couldn't you also just like be seeing your own morals in that science shocking as well absolutely not science is objective and neutral. So the Protestant work ethic and it's you know belief that the desire to work hard is a sign of grace and will be rewarded in this life with wealth and happiness and in the next with salvation has obviously taken a deep hold in the western psyche like lots of people believe without understanding the history or I'm not sure.
And the history or ideological underpinnings that work is inherently virtuous and that a desire not to work hard or worse yet an inability to work hard is a moral failing. People really believe this like really deeply and this belief that people hold deeply and often uncritically is also one that slides very quickly and easily into eugenics.
The idea that humans can be perfected by cleansing the gene pool Hannah surely you will walk us through the connection between the Protestant work ethic and eugenics. I will try and I will attempt to do so via an excellent book also recommended by Jesse in their newsletter called health communism a surplus manifesto.
I was delighted to come across this book which is by Beatrice Adler Bolton and already veer can't who are the co hosts of a podcast called death panel which friend of the podcast in a shaman has recommended to me many times but I don't listen to smart podcasts I listen to goofy podcasts but I will read the smart book and I did so.
Their book brings together critiques of how capitalism frames health with their call for as the title says something that they are conceiving of as health communism and what that entails is a radical transformation of how we think about health as a site of individual striving that can never be fully achieved because the logics of capitalism demand a constant striving for more so you're never healthy enough you always have to be improving yourself.
So under Calvinism it's not enough to be a billionaire you also have to be immortal in order to prove that you are saved and will go to heaven. Yeah but if you are really I mean you know you never have to go to heaven if you can live forever in your perfect society that you build with your cyber body.
So one of the most interesting things that health communism articulates for me is how capitalist states like for example the US and at once pride themselves on their technological advancements in fields like pharmaceutical medicine while also readily subscribing to eugenicist practices.
So it's like if you're so technologically advanced shouldn't you be using your fancy medicines to make people healthier so you have more workers to contribute to the economy like then why is it a problem if people need or want drugs wouldn't that be fine if it made the more productive.
So Adler Bolton and veer can't address this seeming tension by distinguishing between capitalism's treatment of workers and what they call surplus populations and treating those as distinct categories Jesse could you read this definition of the surplus population for us sure.
Quote the surplus or surplus populations can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.
It is a fluid and uncertainifiable population who in fact should not be rigidly defined for reasons we discuss below crucially this definition also elides traditional left conceptions of the working class or the worker as we will describe at length throughout the health communism the idea that the worker is not a part of the surplus populations yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus is one of the central social constructions we'll did in support.
So you work hard to maintain your status as a worker lest you slide into the category of the surplus who are no longer useful to capitalism and thus no longer worth being allowed to live being kept alive having access to life.
So no longer worth the state spending any money keeping you alive so think of the distinction for example made in North America at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns between essential workers who literally workers and like need to be kept alive because they're producing useful labor for the state.
And that category of people with pre-existing conditions like the elderly or the chronically ill so one group it's worthwhile for the state to keep alive because they're performing a useful economic function well the other was tacitly categorized as disposable according to the eugenicist logics of public health policy they weren't producing anything useful so it was not economically worth it for the state to try to keep them alive.
And politicians actually said things like well the people who are most affected are the elderly as though they don't have fucking grandmothers like horrifying statements. So the catch those that like the surplus is also not like exempt from generating capital so the surplus population is still made profitable regardless of the fact that they don't have like labor power in the book they coin is term extractive abandonment.
Which describes how the state creates markets around the surplus population so like nursing homes for the elderly long term care facilities prisons all very profitable enterprises that rely on this surplus population at the center they call it quote pathologizing with one hand while generating capital with the other end quote and they didn't like explicitly right about COVID in the book because they said that it was just
like kind of a continuation of the status quo it wasn't really anything new so in a nutshell the surplus is framed as a burden on the workers and then the conversation kind of becomes like what does this population deserve because they're not working they're just like taking your heart and tax money you know and like malingerers yeah like you don't want to be a burden like those people so you better like work hard on your house you better get into like cold plunging and
like whatever you better make sure like you've done everything you can to deserve your health care and like your housing you're like clean air even in 2020 a lot of the anti backs wellness influencers nilby Klein talks about this and doppelganger they were putting out video like I don't get back to you because I work hard on my house like I'll be fine you know implying that people who were getting sick and dying were they just hadn't worked hard enough to deserve to live right.
I am famously cold hearted and I feel like if I am needing a moment to just like take a pause and digest this information probably a lot of our much kinder gentler listeners out there are probably also maybe at this point being like this is more than I signed up for in this episode about dopamine or you guys it was actually about eugenics so I just want to name like hey hey hey pals you need to take a little break you go
right ahead because we're going to have to plow through and your feelings are legitimate and valid your lead to step away it's okay and with that pause there's simply no time so how do we tie in drugs okay is it just about people living with addiction not being productive enough because like earlier you were talking about ban and cocaine but I know a lot of tech
bros use a lot of cocaine so like what's there's got to be some eugenics in year two right. Oh yeah always so it's attention I find really fascinating Adler Bolton and Vera can't explain that the historical role of pharmaceutical companies especially in the US has been to make people productive for the sake of capitalism so the pharmaceutical advancement of the US was literally framed by politicians during the Cold War as a way of fighting
against the global spread of communism so health like at a population level like people in capitalist countries live longer is taken as a sign of capitalism success while health at an individual level becomes a sign of individual success under the logics of capitalism so capitalism can take responsibility for how well the population is doing but you
individually are responsible for how well you're doing because if you're motivated to do well to take care of yourself it's because capitalism motivated you to do so but the state control of health via the pharmaceutical industry really hinged on the state controlling access to drugs through the categorization of drugs as either listed or illicit so the ones that you are allowed to use to become a better more productive worker and a sign of capitalism
thriving and the ones that are illegal and are a sign of moral failing and particularly those illegal drugs were it during the Cold War being framed as a specifically communist threat to capitalist success I absolutely love the idea of some drugs being communist Marcel would you please read this longish excerpt from health communism about drug use?
Yes quote the anti communist hysteria in the United States mobilized explicitly toward the designation of illicit drugs as a social and political menace would quickly lead to pathologization and explicit calls for the extractive abandonment of drug users and their demarcation as surplus this pathologization was used to great effect to police and incarcerate members of the surplus populations at a time when anti colonial anti racist and leftist sentiment was high in these communities
drug use was invoked as an inherent pathology in language that recalls the rhetoric mobilized against the ill the disabled the mad and the poppers of prior centuries so here within the quote we're quoting historians Susanna rice addiction then is a disease of high social contagion that not only may produce criminality but also tends to attack those persons whose resistance to anti social activity is for a multitude of reasons notoriously low
and a quote within the quote as rice notes this rhetoric and the escalation of disciplinary control over newly illicit drugs dramatically escalated policing through the 1950s as well as incarceration marking a significant development in the shape of contemporary American racial capitalism the bogs act of 1951 for example was an early statute passed in a wave of legislative activity
defining carceral preferences toward illicit drug use the bogs act established the first mandatory minimum sentencing which persists to this day as a principle tool of state subjection fueling mass incarceration and quote holy shit yeah so inventing a category of illegal drugs becomes a major state technology for incarcerating potentially resistant populations there's also famously like what a Nixon aid admitted that the war on drugs was just about like policing black communities and communists
yeah yeah 100% yeah 100% so it's all like this you know it's eugenicist it's capitalist and it's entangled in anti black racism in particular in colonialism in ableism all these things the way that we treat drugs and addiction and health is very broken so yeah framing some drugs as illicit became another way the state could control the surplus also justifying mass incarceration as a way of like protecting the rest of society which brings us to another question
how does a neurotransmitter that your brain makes like dopamine start to get framed as an illicit drug responsible for all of our contemporary social laws from horn and masturbation addictions to chronic depression jazzy thank you so much for setting me up for what's going to be a longish thesis hey Marcel hey should we tell our listeners about the big trip we have coming up
Hannah I think we have to mostly because we're taking this trip so that we can hang out with our listeners so we should we should probably tell them about it yeah absolutely okay but my understanding was the trip was also to celebrate my book of course of course and who better to celebrate your book with than our listeners great point okay everybody we are going to be in the stunning city of Chicago Illinois on October 11th at women and children first bookstore
that sounds like a gay bookstore it is we've already seen so many Chicago listeners comment that this bookstore is the perfect place for me to be joined by you Marcel in conversation about my book clever girl well right because your book is about the monstrous lady dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic
pretty gay listeners we want to see you there book your flight plan your drive start your walk and meet us in Chicago on October 11th at women and children first bookstore that's to help you remember it's the opposite of who gets eaten in Jurassic Park that does help me remember it's going to be so fun coach and Zoe and Gabby will also be there I will probably cry I will also cry come cry with us
yeah crying is gay in our final segment in this essay I will Hannah will bring together the material conditions of our objective study and our theoretical framework to articulate a thesis statement that at a glance
it's going to require some unpacking you better believe it capitalism has a complex ideological relationship to drugs and health on the one hand advanced pharmaceutical breakthroughs have long been treated as a marker of capitalism's superiority to communism a kind of lifespan based human race unfolding alongside the space race as the US and the USSR
and the world has been settled through the cold war to see whose ideology would win out at the same time reliance on drugs is framed as a failure within the logics of capitalism especially neoliberal capitalism in which perfect health is both a demand and an impossible goal kept constantly out of reach
biohackers and anti drug self improvement influencers then are two sides of the same coin both arguing for the perfect ability of the human body under the logics of capitalism both locating the responsibility for health within the individual and positioning drugs as a technology of personal management and optimization
if drugs equal technological advancement equals capitalist success then problems with drugs addiction in particular must be an individual's failing the perfect capitalist subject is master of both themselves and their environment technologies included and there at cultural fixation over dopamine as a drug your brain produces that some people are inherently biologically more likely to crave is about distinguishing yourself as someone who can control drugs even the ones your own body produces
entangled in this anxiety about individualism and technological advancement are the deep Calvinist logics of industrial capitalism as expressed through self improvement and wellness culture the theological premise of predestination as max Weber explains is easily absorbed by industrial capitalism into a notion that the desire to work hard is a sign you are already saved within the Calvinist and capitalist logics of a set of system and predeterminism
anything pleasurable that stands in the way of perfect productivity is suspicious the need for sleep non reproductive sex idleness and pleasure all become boogie men of capitalist damnation impulses that must be rooted out and destroyed
in contemporary rising brine discourse the inward examination central to Calvinism as extended to an absurd degree through tracking technologies and the temptingly bright colors of FMR eyes that seemed to offer at last a fully objective way to measure what we're actually made of in this essay I will
say it this is too much for my brain so I come back to where did I encounter these discourses and why was I convinced by them because I have absolutely heard the like oh the ADHD brain doesn't produce enough dopamine and so people with ADHD can't like actually motivate ourselves to do things if they don't produce dopamine
and so like we're easily distracted we're distracted by bright colors like people I'm saying we I have never been diagnosed with a goddamn thing self diagnosis counts and you know this idea that for example people with ADHD are more likely to develop a sugar addiction because we're like looking for easy external sources of dopamine right and so it's like one that's not how dopamine works at all
just got to throw that out but like lots of these wellness influencers are like yeah I know this isn't actually how dopamine works but it's a useful shorthand for something I believe to be true which is that any failures of productivity are your own brains fault and need to be fixed by you
and that discourse is one that has worked really effectively on me personally for sure like productivity discourse and I need to do some of this like historicizing and unpacking to get at why it's like actually a deeply troubling idea I call it a mythos because it is like a grand narrative and I think some of it also is like a lot of people are not really as religious now as like historically we have been but we still need myths so you know it's like a rational science myth
yeah and it ties a lot of stuff together and also kind of like obscures a lot of things all of this like history and all of these politics yeah and part of the work this myth does is provide a way for individuals to make themselves safe from the horrors of capitalism that we can't help but see unfolding around us and so it becomes a like oh how do I keep myself from becoming part of the surplus like that is my right because like we are workers
so how do we ensure that we never slide into the surplus here are a set of practices you can use that will keep you safe from this terrible fate and that also has like a deeply Christian logic to it like be careful you might end up in hell it's just that hell now is on earth and it's invented by capitalism
I think one of the things that this has me thinking about is the number of people with ADHD diagnoses constantly increasing right and along with all of these like pop science ways to manage and navigate your ADHD and stuff if so many people are neuro divergent what's neuro normative on the one unit feels like we're getting further and further away from a clear sense of who and what counts as neuro normative
but without actually changing our cultural narratives about neuro normativity like I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and for us to be like actually there is no such thing as neuro normative there are a certain set of neuro needs and those neuro needs have happened to influence the economic system the social system that we all live with
and so we've started calling those normal and then everything that deviates from that we call divergent but that doesn't seem to be the discourse right the discourse is always like oh well now we need to think about why all these people are neuro divergent why do we have so many people with ADHD instead of like we've created the system that only a few people are able to thrive in
and we're just starting to recognize all of the ways that everybody else is struggling but we're pathologizing that struggle instead of recognizing it as an inherently oppressive system yeah you know it's the social theory of disability right it's only a problem for somebody not to be able to use stairs if you put fear
in front of every building like you've created yes a barrier to access so it's this like we need a language of aberration from the neuro typical to explain why like almost nobody can achieve according to the logics of like capitalism
there's a really good book also I will recommend called Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman and they talk about how capitalism is getting more over stimulating all the time so like more more people are becoming like less able to deal with that and becoming like disabled
and I think that self control is like a huge part of all of this because it's like what's the neuro typical is like if you can adequately control yourself so like you know you can like do all these things in moderation you can like filter out all the stimuli and you can also be like a flexible worker so like you can't like need too much routine because now the economy is just kind of like all over the place and you know every job application is like we need a flexible reliant worker
who's always in a good mood yeah neuro typical is this ideal that I don't think most of us can need no you know I think a lot about the need to pursue diagnosis in the first place is attached like according to a lot of even policies in Canada in the US is attached to your ability to work a full time job so like you're not disabled if you can work a full time job
it doesn't matter what's going on with your brain as long as you are still able to produce for capitalism it's if and when you can't that it's like oh you're a problem now let's figure out how to fix you so you can get back to being productive
and that's like a logic I think a lot of us have just have just internalized you brought up the social model of disability and I feel like I used to be very like oh it's all social like you know let's stop talking about the medical model like it's not it doesn't have anything to do with biology
but I now like don't really think that they're totally at odds and I don't think the problem is whether it's like biology or social because it is both and I think about this quote from Mark Fisher where he was talking about serotonin because like before dopamine it was serotonin that was the neurotransmitter that was talking about and he says like paraphrasing but he says like even if serotonin
low serotonin does cause depression then we have to ask like why do all these people have low serotonin and that's like a political and a social question yeah in the same way that like we have to ask like why are so many people in so much pain that they need to pursue pain management
why are so many people so totally overwhelmed and distracted that they feel you know unable to get anything done the insistence at the end of the day that it must be you you are bad something about you specifically is bad is a very useful myth for capitalism professor is having some difficulty at the outset of our episode because I have a really complicated relationship to big pharma because when like we know big pharma exists like big
pharma is it's an industry designed to make money it's like drugs cost money and they make money and these are medications that people need but also over prescribing to make money is also a real thing and so it's sort of like trying to train myself out of the kind of binaries that are I think inherent in this like Calvinist worldview right that like well big pharma is bad because all drugs are bad and if you need drugs then you are bad
but like some of these drugs literally save people's lives yeah I don't know and it is I feel like on like last is we make fun of the big pharma because it's like such a conspiracy on the right now like oh big pharma like I made that joke about like government medicine or whatever but like it is a problem you know like there are lots of things that we need to critique about big pharma but that's why I love health
and they focus on like how the industry like globally changes the way that states work like that whole chapter they talk about how like the industry sort of forced the American government to like go into other states other like countries and like privatize their health insurance and all this kind of stuff yeah it's a really big part of the argument in health
communism is like that big pharma becomes a major part of how the US gains global control over the like medical industry and like we really saw that during the pandemic around the development of vaccines and this is again a point that Naomi Klein makes double ganger which coaches teased me for quoting too much but she makes this point that like we got like people on the left in North America got really fixated on countering vaccine resistance and the sort of eugenicist logics of anti-vaxxers
and that actually the more productive Marxist focus should have been on global vaccine access like we should have been protesting the fact that globally people were not getting vaccines and the reason they weren't getting vaccines is because pharmaceutical companies developed them and then owned the patents to them
and like it should be illegal to own the patent to a life saving vaccine absolutely yeah I think that's the real material problem is like why can't we afford these and yeah have the drugs that we need and the answer is so often capital is 99.9 times one of a hundred got 99 problems and capitalism is most of them
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A video podcast about sci-fi fantasy and the radical power of imagining otherwise. Again, you can find out about all of our shows at owichplease.ca. We have an excellent newsletter at owichplease.substac.com and an even better Patreon at patreon.com. Slash owichplease and of course we are on Instagram X and threads at owichplease and on tiktok at owichpleasepod. Dusty, where can people find out more about your work?
They can subscribe to my newsletter at sluggish.xpz and I also just started making video essays on YouTube. You can find me there as slugtown and I'm also on tiktok as slugtown. Slugtown is so good. Thanks to autosindicate for these of our theme song Shopping Mall and of course thanks to the whole witchplease productions team our digital content coordinator Gabi Iori, our social media manager and marketing designers Zoe Mechz, our sound engineer at Malika Gumpankum,
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You make the show possible our enormous gratitude goes out to Rachel H Jordan H KDS Valerie M Stephanie D L clear S and Jessica W. We'll be back next episode to tackle a whole new piece of pop culture through a whole new theoretical lens but until then later neurotransmitterators. Hey Marcel. Hey. Should we tell our listeners about the big trip we have coming up? Hannah I think we have to. Mostly because we're taking this trip so that we can hang out with our listeners.
So we should probably tell them about it. Yeah absolutely. Okay but my understanding was the trip was also to celebrate my book. Of course of course and who better to celebrate your book with than our listeners. Great point. Okay everybody we are going to be in the stunning city of Chicago Illinois on October 11th at women and children first bookstore.
That sounds like a gay bookstore. It is. We've already seen so many Chicago listeners comment that this bookstore is the perfect place for me to be joined by you Marcel in conversation about my book clever girl. Right because your book is about the monstrous lady dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic. Pretty gay listeners. We want to see you there. Book your flight. Plan your drive. Start your walk and meet us in Chicago on October 11th at women and children first bookstore.
That's to help you remember it's the opposite of who gets eaten in Jurassic Park. That does help me remember. It's going to be so fun. Coach and Zoe and Gabby will also be there. I will probably cry. I will also cry. Come cry with us. Yay. Yay. Crying is gay.