The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han argues that Western societies have undergone a major transformation in recent decades, a once-in-an-epoch shift has given rise to nothing less than a new kind of human being. This New Capitalist Person, both blessed and burdened by freedom, conceives of their own life, not as a struggle or a mission, but as a project. They are middle managers of themselves, constantly tracking personal metrics and conducting performance reviews. They launch into this process of self-finessing automatically and compulsively from an early age, with no need for external coercion (only “support” and “guidance”). The process never ends. Well, until it does.

In Han’s telling, we long ago moved away from “the disciplinary society” described by Foucault. We are now living under a new kind of regime that he calls “the achievement society.”

As the name suggests, disciplinary societies are stern, pious, varyingly repressive, and full of overbearing institutions like prisons, hospitals, and the military. The laws are inscribed in stone and may god have mercy upon he who breaks them. The prevailing command is a negative one: thou shalt not!

Achievement societies are more permissive, relativistic, and open-minded. Individuals reign supreme, and so do the fitness studios, shopping malls, and therapist’s offices that help them fulfill their personal goals. The prevailing command is decidedly positive: yes we can!

Han calls the inhabitants of his two systems “obedience-subjects” and “achievement-subjects, respectively. Let’s just call them obeyers and achievers. Obeyers accentuate order, obligation, and rule-following. Achievers strive for freedom, self-management, and being the best possible version of themselves. Because of these differences in emphasis, the two regimes produce distinct ideas about success and even more distinct failure modes.

Han is especially interested in these failure modes. Much of the book is dedicated to the sicknesses that regimes like these inevitably produce.

In the disciplinary society, the exemplary pathologies are criminality and madness (i.e. deviation is measured against commonly accepted social norms). In the achievement society, they are depression, ADHD, and burnout (i.e. deviation is measured against an idealized self). Parents living in the former society worry their kid will become a lunatic delinquent who ends up behind bars. Parents living in the latter worry their kid will become a depressed loser who ends up never doing anything.

Why do achievement societies produce so many burned-out depressives who struggle to motivate themselves? Because the tyrannical voice (“the sneer of cold command”, as per Shelley) hasn’t gone away. Achievers have simply been tricked, under the guise of an endless project of self-actualization, into claiming the voice as their own. To adapt one of

There is no need to send anybody to Siberia in such a society because each of us carries a little labor camp around inside us:

This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. People who suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, or burnout syndrome develop the symptoms displayed by the Muselmänner in concentration camps. Muselmänner are emaciated prisoners lacking all vigor who, like people with acute depression, have become entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards. One cannot help but suspect that the late-modern animal laborans with neuronal disturbances would have been a Muselmann, too—albeit well fed and probably obese.

Achievers are essentially locked in a forever war with their own egos, and burnout is what happens when that war becomes too exhausting to carry on. Not having the energy to continue, the dispossessed achiever draws the blinds, develops unhealthy eating and sleeping habits, and sinks into a miserable animal-like state until something, external or internal, comes along to free them.

Han’s focus on disease gets more complicated. Our regime doesn’t only produce its own representative pathologies. It also has its own pathological paradigm. The past century, you see, was an “immunological age”, dominated by clear distinctions between "inside" and "outside," "self" and "other." This paradigm was particularly evident during the Cold War, with its militaristic and apocalyptic conceptions of geopolitics, culture, and everyday life. A society that thinks of itself in immunological terms requires a strong conception of “the Other”, which in this context pretty much means a clearly defined enemy driven by notably foreign values. If I understand him right, Han argues that the notion of "the Other" – so crucial to a disciplinary society – is slowly melting away in our current, globalised, post-Cold War era. This disappearance of foreignness leads to a focus on threats from within, which are not understood immunologically but rather as “neuronal” phenomena deeply embedded within the system and thus much harder to identify. The typical response to a neuronal disorder is not rigorous defensive action but passive self-hating resignation.

What is Han getting at here? It seems he’s saying that, in an age of slippery definitions, the very distinction between health and illness is under threat. There is no vaccine you can take to inoculate yourself against depression. There is no cure at all, only a continual and expensive process of management. The disorder, like narcissism and BPD (which Han also mentions), is so utterly woven into the social and spiritual lives of the afflicted, that we might do better to stop thinking about them as diseases of the mind and instead consider them as diseases of the self. Well, I guess we already have, which is what talk therapy is for. But the key thing about the achievement society is that it places a historically unprecedented and often crushingly earnest emphasis on the self. It makes the self the most real, the most riveting thing about an individual, more real than their body, their mind, and certainly more real than the larger community and social world they inhabit. The result is a society of individuals who feel constantly frustrated, inadequate, and unhappy, mainly because they are “equipped with an ego just short of bursting.”

Still, I’m not sure how convinced I am about the whole immunology argument. You can hardly find a more archetypically “immunological” historical event than 9/11 and its aftermath, which happened a decade after Han locates the immunological-to-neuronal transition. The main features are there: an external enemy with alien values attacks a self-described healthy system, and that system in turn reacts with triumphalist rhetoric (even many liberals found themselves chanting “USA! USA!” after Bin Laden was killed) and decisive violent action (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).

Arguably, COVID-19 also follows this logic. An exotic threat was identified (from nature this time), swift society-wide action was taken, and a new form of triumphalism took hold, where the disease was cast as the main villain, and public health systems and frontline workers upheld as heroes. That humanity was also actually, literally, dealing with a viral pathogen surely further undermines Han’s case here.

Of course, these two events were more complicated than all that. Plenty of prominent people blamed the US itself for 9/11, which in Han’s terms seems more like a neuronal than immunological thing to do. Similarly, the whole “humanity vs. the virus” thing really only lasted for the first few months of the pandemic. After that, most of the conflict was ideological: “racism is the real pandemic”, the Canadian trucker protests, vaxxers vs. anti-vaxxers, and so on. Again, these look more neuronal than immunological. They are the kinds of things that emerge when society hates itself, but can’t decide exactly where the source of its hatred lies, so instead of actively rooting it out, it resigns itself to perpetual moping and bickering. That said, at the state level, both events showed that we are still capable of taking brutal and spectacular action to defend ourselves from external threats.

I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t understand some crucial aspect of Han’s distinction between “immunological” and “neuronal”. But if it can’t shed light on the two most globally consequential events of my lifetime, then it doesn’t strike me as a particularly illuminating way to think about the world. The whole society/disease paradigm thing doesn’t even explain much when the thing that needs explaining is how a society responds to a widespread disease. So, I’m marking Han a D minus for this theory. The only reason I’m not failing him is because I’m pretty sure there’s some crucial element of the theory that I’m too dense or stupid to figure out.

Thankfully, though, the core of the book is not a hamfisted application of epidemiological metaphors to complex sociohistorical events. Rather, it’s a careful description of the weird psychic effects that emerge when millions of people live under a regime compelling them to be happy and successful at all times. Let’s get into that part.

III

Han isn’t really arguing that depression and ADHD and burnout syndrome are more pervasive today than they were in the past, though every study indicates that they are. He’s saying that the depressed subject is the most characteristic casualty of this kind of society.

In the same way that Foucault suggested that the madmen of the disciplinary society were really just victims of barbarous state power, Han is sort of casting depressives and losers as the tragic heroes of our social order – the ones who are most compellingly bedeviled by its confusing and harmful directives. Their lives are defined by refusal, and they suffer for it. They refuse to go make something of themselves. They refuse to be successful and happy. They refuse to be a well-integrated capitalist subject. What do they do instead? They do the one thing that the achievement society has no trouble castigating: nothing at all. As a result, most of them wake up each morning feeling like living corpses and many of them, succumbing to the worst version of this feeling, turn themselves into actual corpses.

Han crystallizes the achiever’s dilemma:

The late-modern achievement-subject does not pursue works of duty. Its maxims are not obedience, law, and the fulfillment of obligation, but rather freedom, pleasure, and inclination… The dialectic of freedom means developing new constraints. Freedom from the Other switches into narcissistic self-relation, which occasions many of the psychic disturbances afflicting today’s achievement-subject.

This blog is frequented by experts in psychology, psychiatry, and medicine, and no doubt many of you will take issue with a sociological interpretation such as Han’s. I think we can discard some of the more brazen assertions and ornate metaphors in the book without dismissing its fundamental value as a sensitive and occasionally brilliant attempt to account for the rise of modern diseases of the self.