"Mark Fisher points to a phenomenon called magical voluntarism that he identifies as one of the dominant ideological apparatus of capitalist realism. In the interview Fisher is quoted as defining magical voluntarism as the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be.

This is the American Dream in a nutshell, the crystallised core of aspirational models of subjectivation that define us as strivers. We see messages issuing the schema of meritocratic subjectivity everywhere around us but nowhere are they condensed to their skeletal frame than in military recruitment drives. For years the British Army has issued the injunction: be the best. It never answers the question of what it is that one is supposed to be the best at. That is precisely why it is the purest expression of a thousand adverts, job descriptions, television programmes. The entire plane of the media, a plane that wraps itself around its recipients, burrows itself inside them, is a nexus of phantasies that repeat this same injunction: want the best, be the best, you deserve the best.

If army recruitment drives are the purest schematic form of inducement into magical voluntarism then the limit-case is the popular phenomenon of ‘The Secret’. In the interview Fisher talks about how magical voluntarism becomes the belief that everything, including the material universe itself, is subject to individual will.

This is exactly what The Secret is all about. The book posits a natural law called the law of attraction that is summed up in the credo that reality is a product of thought. This law is instrumentalised in order to teach the reader/viewer that if they think about what they want hard enough, for instance via visualisation, then they will receive it. If you add feeling to the mix then your transmission to the universe gets signal boosted. The reason all this is so isn’t just that its based on natural law but also because there is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that Truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer 1

This is the image of the consumer as a soul able to emit desire-transmissions into a receptive universe, and implies an entire metaphysics built around Loreal’s insistence that “you’re worth it”. Mark Fisher is quick to point out the core political problem here: if you fail to find work, pay your bills, get that holiday/car/pair of trainers, it’s because you didn’t want it enough. This implies a deficiency in your ability to desire or, in the language of the Secret, to emit frequencies into the universe. What Fisher’s statement implies is more than what he says. To follow this logic we ultimately have to conclude that the failure is in the individual’s essence: I am a failure right down to the soul; I got what I deserved. It is easy to see how living within this semiology can produce depression.

What neither Fisher nor his interviewer Anindya Bhattacharyya point out in this interview is that magical voluntarism comes out of the work of the radical psychologist David Smail. Smail is a member of a neo-materialist group of practicing and research psychologists, author of several books, and one of the co-authors of an absolutely brilliant materialist theory of mental distress. Mark does point to Smail’s work in another interview (which is how I found his work) and in an article on the privatisation of stress. David Smail identifies magical voluntarism as originating not with capitalism per se, but within psychology itself:

The trouble is, as soon as therapeutic schools start to formalize and professionalize their procedures they nearly always—advertently or not—enmesh themselves in interiorizing philosophies of one kind or another. There are in fact very few approaches to psychological therapy that don’t in some measure subscribe to individualist, idealist and/or what I call magical voluntarist positions. All such approaches have their foundation in a general cultural assumption that is in fact very hard to shake off—i.e., that fundamentally we are all individuals who just happen to find ourselves in societies. I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that fundamentally we are social creatures who just happen to feel as individuals.

The full implications the technique for subjectivation become apparent when we look at Smail: they produce a depth interior in much the same way that Foucault described as the work of psychoanalysis - a deep subjective core where an individual’s truth is located. As such it plays perfectly into the individualism of capitalism and thereby extends the erosion of communality thereby precluding the possibility of any collective - let alone class - action. The idealism of the technique is what we saw with the secret and can be simply expressed in the formula:

(focussed)desire+thought+emotion=production of personal reality.

All structural explanations for experience, whether they are biological, embodied, economic, political or historical, are erased. Materiality disappears into a cloud of psycho-marketing strategy. With magical voluntarism we see a deep confluence between positive psychology, psychotherapy and advertising. This confluence is hardly surprising as these three facets have always been entwined. Smail’s work in The Origins of Unhappiness also point to all this being an intentional strategy first deployed during Thatcher’s demolition of working class communities and organisation. Summarising the argument in that book in an interview with the author of The Therapy Industry, Paul Moloney:

Margaret Thatcher was a big influence as well. In one sense, she was just about the best psychologist that I’ve ever come across, because she knew better than anybody, (or the influences she stood for knew better than anybody) what changes people, and how to bring people into line and that’s by affecting their interests and threatening them, inducing them through paying them lots of money and so on. It became very evident after 1979 that the people who came to see me didn’t have much room for manoeuvre, no matter how much will power they applied to the circumstances that they found themselves in, and usually because of some nasty, punitive measure that the Tory government had taken. These people blamed themselves, and they struggled to think ‘ what is it about me…. my personal strategies and so on that are not working …why am I so inadequate in these circumstances…?’ and it was perfectly obvious to me that they were not inadequate; it was the circumstances that were the problem.

This work is continued by through ConDem government’s Behavioural Insights Team, or nudge unit, and by the continued spread of psychotherapeutic and behavioural interventions beyond the consultation room. Just as psychiatry autonomised itself from the Asylum following deinstitutionalisation, so to has psychotherapy come to spread itself throughout the social fabric. The most popular form of magical voluntarism today is CBT but motivational interviewing and mindfulness have also metastasized through the body of the social. One of the leading figures of the positive psychology movement, Martin Seligman, has had a profoundly influential role in disseminating the idea that we can train ourselves to be happy through changing our thoughts:

Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals. In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable 2 .

Seligman believes we can develop ‘new cognitive skills’ that essentially revolve around changing how we look at situations, including disputing our pessimistic beliefs. From Seligman’s point of view, if we want to happy people then we should renounce our analyses of capitalism because it just makes us depressed: it is the belief about capitalism rather than the material conditions that create depression. The problem is explanatory style: change the explanation, change the world. This is the very inverse of Marx’s 11th thesis.

In my view Seligman’s earlier theory of learned helplessness was correct...the left - broadly defined - has learned that it is pointless to do anything to change its situation because nothing works. Any groups that do take the initiative to act must be educated on the futility of action. Zizek has the slogan for this position, a position he advocates: don’t act, think. This separation is regressive and really amounts to the depressive tendency to ruminate, to go over the same problems again and again, sinking deeper into despair''.