Can there be a meaningful politics beyond the ephemeral drama of the current election and its party rivalries, some way of collectively thinking about our values and priorities? Or will we continue with the selfish society in which we each pursue our own material interests without considering the needs of others?  My book, The Selfish Society, opens up these wider questions, offering a new take on issues such as the power of the state or the question of democracy. Unusually, the book approaches these questions from a predominantly psychological perspective rather than a political or economic one. Thinking outside the traditional framework, I suggest that modern psychology and neuroscience can throw light on our public life – not just on our private problems, or on our consumer habits. The Selfish Society looks at the way that emotions lie behind all we do, including the way that politicians behave, our social policies, and the choices we ourselves make in the political sphere.  For me, the real questions that we currently need to address are about how we get past our fixations on materialism and short term thinking, how we moderate our individualism, and create a more sustainable, mutually co-operative future.

One way of understanding my individual psychotherapy clients is by discovering the history of their close relationships.  In this book, I look at the unfolding history of industrial capitalism, weighing up its psychological benefits and losses. What I found was the loss of more collective way of life, and the sense of belonging to a social group, balanced against the huge material gains and greater individual freedom of modern life. But our freedom came with conditions attached. The capitalist economy, supposedly just an impersonal and efficient system for maximising production, also shaped our relationships. It required that we work long hours to deliver profit and it made it more difficult for us to choose to give our time to anything inefficient or unprofitable, such as responding to others’ emotional needs.  Unconsciously, we took on board the message that it is good to be emotionally as well as financially self-sufficient.

Collectively, we gave priority to material security over our everyday relationships, a bargain that seemed worthwhile in the earlier stages of capitalism.  But this trade-off no longer works. It has been seriously challenged by the social and political changes of the last 40 years, decades of intense and addictive consumerism which have unbalanced society. Added to that, women’s tacit agreement to make relationships their priority and to hold on to caring values within family life, has been blown apart by women entering the masculine world of work on increasingly equal terms from the 1970s onwards- further tipping the balance away from emotional well-being.

Most worrying of all, these changes have had a huge impact on children, especially babies. The imperative for everyone to work and earn at all times has pushed many parents into using impersonal, institutional care for their babies and very young children. But as I described in my previous book Why Love Matters, neuroscience and developmental psychology make it very clear that optimum emotional development is based on the quality of early care, and personal attention to emotions. When babies and toddlers don’t get enough of this magic stuff, they become children who are unable to handle stress and who are often unco-operative and relate poorly to others.

The poorly developed ‘social brain’ finds it hard to manage deferred gratification, real concern for others, and self-restraint.  Those who have not experienced empathy from their close relationships find it difficult to transcend self-centred behaviour. In my view, these signs of emotional impoverishment are now appearing at every level of society – from the ‘broken Britain’ of long-term benefit claimants and anti-social teenagers, to the greedy political and financial leaders who so vividly demonstrate their lack of empathy with others. My experience as a psychotherapist has demonstrated to me over and over again, that without a strong and secure sense of self rooted in early life, people of every socioeconomic background are more vulnerable to the lure of consumerism, searching for money, fame, or power to feel like ‘someone’ – or becoming addicted to drugs, food, or alcohol to escape their distress.  In this sense, our child-rearing practices play a major part in creating and sustaining a culture of materialism and short-term, ‘me-first’ politics.

There is a way out of this mess. Practical solutions are available if we choose our priorities carefully. My prescription is for a massive investment in early parenting that includes both financial support (such as a parenting wage for 2 years) and much greater psychological support for new parents.  But above all, The Selfish Society suggests that new values are needed to solve the urgent problems we face through climate change. Selfish individualism has become anachronistic and unhelpful. Somehow we need to become capable of developing long-term solutions and learning how to co-operate on an international scale. To achieve this, we will need a quantum leap in our psychological awareness and in our capacity for empathy – qualities that are rooted in early care. We will need to question our own assumptions that relationships are of less value than material well-being- and find the confidence to believe that we ourselves can shape society rather than being shaped by the ‘invisible hand’.

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