Highlights from Freddie deBoer’s “Selfishness & Therapy Culture” (and I should add this caveat: Freddie is not opposed to therapy, as he makes clear at the outset; rather, he’s taking aim at the way “therapy has gone from being a tool to being a culture, in a way that’s bad for everyone”):

• On one of the most pernicious assumptions of therapy culture: [There is] a constant, recurring theme of the whole therapy-as-culture genre, the notion that social pressure, the pressure to do something the individual doesn’t want to do, is inherently bad, inherently wicked. The notion that much of the difficult work of life is about working against our base individual desires, and the idea that we need to build social pressures to support this work, are both casually discarded as pathological. Better to feel no pressure to do anything, in pursuit of a self-actualized life. The directive to forgive is as old as human morality, but the wisdom of the past is of little concern compared to the impulse of the moment.
• On the utilitarian ethic fostered by therapy culture (in responding to a NYT piece arguing that you should contemplate forgiveness only when and because it might benefit you): That we might want to embrace moral virtues like forgiveness in the pursuit of benefits that can’t be measured with an Apple Watch goes unconsidered. The idea that there are higher virtues towards which we might labor is nowhere to be found. This passage’s implicit value system would justify saying that compassion is good because it reduces blood pressure, that honesty is good because speaking the truth causes a pleasant release of endorphins, that you shouldn’t rob and murder someone because doing so might worsen fine lines and wrinkles. It’s a stance on morality that has completely excised the interests of others, which is to say, an anti-morality, a consumer product marketed in moral terms, a justification for selfishness bought off the rack.
• On how expressive individualism has become an invisible ideology: Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say "ideology at its purest"? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions. And the ideology that Carons demonstrates here, the set of assumptions she can’t begin to examine critically because she does not notice them, says that the individual has no responsibility to anyone but themselves. There is no moral duty, there is only the immediate emotional needs of the individual, which eclipses all other concerns, which is sacrosanct.
• On the problems that ensue when unfettered freedom is extolled as the highest good: Who told you that your job in life is to free yourself? "Freeing yourself" is very often the opposite of pursuing moral action. Very often, the reason that there’s someone who you might or might not forgive, the reason for the offense, is precisely because that person had freed themselves in an entirely inappropriate manner. (A lot of the world’s most predatory people are those who feel much too free.) Who told you that your emotional comfort is the heart of the moral challenge? The moral challenge resides in the face of the other. And who needs this? Is there really an insufficient supply of influences telling you to put yourself first, in 21st-century America? What are we doing, telling a civilization full of people raised on capitalist selfishness that they need to be more selfish?
• On how therapy culture makes it impossible to answer the question: How do you—absent God and traditional forces of constraint—create structures that compel people to be less selfish?: What’s happening in much of our culture amounts to answering that question by refusing its challenge - by saying that we don’t need less selfishness, thanks, but rather more. And the particular misery is that they’ve found a ruthlessly efficient and impregnable means to defend that position, therapy. Not therapy in terms of going to see a licensed clinical practitioner of some sort and undertaking a (hopefully evidence-based) process to achieve specific medical goals related to mental health and wellbeing. But therapy as in therapeutic culture, the offloading of all of the human project into the domain of psychiatric care. The basic work of life, human interrelations that involve multiple people who all have their own legitimate points of view, is reduced to being an exercise in one person’s pursuit of self-actualization. We all become bit players in each other’s plays. The abstruse vocabulary lends self-interest the sheen of medical legitimacy, and it also carries with it a potent discursive cudgel: anyone who disagrees with or criticizes someone who invokes the therapeutic mode is an impediment to them healing from their trauma, perhaps even guilty of retraumatizing them. In the NYT piece, Caron repetitively mentions women who have endured very real trauma, which has the inevitable effect of making her piece seem like the voice of the traumatized. But of course what people want and what they need are not the same, and anyway, because everything that lives experiences trauma, exempting the traumatized from social rules simply removes social rules entirely.
• On the "moral rules" implicit in therapy culture:
1. You, your feelings, and your goals are always preeminent and in any conflict supersede those of others.
2. You are entitled to total and complete emotional safety at all times, and this entitlement supersedes the rights and desires of others.
3. Simultaneously, you are a totally, existentially, permanently fragile being.
4. Since there is nothing that can be endured or recovered from that is not injustice, the concept of resilience is itself an expression of injustice.
5. That which makes you feel better is that which is right to do.
6. In any conflict between any two people, there is always one guilty abuser and one blameless victim.
7. You argue, they gaslight, you have self-respect, they are narcissists, you are still growing, they are toxic, you have boundaries, they have limitations, you hold space, they stand in the way of your growth.
8. Your own behavior is always a trauma response, and thus not your fault; the behavior of others is always freely chosen, and thus responsibility-bearing.
9. Any of your behaviors is merely one small step on your journey, and you are still in the process of becoming yourself, any behavior of others you don’t like is constitutive of their very being and cannot change.
10. Wanting and not getting, for you, can never be an expression of the basic reality of existence, but rather is always evidence of crime, abuse, mistreatment, pathology, injustice.
11. Everything you feel, do, and are is valid, always valid, until the end of time.