The Ideology of the Intimate and Fractured of Self
The Lonely Crowd: Ideologies contaminate knowledge in science, economics, and education. But where does this crisis hit home? Where does it truly fracture us? The answer is in the most intimate spaces of our lives: around the dinner table, in the therapist’s office, and in our increasingly silent neighborhoods.
Furedi tells us how it reshapes our lives: “Therapy becomes a technique for managing the self, for smoothing over the contradictions of living in a society that preaches freedom but demands conformity. It is a way of making the unbearable seem normal.” (Furedi, 2004)
Let us moves from the grand architectures of power into the living room. It argues that the ideologies of market fundamentalism and hyper-individualism don’t just live in textbooks or corporate boardrooms; they seep into our private relationships, reshaping how we love, how we heal, and how we connect. The result is a profound crisis of the self, where we are taught to see ourselves as isolated islands of competition and consumption, all while yearning for the very community and meaning that the system undermines. We are becoming a society of lonely people, busily following a script for a “good life” that leaves us feeling emptier than before.
The Ideology of the Intimate
Illouz describes the ideology behind our intimacy: “The new intimacy is a consumer intimacy, disposable and ephemeral. It is about the freedom to choose and the obligation to make oneself chooseable. It is predicated on a model of the self as a project to be managed and an asset to be invested.” (Illouz, 2007)
1. The Idealized Nuclear Family: The Consumption Unit
The nuclear family (mom, dad, 2.5 kids, white picket fence) is held up as the natural, ideal form of human belonging. But as philosopher Louis Althusser argued, the family is a powerful “Ideological State Apparatus.” It’s a primary site where we learn the values, roles, and behaviors that society wants us to have.
Althusser writes about the family as what I call the Repressive Ideological Apparatus(RIA): “The family is the pre-eminent Ideological State Apparatus. It operates by structuring the developing child’s unconscious, anchoring it in a predetermined social reality and class position before the child ever sets foot in a school.” (Althusser, 1971)
In a consumer society, the family’s ideological role is to function as a self-sufficient unit of consumption. It is idealized as a private haven, a retreat from the world. But this very ideal encourages isolation from extended family and broader community networks. We are sold the dream of a single-family home with everything we need inside it—effectively a castle with a drawbridge pulled up. This model doesn’t just happen; it’s promoted because it’s profitable. It requires every household to buy its own lawnmower, its own set of toys, its own streaming subscriptions.
It turns relational needs into market opportunities, fostering a subtle sense of competition with other families rather than solidarity. Fromm argues that it leads to pathology of love: “What is now called ‘mental health’ is the ability to love and work in a society whose dominant institutions are predicated on the denial of love and the destruction of work. In such a society, the ‘healthy’ are those who can adjust to its pathologies.” (Fromm, 1955)
2. Therapy Culture: Pathologizing the Healthy Response
What happens when living in this isolated, high-pressure unit creates pain? We turn to therapy. Now, therapy can be a vital tool for healing. But a certain strand of therapy culture has been co-opted by the very system that creates the distress.
Hooks gives us a solution: “The only way out of the crisis of the self is through the reconstruction of the social. Healing is not an individual journey but a collective project of building a world where everyone can breathe.” (bell hooks 2000)
When someone is deeply unhappy with a relentless, competitive job, a common therapeutic response might be to help them “build resilience” or “manage stress.” The problem is framed as within the individual—a chemical imbalance, a faulty coping mechanism. The possibility that the person is having a perfectly healthy response to an unhealthy society is often ignored. Resistance to a soul-crushing system is pathologized—turned into a symptom of a disorder to be medicated or managed away. The goal becomes adjusting the individual to fit the world, rather than questioning a world that makes so many of us sick.
This turns therapy from a tool of liberation into a tool of social control, reinforcing conformity and obscuring the valid, structural roots of our anguish. “The ‘sick’ individual, in his symptoms and in his life, often defends the aspirations of the whole against a whole sick society. In a repressive society, the individual’s neurosis may be a form of resistance.” (Cooper, 1967).
3. The Fraying Fabric: Hyper-Individualism and the Death of the Commons
Beyond the family, the ideology of the market has declared war on civil society—the web of clubs, associations, churches, and public spaces where we form connections outside of work and family. This is the realm of the “commons.”
Hyper-individualism teaches us that we are solely responsible for our own success and failure. This logic shreds our sense of mutual obligation. Why invest in public parks if my backyard is enough? Why support local libraries when I have Amazon? Why join a community club when I can network on LinkedIn?
This mindset, combined with a competitive worldview, turns neighbors into strangers and public goods into unnecessary expenses. We become atomized—isolated particles bouncing around in a social vacuum, wondering why we feel so alone in a crowded world. “The most important, yet least acknowledged, consequence of the rise of neoliberalism has been the capitulation of the left to the agenda of privatization… The very term ‘the public’ has been evacuated of meaning, replaced by ‘the market’ and ‘the individual.’” (Harvey, 2005)
4. Marketizing Intimacy: Relationships as Transactions
This transactional logic doesn’t stop at the community level; it invades our most personal relationships. We begin to marketize intimacy. Dating becomes a process of “shopping” on apps, swiping through optimized profiles as if comparing products.
We speak of “investing” in relationships and worry about the “return” we are getting. Even our friendships can become strategic networks for professional advancement.
When relationships are viewed through a transactional lens, their authenticity withers. We are valued for our utility, not our humanity. This creates a deep, unspoken anxiety: “If I stop being useful, successful, or attractive, will I still be loved?” This turns love from an unconditional state of being into a conditional performance.
5. The Crisis of Meaning: Why Are We So Anxious and Depressed?
The outcome of this ideological invasion is a profound crisis of meaning. We are biological creatures wired for community, mutual aid, and purpose. Yet we are living in a system that glorifies the very opposite: individualism, competition, and material consumption. “The impotence of the worker is not merely the joylessness of his labor, but the fact that his life-activity is not his own. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. The result is that man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating… and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.” (Marx, 1844)
This creates what sociologists call alienation—a feeling of disconnection from our work, from each other, and from ourselves. We are following the script we were given: go to school, get a job, buy a house, consume. But we find it doesn’t fulfill our deeper need for purpose and connection. Is it any wonder that this existential dissonance manifests as a mental health epidemic?
Anxiety and depression are not just chemical malfunctions; they are, in part, the logical, human response to a world that has systematically stripped away the foundations of meaning-making: secure community, purposeful work, and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. “Depression is not a malfunction but a form of communication, a signal of something terribly wrong in the social world. It is not just a private misery but a public health crisis that points to the failure of our collective ways of living.” (Cvetkovich, 2012)
Mending the Fracture
The fracture of the self is not a personal failing. It is a political and ideological achievement. To mend it, we must first recognize that our pain is not always a private pathology to be cured, but often a public clue to what is broken in our world.
Healing begins by rejecting the isolated nuclear family ideal and actively building chosen families and community networks of mutual support. It means seeking therapeutic practices that empower us to critique the world, not just adjust to it. It requires us to de-marketize our relationships, practicing generosity and connection without an expectation of return.
Most of all, it means realizing that the knowledge we have about how to live—the story that tells us to pull up the drawbridge and focus on our own—is contaminated knowledge. True well-being lies in the opposite direction: in solidarity, in the commons, and in the courageous work of building a society that values people over profit, and connection over consumption. The path to a whole self begins by reaching out, not just inward.
