Neoliberalism
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Neoliberalism, fear and business: how neoliberal ideology exploits fear for political gain—the psychology of a market.
The fear industry: What Byung-Chul Han, Rainer Mausfeld and Hannah Arendt know about the business of fear
The fear industry is not a marginal phenomenon of the wellness market. It is a political project. That sounds like an exaggeration – until you read the right thinkers.
Byung-Chul Han, Rainer Mausfeld and Hannah Arendt have independently described the same thing: fear is not a private emotion. It is a means of control. Anyone who understands how fear is generated, channelled and monetised understands the fear industry not as a market failure, but as market logic in its purest form.
What is the fear industry, and why is psychology alone not enough to explain it?
The term "fear industry" refers to the conglomerate of wellness brands, self-help publishers, mental health apps, coaching platforms and social media influencers that systematically build their business models on the raw material of fear. The global wellness market was estimated at over $ 5.6 trillion in 2023. Mental health apps generate billions in revenue – despite consistently weak evidence. A 2023 analysis by the BMJ found that most commercial mental health apps lack validated clinical outcomes. They measure effectiveness in minutes of use, not in remission rates.
But the crucial question is not: How big is this market? The crucial question is: Where does the fear that fuels it come from?
Psychology alone is not enough here. Philosophy and political theory are needed.
Byung-Chul Han: Fear as the operating system of the performance society
In Psychopolitics (2014), Byung-Chul Han describes a fundamental change in power structures. The old disciplinary society (Foucault's model) operated through prohibitions, walls, and punishment. It said: You must not. The new performance society works with seduction, optimisation and self-development. It says: You can. You should. You must, but voluntarily.
Power has changed location. It no longer resides in prisons. It resides in your psyche.
Han calls this psychopolitics: a form of rule that targets not the body, but emotions, motives, and desires. It does not require surveillance cameras: it relies on voluntary self-measurement. No ankle cuffs: it generates fitness trackers. No confessors: it generates therapy apps that log your mood in real time.
The subject who is allowed to exploit himself does so more completely than any external master ever could. He calls this the exhaustion of possibility: suffering does not arise from prohibition, but from the endless imperative of being able to be more. The fear of falling behind, of not being good enough, of wasting one's own potential: it is not a bug in this system. It is its central feature.
The fear industry has read Han and built a subscription model around it.
Rainer Mausfeld: How elites strategically produce and channel fear
While Han describes the inner logic of self-exploitation, Rainer Mausfeld goes one step further. In his books "Angst und Macht" (Fear and Power) and "Warum schweigen die Lämmer?" (Why Are the Lambs Silent?), the psychologist and political scientist puts forward an uncomfortable thesis: fear is not a by-product of social development. It is its conscious means of control.
Mausfeld draws on Walter Lippmann's concept of the manufacture of consent and shows how modern elites not only exploit fear but also actively generate it. The mechanisms are precise:
· Sensory overload instead of enlightenment: a constant flood of threatening information creates diffuse anxiety without a clear target. Diffuse anxiety paralyses, whereas concrete threats would mobilise people.
· Depoliticisation through psychologisation: Structural problems (precariousness, loss of control, social disintegration) are translated into individual psychological deficits. The subject treats themselves instead of changing the circumstances.
· Channelling into consumption: The fear generated is not resolved, but redirected towards products: supplements, apps, retreats – all promise to restore the control that has been structurally taken away.
Mausfeld would not describe the fear industry as parasitic, exploiting an existing feeling. He would describe it as constitutive: it produces the fear on which it thrives, in collaboration with media and political structures that share the same interest: an exhausted, self-focused subject with no political energy left.
In Mausfeld's reading, the fear industry is the private-sector extension of political rule.
Hannah Arendt: What happens when fear destroys the public sphere
Hannah Arendt introduces a third, even more fundamental dimension. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), she describes what fear does to political beings: it drives them back into the private sphere.
Arendt distinguishes between the public sphere – the place of collective action, visibility and political freedom – and the private sphere, the place of necessity, survival and isolation. Totalitarian rule, Arendt observed, does not begin with violence. It begins with loneliness: the destruction of trust in shared reality, the retreat into the exhausted self.
That sounds historical. It is highly topical.
The fear industry operates precisely in this terrain. It addresses the individual, never the collective. It offers self-regulation, never structural change. It talks about your nervous system, your resilience, and your inner child. The public sphere, where problems could be negotiated politically, is shrinking because the exhausted subject no longer enters it.
Arendt coined the term "alienation" for this: the feeling of having fallen out of a shared world. What the fear industry sells as a psychological deficit – dysregulation, trauma, hypoarousal – is often exactly that: alienation. And the answer to that is not another app subscription.
The answer would be political participation. But that doesn't sell well.
The triangle: Han, Mausfeld, and Arendt as a common diagnosis
Read together, these three thinkers paint a coherent picture:
Han describes how the subject internalises domination and becomes an optimisation machine out of fear of not being good enough.
Mausfeld shows that this fear does not arise spontaneously but is strategically generated and channelled into consumption to neutralise political energy.
Arendt explains what is destroyed in the process: public space, political agency, shared reality – replaced by the isolated individual thrown back on itself.
The fear industry is the place where all three dynamics converge. It is not the cause. It is the institutionalised symptom.
What pseudoscientific concepts does the fear industry use, and what is behind them?
Mausfeld has pointed out that successful rule always speaks the language of liberation. The fear industry is the world champion in this. It operates with scientific-sounding vocabulary that is either highly controversial or simply false, yet creates a sense of technical control over one's inner life—Psychopolitics at the product level.
Three examples:
· Polyvagal theory, according to Stephen Porges, is popularly presented as a simplified three-state model that explains almost every state of mind, despite considerable scientific criticism of its basic neurophysiological assumptions. The more complicated the theory sounds, the more products can be sold with it.
· "Trauma" as a universal category: When everything is trauma – arguments with the boss, the end of a relationship, critical feedback – the term loses all diagnostic precision. Mausfeld would add: Extending the concept of suffering to encompass everyday life is a prerequisite for expanding the market and preventing political interpretations of structural suffering.
· "Regulating the nervous system": anatomically inaccurate, therapeutically vague, commercially highly precise. The autonomic nervous system cannot be "reset" with a cold shower. But the term creates a feeling of individual control over biological processes: Han calls this biopolitics self-technology.
Is mindfulness the solution or an accomplice?
Mindfulness as a clinical intervention: Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol is evidence-based and well-researched for specific indications. But what the anxiety industry has made of it is something philosophically different.
Ronald Purser calls it McMindfulness: the domestication of a contemplative practice into a productivity tool. And Han would agree: commercial mindfulness is psychopolitics at its purest. It does not help to question the conditions that create anxiety: it makes you more capable of enduring these conditions.
Mausfeld adds: a subject who meditates to function within the system is not a resistant subject. It is an optimised one.
Arendt closes the circle: the contemplative, self-centred individual does not enter the public sphere. It regulates itself, so the system does not need to be regulated.
Resilience, in this reading, is not a strength. It is an organised retreat.
What does this mean for your mental health from a clinical perspective?
Han, Mausfeld and Arendt jointly pose an uncomfortable question: what if the suffering does not lie within you, but in the conditions under which you live?
This does not mean that mental disorders are not real. Anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, ADHD: these are clinical realities that require evidence-based treatment: cognitive behavioural therapy, schema therapy, mentalisation-based therapy, and pharmacological treatment where indicated. These methods have proven effectiveness. A wellness subscription does not.
But the meta-question remains: why are so many people so exhausted, so anxious, so fragmented at the same time? And who benefits from the answer: "Because you personally haven't optimised enough yet"?
In my practice, I see this pattern regularly. People who have done everything "right": meditated, journaled, undergone therapy, optimised. And yet they still feel worse. What then emerges is a second layer of guilt. Han calls it the internalisation of failure. Mausfeld calls it the successful depoliticisation of suffering. Arendt calls it the complete withdrawal from the shared world.
The fear industry calls it: the target group.
How can you critically confront the fear industry?
The goal is not cynicism. It is, to quote Han, the recovery of the negative: the ability to say no, to allow boundaries, to tolerate unproductivity without immediately having to treat it therapeutically. And, to quote Arendt, the recovery of the political: the confidence that problems that arise structurally can be solved structurally.
Specifically:
· Ask for evidence, not testimonials. Randomised controlled studies in peer-reviewed journals: that is the standard. Instagram success stories are marketing.
· Be wary of anyone who defines your problem and sells you the solution at the same time. That's not a therapist: that's a salesperson with an Instagram bio. Mausfeld's rule of thumb: anyone who creates fear and sells reassurance has an interest in your fear.
· Can you distinguish between normal and clinical? Fear of an exam is not an anxiety disorder. Grief after a loss is not depression. Experiencing boundaries is not trauma. Not all exhaustion is an illness: some is a signal that points outward, not inward.
· If you have real symptoms, seek professional help. Find a licensed psychotherapist or psychiatrist, not a certified life coach without a licence.
Conclusion: The fear industry needs your fear: Han, Mausfeld and Arendt explain why
Han is right: the most effective form of rule is that which disguises itself as liberation.
Mausfeld is right: this rule produces the fear on which it thrives and prevents this fear from becoming political.
Arendt is right: a society in which the individual is exhausted and left to fend for themselves no longer has a public sphere. And without a public sphere, there is no political freedom.
The fear industry is the place where all this comes together. It is not the cause of the crisis: it is its most profitable form of administration.
Mental health does not arise from self-optimisation under market conditions. It comes about through relationships, meaning, biological stability and, where necessary, evidence-based clinical treatment. That's hard to subscribe to. That's why the fear industry doesn't sell it.
And perhaps that is the real resistance: the ability to exist unoptimised. Not as a weakness. As a political stance.
The most important points at a glance
· The anxiety industry is a £5.6 trillion market based on the systematic pathologisation of normal experiences and the translation of structurally generated suffering into individual consumption.
· Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics): The performance subject exploits itself: voluntarily, completely, out of fear of its own inadequacy. The fear industry monetises this self-exploitation precisely.
· Rainer Mausfeld (Fear and Power): Fear is strategically generated and channelled to neutralise political energy. The fear industry is the private-sector extension of this strategy.
· Hannah Arendt (Vita Activa): Fear destroys public space and drives the individual into isolation and alienation from the world. The exhausted, self-focused subject is no longer political.
· Evidence-based psychology (cognitive behavioural therapy, schema therapy, mentalisation-based therapy) differs fundamentally from commercial wellness consumption.
· Those who struggle with genuine psychological distress need qualified treatment: no app, no coach, no supplements.
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