The best way to explain capitalism's effect on the mind is to describe an inefficient call centre. This is what Mark Fisher does in Capitalist Realism, and, as far as metaphors go, it's a slam dunk of a home-run.
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center?
Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could.
Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
I love this description. Describing capitalism to ourselves feels as hard as describing water to a fish. Without experiencing another system to compare it to, it's not easy to suddenly abstract ourselves from the only system we've ever known.
Meawnwhile, it's no sweat to recall memories of being stuck inside a call centre death-loop. And it's not much of a mental leap to remember the relief you felt outside of it. The difference, as Fisher points out, is water to a fish - and capitalism to our lives.