Welcome to Conversations with Claude. In this series I explore the ideas of big thinkers about technology, philosophy, culture, politics and the contemporary zeitgeist with my (artificial) intelligent friend Claude (oh irony..).
Can you summarize the most important ideas of Byung Chul Han for me?
I’ll provide a comprehensive overview of Byung-Chul Han’s key philosophical ideas. As a contemporary German-Korean philosopher, Han offers distinctive critiques of modern society and digital culture.
Core themes in Han’s work include:
The Burnout Society Han argues we’ve moved from Foucault’s “disciplinary society” to an “achievement society” where individuals self-exploit through constant self-optimization. Rather than external discipline, we internalize pressure to achieve and perform, leading to widespread burnout, depression, and anxiety. The mantra “Yes, we can” becomes a form of coercion.
Digital Culture and Loss of Contemplation Han believes digital technology and social media create a “swarm” mentality that erodes true individuality and deep thinking. We lose the ability to engage in “deep attention” or contemplation, instead living in a state of “hyperattention” characterized by constant multitasking and distraction.
The Transparency Society In his book “The Transparency Society,” Han argues that our obsession with transparency and information sharing doesn’t lead to truth but rather to conformity and control. Total transparency eliminates the mystery and otherness essential for human relationships and authentic experience.
The Disappearance of Ritual Han sees modern society losing important rituals that give life meaning and create community. Digital communication and social media create only shallow connections, while traditional rituals that marked time and created shared experiences are eroding.
The Loss of Beauty and Contemplation In works like “The Salvation of the Beautiful,” Han argues that our culture has lost the ability to appreciate true beauty, which requires distance and contemplation. Instead, we pursue a smoothed-out, Instagram-friendly aesthetic that lacks depth.
Power and Control Han extends Foucault’s ideas about power, arguing that modern power operates through positivity rather than negativity – through encouragement to optimize and share rather than prohibition. This “smart power” is more effective because people willingly participate in their own exploitation.
Can you explain why positivity is a bad thing according to Han?
According to Han, positivity becomes problematic not because optimism itself is bad, but because of how it functions in modern society. Here’s his key argument:
In traditional societies, power operated through negativity – through prohibition, law, and “you must not.” But modern society operates through “you can” and even “you must” – constantly pushing us to optimize ourselves, achieve more, and unlock our potential. This seems positive, but Han argues it’s actually more insidious.
The violence of positivity works in several ways:
- Self-exploitation: Instead of being exploited by an external boss, we become our own slave drivers. We constantly push ourselves to be more productive, more successful, more connected. There’s no external force to resist – we do it to ourselves willingly.
- The Illusion of Freedom: When we’re told “you can do anything!” it doesn’t feel like oppression. But this unlimited possibility creates constant pressure. There’s no longer any excuse for failure – if you didn’t succeed, it must be your fault for not trying hard enough.
- Loss of Boundaries: Traditional negative commands (like “Don’t work on Sundays”) created boundaries and rest. But positivity eliminates these limits. There’s always more you could be doing to improve yourself, network, or be productive.
- Psychological Consequences: This leads to what Han calls “achievement anxiety” – a constant feeling of inadequacy and exhaustion. Depression and burnout become not personal failures but natural responses to a society that demands constant self-optimization.
Han uses the example of social media: It seems positive – you can connect with anyone, share your life, build your personal brand. But this “freedom” becomes a compulsion. You must be visible, you must network, you must cultivate your image. The positive “can” becomes an exhausting “must.”
So for Han, the problem isn’t positivity itself, but how it functions as a form of power that’s harder to recognize and resist than traditional oppression. When there’s no external enemy to fight – just your own failure to achieve your full potential – resistance becomes nearly impossible.
This all connects to what Han sees as a fundamental crisis in modern society: we’ve lost the ability to engage with negativity, otherness, and limits. By trying to make everything positive, transparent, and achievable, we’ve created a society that’s paradoxically more exhausting and less fulfilling than traditional “negative” societies.
I would call it: the popularization and commercialization of stupidity and narcissism
Han would probably agree with your diagnosis but frame it slightly differently. For him, it’s not that people pursuing self-improvement are stupid or narcissistic per se, but rather that the entire cultural logic traps them in a kind of productive narcissism. You’re constantly focused on yourself – optimizing, tracking, improving – but this inward focus doesn’t lead to genuine self-knowledge or development. Instead, it creates what he might call a “polished” self that’s marketable and performative.
The commercialization aspect is crucial. Self-improvement has become indistinguishable from consumption. Buy this course, download this app, follow this influencer’s morning routine, track your sleep and productivity. The industry sells the fantasy that you’re always just one purchase, one hack, one optimization away from becoming your best self. But this keeps you in a perpetual state of inadequacy – you’re never good enough as you are.
Han would say this is narcissism in a specific sense: not self-love, but an obsessive self-relation that paradoxically prevents genuine self-encounter. You’re so busy monitoring and improving yourself that you never actually experience yourself or the world. The quantified-self movement is a perfect example – tracking every calorie, step, and sleep cycle creates the illusion of self-knowledge while actually alienating you from your own bodily experience.
The “stupidity” you mention connects to what Han sees as the loss of contemplative intelligence. Real wisdom requires the ability to sit with difficulty, ambiguity, and even boredom. But self-improvement culture demands constant action and measurable results. This creates a kind of frantic superficiality that mistakes activity for growth.
What makes this particularly insidious is that it feels empowering. People genuinely believe they’re taking control of their lives, becoming their best selves. They don’t realize they’re just participating more efficiently in their own exploitation – becoming better workers, better consumers, better performers of success.
Your cynicism about it seems well-placed. The self-improvement industrial complex has taken genuine human desires for growth and meaning and turned them into profit engines that ultimately leave people more exhausted and empty than before.
This is where people like Tony Robbins and Andrew Tate come in..
Exactly – and they represent two complementary variants of what Han would see as the achievement society’s most visible symptoms.
Tony Robbins embodies the glossy, corporate-friendly version of achievement ideology. His message is pure positivity as violence: “Unleash the power within!” “You can do anything!” The problem isn’t structural inequality or exploitative systems – it’s just that you haven’t optimized yourself enough. Haven’t thought positively enough. Haven’t taken massive action. His empire sells the fantasy that personal transformation through will and technique can overcome any obstacle. It’s the perfect ideology for neoliberal capitalism – all problems are individual, all solutions require you to work harder on yourself.
Andrew Tate represents a darker, more explicitly toxic variant. He packages the same achievement obsession through hypermasculinity and aggression. But notice the underlying structure is identical: constant self-optimization (the body, wealth, status), quantification of success (cars, money, women reduced to metrics), and the idea that failure is purely personal weakness. He just removes the positive veneer and replaces it with open contempt. Both are selling the same product – just to different demographics.
What’s fascinating from Han’s perspective is how both operate through what appears to be freedom and empowerment. Nobody forces you to buy Robbins’ seminars or follow Tate’s “Hustlers University.” You choose it. You want it. This is the genius of positive power – the exploitation feels like self-actualization.
The tragic part is that the people drawn to these figures often genuinely feel stuck, powerless, or lost. They’re responding to real problems – economic precarity, social atomization, loss of meaning. But instead of solidarity or structural critique, they’re offered more self-exploitation dressed up as empowerment.
How does this relate to the rise of populism, anti-intellectualism and binary thinking?
This is a brilliant connection, and I think Han’s framework helps explain these phenomena in ways that go beyond typical analyses.
The Exhausted Subject and Populism
Han’s achievement society creates what we might call the “exhausted citizen.” People are burned out from constant self-optimization, precarious work, and the pressure to perform success. They feel like failures because the system tells them “you can do anything” – so if they’re struggling, it must be their fault.
Populism offers relief from this exhaustion. It says: “It’s not your fault – it’s them.” The elites, the immigrants, the globalists, the establishment. This is incredibly appealing because it externalizes the violence. Instead of being your own oppressor (which is psychologically unbearable), there’s suddenly an enemy you can resist. Populism reintroduces negativity – the “no,” the boundary, the clear opposition – which the achievement society eliminated.
The Collapse of Contemplation into Binary Thinking
Han argues that digital culture has destroyed our capacity for contemplative, nuanced thought. Social media rewards instant reactions, emotional responses, and clear takes. There’s no time or space for complexity, ambiguity, or sitting with difficult questions.
Binary thinking is the natural outcome. Everything must be reduced to simple oppositions: us/them, good/evil, patriot/traitor. This isn’t just ignorance – it’s a structural feature of how digital culture operates. The algorithm demands engagement, and nuance doesn’t generate clicks. Outrage does.
Moreover, when you’re exhausted from constant self-optimization, you don’t have energy left for complex analysis. Binary thinking is cognitively cheap. It offers clear answers, clear enemies, clear solutions. The exhausted subject gravitates toward it out of necessity.
Anti-Intellectualism as Resistance to Elitism
Here’s where it gets interesting. Han would likely see anti-intellectualism partly as a distorted response to real problems with intellectual culture.
The “expert class” often operates within the same achievement society logic – credentials, optimization, performance of intelligence on social media. Intellectuals become another performance of success that regular people can’t access. The academic who tweets about inequality from their tenure-track position embodies the same contradictions.
When intellectuals say “trust the science” or “listen to experts” while themselves being embedded in systems of privilege and credentialism, it’s not entirely irrational for people to distrust them. The problem is that this legitimate skepticism gets channeled into rejecting expertise altogether rather than demanding more democratic access to knowledge.
Anti-intellectualism also reflects what Han sees as the loss of contemplative culture. If all knowledge must be immediately useful, measurable, applicable – what he’d call “instrumental” – then abstract thinking, theory, and contemplation seem pointless. Why read philosophy when you could be optimizing your productivity?
The Swarm and Political Discourse
Han’s concept of the “swarm” is crucial here. Digital culture doesn’t create genuine publics capable of sustained deliberation. It creates swarms – temporary aggregations that form around emotional triggers and disperse just as quickly.
The swarm can’t tolerate ambiguity or complexity. It needs clear targets for outrage. This makes genuine political discourse impossible. Instead of debating policy, we get performance and tribal signaling. Politicians become entertainers (Trump being the obvious example) because that’s what the swarm responds to.
Binary thinking dominates because the swarm requires it. You can’t swarm around a nuanced position. You need clear enemies and simple narratives.
The Death of Ritual and Meaning
Perhaps most fundamentally, Han argues modern society has destroyed the rituals and narratives that gave life collective meaning. Religion, civic traditions, labor movements – these provided frameworks for understanding suffering and finding purpose beyond individual achievement.
Populism fills this void. It provides ritual (rallies, slogans, symbols), narrative (the nation under threat, the people versus elites), and community (us against them). It’s a degraded form of meaning-making, but it’s something.
The tragedy is that people turn to populism not because they’re stupid, but because they’re desperate for something that transcends the isolated, exhausted individualism of achievement society. They want solidarity, shared purpose, clear values. Populism offers a toxic version of these genuine needs.
The Positivity Trap
Here’s the final connection: mainstream politics and intellectual culture often operate through the same toxic positivity that Han critiques. “Yes we can,” “Lean in,” “Be the change,” “Build back better.” Everything is framed as empowerment and opportunity, never as structural conflict or genuine opposition.
This leaves people with no vocabulary for their anger and exhaustion except what populism provides. If liberal politics says “you can achieve anything through hard work” and you’re barely surviving, populist politics at least acknowledges that something is wrong – even if it misdiagnoses the cause.
Binary thinking, anti-intellectualism, and populism are all symptoms of the same crisis Han identifies: a society that has eliminated genuine negativity (limits, opposition, conflict) in favor of endless positivity, but in doing so has created psychological and social conditions that are unbearable. The return of crude, violent forms of negativity (racism, nationalism, conspiracism) is the repressed coming back in distorted form.
The solution isn’t more positivity or more expert-driven optimization. It’s recovering the ability to think contemplatively, engage with genuine otherness, and build forms of solidarity that acknowledge real conflict and structural problems rather than reducing everything to individual achievement or tribal identity.
Does this resonate with what you’re seeing? I think Han’s analysis cuts deeper than most liberal hand-wringing about “why people vote against their interests” because he understands the psychological conditions that make populism appealing.
Jaap van Ark - SCIENTIA POTENTIA EST 