（写在前面：新自由主义资本主义鼓吹竞争贬低合作，制造了导致人们相互敌视，异化，抑郁甚至自杀的完美主义，最终造成”每个人对每个人的战争“。）
A new study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill in the journal Psychological Bulletin finds perfectionism is on the rise. The authors, both psychologists, conclude that “recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.”
Thomas Curran和Andrew Hill在“心理学通报”杂志上发表的一项新研究发现，完美主义正在崛起。 两位作者都是心理学家，他们得出结论：“近几代年轻人们认为其他人对他们要求更高，他们对他人的要求更高，对自己的要求也更高。”
When identifying the root cause of this growing appetite for excellence, Curran and Hill don’t mince words: it’s neoliberalism. Neoliberal ideology reveres competition, discourages cooperation, promotes ambition, and tethers personal worth to professional achievement. Unsurprisingly, societies governed by these values make people very judgmental, and very anxious about being judged.
在确定这种日益增长的追求完美的根本原因时，Curran和Hill不会切碎言辞：这是新自由主义。 新自由主义意识形态鼓吹竞争，贬低合作，促进野心，并将个人价值与专业成就联系在一起。 不出所料，受这些价值观支配的社会使人们非常爱评价他人，并且非常担心被评判。
Psychologists used to talk about perfectionism as though it were unidimensional — only directed from the self to the self. That’s still the colloquial usage, what we usually mean when we say someone’s a perfectionist. But in the last few decades, researchers have found it productive to broaden the concept. Curran and Hall rely on a multidimensional definition, encompassing three types of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented, socially prescribed.
心理学家们过去常常谈论完美主义，好像它是一维的——只是从自我指向自我。 这仍然是当我们说某人是完美主义者时通常意味着的口语用法。但在过去的几十年里，研究人员发现扩大这一概念将概念丰满了。Curran和Hall依赖于多维定义，包括三种完美主义：自我导向，他人导向，社会规定。
Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not entirely unfounded — sensation that everyone is waiting for you to make a mistake so they can write you off forever. This hyper-perception of others’ impossible expectations causes social alienation, neurotic self-examination, feelings of shame and unworthiness, and “a sense of self overwhelmed by pathological worry and a fear of negative social evaluation, characterized by a focus on deficiencies, and sensitive to criticism and failure.”
自我导向的完美主义倾向于将自己置于不切实际的高标准中，而他人导向的完美主义则意味着对他人抱有不切实际的期望。 但是，“社会规定的完美主义是完美主义发三个维度中最令人痛苦的，”Curran和Hall认为。它描述了持久性—— 而非完全没有根据——的感觉产生的偏执和焦虑的感受，每个人都在等着你犯错，这样他们就可以永远地把你钉在耻辱柱上。 这种对他人不可能的期望的过度认知导致了社会异化，神经质的自我检查，羞耻和不配的感觉，以及“由于病态的忧虑和对负面社会评价的恐惧所致的自我压倒感，其特点是关注缺陷，以及 对批评和失败敏感。“
In an attempt to gauge how culturally contingent the phenomenon of perfectionism is, Curran and Hall performed a meta-analysis of available psychological data, looking for generational trends. They found that people born in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada after 1989 scored much higher than previous generations for all three kinds of perfectionism, and that scores increased linearly over time. The dimension that saw the most dramatic change was socially prescribed perfectionism, which increased at twice the rate of the other two. In other words, young people’s feeling of being judged harshly by their peers and the broader culture is intensifying with each passing year.
为了衡量完美主义现象在文化上的局限性，Curran和Hall对可用的心理数据进行了萃取分析，寻找世代趋势。他们发现，1989年以后出生在美国，英国和加拿大的人在所有三种完美主义中的得分都比前几代高得多，并且这些得分随着时间的推移线性增长。看到最戏剧性变化的维度是社会规定的完美主义，其增长率是其他两个的两倍。 换句话说，年轻人被同龄人严格评判的感觉和更广泛的文化正逐年逐渐加剧。
Curran and Hall attribute this change to the rise of neoliberalism and its cousin meritocracy. Neoliberalism favors market-based methods of assigning worth to commodities — and it designates everything it can as a commodity. Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced things like public ownership and collective bargaining with deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group in the very fabric of society. Meanwhile, meritocracy — the idea that social and professional status are the direct outcomes of individual intelligence, virtue, and hard work — convinces isolated individuals that failure to ascend is a sign of inherent worthlessness.
Curran和Hall将这种变化归因于新自由主义及其堂兄精英统治的崛起。新自由主义倾向于以市场为基础的方法来为商品分配价值——它将它能指定的一切都指定为商品。自1970s中期以来，新自由主义的政治—经济政权已经系统地将公有制和集体谈判等事项取代为取消管制和私有化，在社会结构中促进个人凌驾在群体之上。与此同时，精英统治—社会和职业地位是个人智慧，美德和努力工作的直接结果的思想 —使被孤立的个人相信，未能提升自己是一种固有的无价值的标志。
Neoliberal meritocracy, the authors suggest, has created a cutthroat environment in which every person is their own brand ambassador, the sole spokesman for their product (themselves) and broker of their own labor, in an endless sea of competition. As Curran and Hall observe, this state of affairs “places a strong need to strive, perform, and achieve at the center of modern life,” far more so than in previous generations.
作者认为，新自由主义精英统治制造了一个残酷的环境，每个人都是他们自己的品牌形象大使，他们的产品（他们自己）和他们自己的劳动的唯一发言人，处在在无尽的竞争中。正如Curran和Hall所观察到的，这种状态“强烈需要把奋斗，表现和实现放在现代生活的中心”，远远超过前几代人。
They cite data showing that young people today are less interested in engaging in group activities for fun, attending instead to individual endeavors that make them feel productive or fill them with a sense of achievement. When the world is demanding that you prove yourself worthy at every turn, and you can’t shake the suspicion that the respect of your peers is highly conditional, hanging out with friends can seem less compelling than staying in to meticulously curate your social media profiles.
他们引用的数据显示，今天的年轻人对参与团体娱乐活动不感兴趣，而是进行个人努力，使他们感到充实或充满成就感。当世界要求你在每一回合都要证明自己值钱，并且你无法摆脱怀疑同伴的尊重是高度有条件的时，与朋友闲逛似乎不如留下来精心编写你的社交媒体资料那么有趣。
One consequence of this rise in perfectionism, Curran and Hall argue, has been a series of epidemics of serious mental illness. Perfectionism is highly correlated with anxiety, eating disorders, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The constant compulsion to be perfect, and the inevitable impossibility of the task, exacerbate mental-illness symptoms in people who are already vulnerable. Even young people without diagnosable mental illnesses tend to feel bad more often, since heightened other-oriented perfectionism creates a group climate of hostility, suspicion, and dismissiveness — in which the jury is always out on everyone, pending group appraisal — and socially prescribed perfectionism involves an acute recognition of that alienation. In short, the repercussions of rising perfectionism range from emotionally painful to literally deadly.
Curran和Hall认为，完美主义崛起的一个后果就是一系列严重精神疾病的流行病。完美主义与焦虑，饮食失调，抑郁和自杀念头高度关联。 不断强迫完美，以及不可避免的不可能的任务，加剧了已经很脆弱的人的精神疾病症状。 即使是没有可诊断的精神疾病的年轻人往往会更频繁地感觉糟糕，因为增长的他人导向的完美主义会造成一种充满敌意的，怀疑的和不屑一顾的群体氛围——陪审团总是在每个人面前，等待集体评估—以及社会规定的完美主义 涉及对异化的敏锐认识。简而言之，不断上升的完美主义的影响范围从情绪上的痛苦到字面意义上的致命。
And there’s one other repercussion of rising perfectionism: it makes it hard to build solidarity, which is the very thing we need in order to resist the onslaught of neoliberalism. Without healthy self-perceptions we can’t have robust relationships, and without robust relationships we can’t come together in the numbers it would take to rattle, much less upend, the whole political-economic order.
还有另外一个对完美主义崛起的反响：它使得建立团结变得困难，这是我们抵制新自由主义的进攻所需要的。 如果没有健康的自我认知，我们就无法拥有坚固的关系，如果没有坚固的关系，我们就无法将个人们整合在一起，从而颠覆整个政治—经济秩序。
It’s not hard to see parallels between the three dimensions of perfectionism and so-called “call-out culture,” lately the hegemonic tendency on the Left: a condition in which everyone watches everyone else for a fatal slip-up, holding themselves to impossibly high standards of virtuous self-effacement, and being paralyzed with the secret (again, not unfounded) fear that they’re disposable to the group, that their judgment day is around the corner. The pattern is of a piece with other manifestations of neoliberal meritocratic perfectionism, from college admissions to obsessive Instagram curation. And because it divides rather than unites us, it’s no way to build a movement that ostensibly seeks to strike at the heart of power.
不难看出完美主义和所谓的“号召文化”在这三个维度之间的相似之处，最近是在左派内部的霸权倾向：一种每个人都看着其他人的致命的挫折的环境，将自己放在不可能实现的造成自我贬低的高美德标准，以及对这个秘密—他们对团体来说是用了一次之后就要被丢掉的（重复，这并非毫无根据）的恐惧感到瘫痪，他们的审判日即将来临。 这种模式与新自由主义精英完美主义的其他表现形成一块，从大学录取到盲目的Instagram策划。而且因为它分裂而不是团结我们，所以没有办法组建一个在表面上试图打击权力核心的运动。
Perfectionism makes us scornful of each other, afraid of each other, and unsure of ourselves at best. It prohibits the types of solidaristic bonds and collective action necessary to take on neoliberal capitalism, the very thing that generates it. The only possible antidote to atomizing, alienating perfectionism to reject absolute individualism and reintroduce collective values back into our society. It’s a gargantuan task — but with the vise-grip of neoliberalism tightening on our psyches, it’s the only way forward.
完美主义使我们相互鄙视，相互害怕，最好的状况是不信任自己。它禁止采取推翻新自由资本主义所必需的团结纽带和集体行动，而新自由资本主义产生了完美主义。原子化的唯一可能的解药是，疏远完美主义，拒绝绝对的个人主义，并将集体价值重新引入我们的社会。这是一项庞大的任务—但随着新自由主义对我们心理的紧缩，这是前进的唯一途径。
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/under-neoliberalism-you-can-be-your-own-tyrannical-boss
