**⏺️ With:** [[Disciplinary Society]], [[Technologies of the Self]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Philosophy > **🌱 Planted:** Tue 7 January 2025 --- ***Achievement Society enforces control through internal self-exploitation.*** ![[Achievement Society.png]] > [!quote] > "The achievement society is characterized by a new form of exploitation: self-exploitation. The individual is no longer exploited from the outside, but rather exploits itself from within." — [[The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han]] [[Byung-Chul Han]] argues that today's postmodern world is no longer governed by Foucault's [[Disciplinary Society|Disciplinary Society]], rather it has been replaced by a more contemporary model: achievement society. This new form of control, predicated on positive modal verbs like "can" and "will" (what Han calls "the positivity of can") replaces the prohibitions of disciplinary society with an imperative to achieve, creating a new commandment: the constant pursuit of improvement, (over)production, optimisation and achievement. This shift creates what Han calls "the achievement subject": an individual who is seemingly free from external forms of control and exploitation. This freedom is paradoxical, however. Instead of the external control and obedience of disciplinary society, achievement society relies on the motivation of the individual's internal desire to self-improve, self-optimise and self-monitor. Hence, no form of external exploitation is required. The individual operating within the society willingly exploits themselves, becoming both the victim and the perpetrator in a new type of internal self-exploitation. Where the excess negativity of the disciplinary society produced madmen, criminals, and the suppression of the self, the achievement society produces something much more overtly difficult to see, and therefore much more sinister. This type of imbalance produces afflictions not of the physical (the body or material items we possess), rather it produces those of the psychological: burnout, stress, anxiety, depression and narcissism. Ultimately, this type of internalised control creates a society where people are constantly striving yet never arriving, consumed by the pursuit of unattainable perfection. [^1]: [[The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han]]