Neoliberal Indoctrination
10 min read
·
Jun 30, 2021
Neoliberalism serves as social indoctrination. It tells the poor and weak they are responsible for their misery. It does its utmost to prevent the true extent of social poverty from reaching the general public. The health system despite ever greater expenditures becomes increasingly inhuman, social work erodes, a “re-feudalization boom” rages along with de-democratization, and investors aim at privatizing the public education system. When the poor and weak blame themselves for social inequality (low motivation, negative attitudes etc), the state and businesses escape their responsibility to contribute to education, community and the infrastructure. Minds are fogged and controlled by neoliberal media, focus on the trivial (celebrity news and sports fixation) and psycho-techniques make resistance against this inhuman ideology largely impossible.
As low profits led to the explosion of the financial sector and financialization around 1980, the financial meltdown of 2008 led to the discrediting of neoliberalism. Homo oeconomicus fades away as an economic theory along with market fundamentalism and market radicalism. Market failure and state violence epitomized by Enron’s expansive accounting method and the aggressive wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria should be lessons if the future is to be worth living.
We live at the close of the neoliberal rollback where universities became profit centers, health care becomes a privilege not a right, where climate change and protection of labor and the environment are ignored in trade agreements while foreign investors can sue states for real and imaginary profits. The threat of lawsuits for lost corporate profits will have a chilling effect on labor and environmental protection.
The people are too big to fail, not the banks. Risks and bailout costs were shifted to taxpayers. When neoliberalism is rolled back and Orwellian distortion of language and democracy is ended, poverty will be ended through the exercise of true democracy. System change, not climate change is the imperative.
As capitalism grows, inequality grows. Capitalism is an inequality machine (cf. Thomas Piketty). Corporations are sometimes more powerful than nations. In addition to buying back their own stock, corporations store $7 trillion in tax havens and deny local, national and international responsibility and liability. A hundred years ago, the French socialist Jean Juares warned: “Capitalism contains crisis as rain clouds contain rain.”
PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR ORIENTATION: THE FUTURE GUIDES THE PRESENT
Striving for utopia is the hope and motivation of the present. The present transcends itself only when it includes hope and promise. The poor live in two worlds, the world of hope and the world of misery, while the rich live in only one world where the future is only a repetition of the present. Life and reality are not linear or self-evident but pluralist and dependent on interpretation. True wealth is manifest in a larger consciousness of interdependence, empathy, historical awareness and humble openness to liberation.
The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The penultimate draws its strength from the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).
We find ourselves at the end of an epoch without clear signs of the new epoch. How can citizens be promoted and not reduced to consumers? How can the state ensure the food, housing and health necessities and not set corporate welfare and corporate profit above everything? How can education emphasize critical thinking and sustainability and be strengthened with money from a reduced pentagon and a downsized financial sector?
ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS: REDUCING WORKING HOURS, EXCHANGING ROLES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS
Community centers could be a third way beyond the state and the market. Vancouver B.C. has 26 community centers, some with swimming pools that take your breath away. The Carnegie Community Center in the poverty-stricken Downtown East Side is subsidized by the province. There hope is restored and becomes concrete in the real functioning mosaic of interdependence and love of life. Inexpensive meals of casseroles, a library quickly filled to the brim, a computer room offering everyone 3 hours of daily computer use, a basketball gym, a game room, a TV room, a theater and counseling and class opportunities are a life-giving antidote to the non-stop consumerism and cajoling of one-dimensional neoliberal profit worship. The community centers have a cushioning and multiplying effect enabling both working and unemployed to feel integrated and welcomed in the community.
Free Internet books and publishing e-books at Smashwords.com are examples of the new person-oriented alternative digital economics. The gate is taken away from the gatekeepers; e-books have a 30% share of new books today that has stabilized over the last 3 or 4 years. People are reading on screens and not only on the printed page. Openculture.com gives us 700 free movies (including the 1915 “Alice in Wonderland”), 700 free e-books and 450 free audio books (including George Orwell’s “1984”). How can anyone be “hard-nosed” with 700 free movies? Super Amigos is a free Mexican movie from 2007 where the activist refuses anything packaged, goes up against bestial bullfighting, homophobia and eviction of seniors.
Access could replace excess; enough could replace more. The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein). Work, strength, health, power and nature must be re-conceptualized to avert re-feudalization, destruction of democracy and corporate destruction of the environment. As we move into a digital knowledge-based society, qualitative growth can replace quantitative growth. Instead of gazing at the stories of office buildings, we could become storytellers living double vision, universal and particular history.
Music, dance, poetry and literature deserve important places in a post-material de-commodified world. The military-industrial complex and the horror of never-ending war must give way to multicultural interdependence, forgiveness, empathy, surprise, mystery, play and environmental caring.
Reducing working hours, exchanging roles and community centers are vital in a post-growth, post-fossil and post-autistic economy. Person-oriented work and investments in labor-intensive sectors could mark our transition and end exploding inequality.
The demonized social state can be re-discovered as the future of humanity. We are fulfilled in the other, in expanding possibilities and awareness, not in amassing things. Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill.
The state should be the support of the majority, rescuing those who fall under the wheel and blocking private interest from eclipsing public interest. “When the government trusts citizens, citizens trust government,” said Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime Minister. Can we promote the welcoming spirit and not the spirit of fear in a multi-polar world in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static? How can the future become a future of generalized security? How can food, housing, health care be human rights and not privileges? How can sharing replace hyper-individualism, narcissism, self-righteousness and class immunization?
The state is different than a business or a household. The state can become indebted and borrow money from the future so future generations can share the benefits of social investment. Bernie Sanders wants to return people’s taxes in the form of infrastructure and education rather than transfer hundreds of billions to military contractors and he wants to regulate Wall Street and break up the big banks. Two ways the bomb changed everything is that weapons can be de-stabilizing and security cannot be only military.
Without regulation, there would be no healthy forests or fish in the lakes. Markets are not self-healing or panaceas but tools helpful after fundamental political questions are answered democratically: What kind of society do we want? How can competition and cooperation strengthen each other? How can the market, state and work be redefined? How can nature be protected as our partner and our hope and not reduced to a free good, external or sink?
“The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring” (Rilke). “The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory” (Heidegger). “The penultimate depends on the ultimate” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing (Oscar Wilde).
THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK CONFUSED THE GOAT WITH THE GARDENER
The brutal epoch of the neoliberal rollback is ending. State, labor, business, and social myths have caused re-feudalization and destruction of democracy, exploding inequality, insecurity for labor, degradation of the environment and a depressed and cynical populace. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Occupy and Bernie Sanders resisted these myths in their different contexts. In the 1930s Roosevelt brought the economy from ruin to new life by creating four million jobs in two months and building thousands of miles of roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and community centers. Minimum wage, social security and worker protection on the job showed the state could be caring and not only punishing.
Now is the time for counter-measures, for recognizing market failure and state violence, for quantitative easing for the people, for reducing working hours, and abandoning the misplaced trust in profits and corporate beneficence.
A future-friendly and environment-friendly economic policy that abandons myths is necessary along with circulating money. Only then are persons no longer grist to be ground up or “cost factors” to be reduced and CEOs no longer seen as beneficent “job creators.” The social contract and our interdependence are threatened when we tear at each other like rabid wolves and when the public interest is subordinated to the interests of corporations.
Alternative economics emphasizes reducing working hours and investing in the infrastructure. Education spending must be increased to ensure quality of life. Future necessities and the right to work must not be disregarded as labor insecurity becomes more widespread.
Social-economic regulation opposes supply-side trickle-down economics with its social cuts and tax relief for the super-rich. The Asian, Mexican, Argentinean and the Russian crises refute “Forever Number one.” The Washington consensus is exposed as a fraud by the latest financial crisis which results from deregulation, privatization, opening markets and attacking unions.
Instead of expanding education and creating community centers with a multiplier effect, trillions are squandered on wars of choice and bailouts to speculators who stylize themselves as “investors” and “system-relevant.”
The crisis is also a chance to abandon the destruction of nature and the hegemony of financial markets and financial products. The “quiet co-op” of Wall Street and the banks could be countered with new models replacing the rapacious business model and the short-sighted privatization model. The state has a social nature and cannot only be a security and power state or a trough for “achievers” and the super-rich and an “activating — punishing” state for the unemployed.
Thirty years of supply side, trickle-down economics favored capital and speculation and harmed labor. The role of the state, reversing inequality and creating meaningful jobs became taboo subjects with the self-healing market. All problems were stylized as interferences with the market. Private vices were said to produce public good. All life was reduced, commodified or instrumentalized to economic productivity.
Herbert Marcuse (“One Dimensional Man”), Erich Fromm (“Escape from Freedom”) and John Kenneth Galbraith (“The Affluent Society”) could be our mentors as we redefine the economy, the state and future-friendly sustainability. The “Gross Happiness Index” could replace the “Gross Domestic Product.” Progress could be redefined as living simply so others can simply live. Maximization of knowledge could replace maximization of profit. The community centers in Vancouver B.C. could be seen as an advance in social evolution with cushioning and multiplier effects reinvigorating public spirit. Ignorance could be fought, not immigrants
The social state, solidarity, justice and sharing, open doors while neoliberal deregulation and privatization lead to exploding inequality, generalized insecurity and disappearance of public spirit. Corporations could be made taxable again since schools, roads and police protection do not arise out of the blue. Dishwashers do not become millionaires. The state has a vital role to protect people from unemployment, old age poverty and abuse of power.
THE ARC OF HISTORY BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE!
The arc of history bends toward justice (MLK). The welcoming tradition is also part of American history, not only the traditions of fear and personal enrichment.
The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein).
Corporatist democrats seem to be 100% pragmatists and 0% idealists. Lies and trickery darken much of American history. 7.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, 2.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos. According to Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party, Saudi Arabia has purchased $50 billion in armaments over the last decade and Israel receives $8 million of military assistance every day.
The elite never make a mistake; everything is only a learning experience. Bill Clinton said NAFTA would bring 1 million jobs to the US and instead 1 million jobs were lost, subsidized corn was dumped on Mexico and millions of Mexicans could not survive on their small farms. Bill Clinton removed the Glass-Steagal fire wall between commercial and speculative banks, encouraged the creation of money out of thin air and had the gall to write “Back to Work.” Life and death matters, economic theory and truthfulness are secondary to financiers and cardboard politicians bent on their own enrichment. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who will not lead us to WWIII, who has principle, determination, consistency, love of life and love of the future and will help end poverty instead of ending democracy!
The TTIP, TPP and TISA are NAFTA on steroids, corporate rule run amok, refusing to live in a multi-polar world where labor and nature have rights, refusing self-criticism and future-friendly economics, refusing to see market failure and state violence and the self-destruction of profit-worship and the inanity of thinking we are “all bright.” Jean Twenge in her book “The Narcissism Epidemic” explains that narcissism, the cult of specialness, was thought to be the ladder of success while it really is a terrible anti-social blindness that marginalize others and blocks discussion (www.booktv.org).
In Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the state was caring and not punishing and rescued those under the wheel. Minimum wage, social security and worker protection on the job were alternative economic policies in a time of slums and strikes.
Very soon we must find some way besides jobs to distribute the wealth generated by our increasingly automated productivity, something like a guaranteed annual income. But to make any political changes, we have to change the way we think and talk about economic reality. Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can free us from the “one-dimensional” worship of profit and neoliberal indoctrination. Ending poverty, not democracy and system change, not climate change could be our revolutionary songs.
By abandoning myths, false promises, half-truths and fables, we change assumptions, priorities and policies and live in a future-friendly world with generalized security. By discarding distractions and by involvement we become people of hope.
“The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring” (Rilke). “The swan that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory” (Heidegger). “The penultimate depends on the ultimate” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing (Oscar Wilde).
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