Powerful elites always have a justification for their obsessions. In the past emperors, kings, and aristocrats claimed they were God’s chosen. The plutocrats of the modern world have dispensed with God, but they have a philosophy that justifies in their minds the evil they do and the misery they cause: it’s called libertarianism, and Ayn Rand is their prophet. Objectivism is the name she gives to this philosophy. One thing about this pseudo-philosophy is that it is accurately named in that she objectifies people who are not entrepreneurs. She means us to understand the term in the sense that she is looking at the world objectively with no wishy-washy, goodie-two-shoes wishes and hopes obscuring her vision. She thinks human nature is purely selfish, and that any interference in the selfish quest for money, power and success is wrong. She divides humanity into creators and slaves – her objective reality.
Neoliberal libertarianism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of “winners and losers”. Neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right-wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success associated with growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008. From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet – this zero-sum game of winners and losers benefits only the far right.
As Erich Fromm argued, in order for any society to survive it must mold the character of its members in such a way as to make them comply unthinkingly with the dominant world-view. Broader social, economic, political and historical factors that are expressed in our current dominant neoliberal ideology essentially shape not only our understandings of ourselves, but also our understanding of what constitutes health and illness, right and wrong, success and failure. Further, as Fromm warned, if those character traits engendered by the extant socioeconomic system are unhealthy and destructive ones, that system will inevitably produce unhealthy persons and an unhealthy society. Neoliberalism has shaped and encouraged narcissism – creating a cultural shift towards narcissism in the last 40 years – as not merely something to aspire to, but to exalt. But what is it actually doing is destroying us.
Looking once more to Erich Fromm, in his book, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, he eloquently describes how evil is the outcome of a series of choices made that progressively cause one’s heart to harden. Two of the causes for this hardening of the heart are particularly relevant to understanding how neoliberalism has proven destructive to compassion and thus to justice as well. The first is what Fromm calls a love of death. What he means by this is adopting a set of values and beliefs opposed to reverence for life and respect for anything that promotes growth and thriving. This attitude leads such individuals not merely to inflict pain on others, but to seek to have complete control over them and to render them into helpless objects. The goal is to transform persons into things, like possessions. This transformation then facilitates and even justifies humiliating and enslaving them.1
Narcissism reduces everyone to an object to be maneuvered for the narcissist’s pleasure. Rand’s objectivism supports narcissism by demonizing altruism. Neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms, and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programs of redistribution, such as the New Deal, draw from these same principles and values.
This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political economy. Not the economy – rather privatization, monetization, deregulation, generalized competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalized capitalism. Over the last four decades, neoliberal restructuring of the economy created a symbiosis of debt and discipline. New legal regimes and strategic use of monetary policy displaced Keynesian welfare, facilitated financialization of the economy, broke the power of organized labor, and expanded debt to sustain aggregate demand. Republicans, in amplifying the individualist ethos, have amplified these dark, divisive, destructive and unsustainable forces in the body politic. Moreover, the narcissist is typically at a state of constant antagonistic warfare with others in order to assert dominance. Collective narcissists are a group of people who desperately need their group to be admired, and validated by others.
Since the election of President Trump, the Republican Party has become even more brazen in engaging in callous and ruthless acts that lay bare their utter disregard for human dignity and complete moral bankruptcy. Republicans have captured the ideal of American individualism, and taken it to narcissistic extreme. Depriving people of health care, undermining policies and laws to protect the excluded and vulnerable, stripping wealth and resources from those who already struggle under the burden of poverty. They have done more than lost their conscience. They are bereft of compassion and indifferent to justice. However, we must recognize that the insidious undermining of compassion and justice by neoliberalism contaminates all of us to varying degrees. If we confine our condemnation to the egregious actions of the Republicans, and fail to reflect on our own unthinking compliance with the dictates of neoliberalism, can we really hope to reclaim compassion and justice?
Although all concepts are metaphors invented by humans (created to facilitate ease of communication), Nietzsche observes, humans forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe they are ‘true’ and correspond to reality. In the 1980s the word meritocracy was being used approvingly by a range of new-right think tanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the West is the greatest untruth of this day and age.
The rhetoric of neoliberalism is one thing; its reality is something else. The nineteenth century theory of neoliberalism (neoclassical economics) romanticized free markets; its twenty-first century practice (globalization) reveals a world-economy rigged in favor of the ruling classes and multinational corporations, at the terrible expense of the masses, the postmodern wretched of the earth. The normalization of hostile environments signals a worrying and global shift in values of tolerance, empathy, compassion, hospitality and responsibility for the vulnerable. The current symptoms and underlying trends of neoliberalism are hardly unprecedented. In fact, they remind us of the reign of imperialist oligopolies in the world-economy around the turn of the previous century, during the long wave of capitalist expansion from 1893 to 1914 that culminated in structural crisis and ultimately World War I. That crisis is instructive today because it proves that capitalism without planning is unsustainable.
The elaborate conceptual frameworks that guide economic policy-making have their own dynamics, distinct from objective reality. Objective reality can undercut certain ideas as it did in the 1970s, when poorly understood crises undermined the post-war consensus on Keynesianism – but never clearly dictates new ideas. Thus, the turn to neoliberalism and monetarism in 1980s resulted from the simple availability of these ideas incubating in right-wing think tanks more than from their objectively functional solutions to real problems. Inequality has not arisen by accident or due to the chaos of capitalism or ‘globalization’. Ontologically, critical realism holds that reality exists independent of our knowledge of it – critical realism insists that the meaning of such a reality is a social construction. The economic-political philosophy behind the social construction of neoliberal ideals is the determinant factor in preserving the status quo, even after numerous economic crises.
1 Frank Gruba-McCallister. Neoliberal Narcissism: With the Death of Compassion Comes the Death of Justice (3 Dec 2017) https://medium.com/@FrankGrubaMc/neoliberal-narcissism-with-the-death-of-compassion-comes-the-death-of-justice-d50ee4225c17