What About Me?

"One of the extraordinary aspects of neoliberalism is the doctrine—which goes far beyond economics—that the natural form of human organisation is extreme competition and individualism. This doctrine holds that individualism is not just natural but also good, and should be encouraged. Supposedly, any effort of people to organise in combination with each other to create a better world disrupts the natural functioning of what is called ‘the market’, which is a sorting system for deciding who the winners should be and who the losers should be. If you disrupt the market, then the wrong people are identified as the winners, and the wrong people become the losers. “The state of nature (as Hobbes would have called it) for human beings is the exact opposite of what he proposes: we have to work together to survive.” So, it’s an intensely moral doctrine, but one founded on a complete misconception of human nature. It’s a Hobbesian worldview. And when Thomas Hobbes formulated his philosophy in 1651—the notion that we’re engaged in a war of every man against every man, and that in the state of nature our lives were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short—it was understandable because he’d just witnessed the English Civil War in which a high proportion of the men in England were killed. His understanding of human evolution was limited to the book of Genesis, and he subscribed to the doctrine of Original Sin. So, while it was understandable in 1651, it is completely unsustainable in the twenty-first century in which we see an extraordinary conjunction of neuroscience, social science, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology all pointing us in the same direction which is that we are, in the words of an article in Frontiers in Psychology , ‘spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals’, in that we are fantastically altruistic and socially minded. The state of nature (as Hobbes would have called it) for human beings is the exact opposite of what he proposes: we have to work together to survive. Here we were in the African savannahs, the slowest and weakest of all the large mammals, living in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. The only way we survived was through extreme reciprocity and mutual aid. That is deeply implanted in our psyches. We have an innate tendency to help each other, and we prosper by doing so. So, neoliberalism is founded on a complete myth. But it’s a myth that has been very successfully propounded through the media and by the government. It’s a story which we keep being told until we start telling it to ourselves, and imagining that this is how it ought to be. But it turns out, as Verhaeghe demonstrates, that we can’t actually live like that. If we tell ourselves we are lone rangers, sole traders, self-made men and women living in complete isolation, our psyches collapse and we end up with epidemics of mental health problems. We end up simply being unable to sustain our inner lives. This leads to a whole series of social phobias, obsessive compulsive disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and self-harm. We see that—as happens so often in societies—it is children that bear the brunt of social trends. We’re now seeing in Britain, for example, what appear to be epidemics of mental health problems amongst children. When you look at the admissions of children to Accident and Emergency departments because of self-harming, the levels of eating disorders, and the complete inability to find beds for children with severe mental health problems, you see that something bad is happening. What Verhaeghe proposes is that we have internalised the neoliberal narrative and it simply does not work for us. I think that’s right. Interestingly, by the time Hayek came to write his book The Constitution of Liberty , he had completely given up on the idea of meritocracy. He simply equated wealth with merit. It didn’t matter how you acquired that wealth—whether you inherited it, or whether you or your parents stole it. The fact of being rich was a demonstration of merit, and the rich should be unimpeded in the way they wanted to live because they would be the scouts or pioneers who would show everybody else how to live. It’s interesting that, as the doctrines of neoliberalism evolved, their purpose became more and more transparent. Originally, neoliberals claimed that they wanted a meritocracy as a justifying rhetoric. But in fact, the last thing they wanted was a true meritocracy, as that would threaten the very rich. There were billionaires funding the neoliberal international all over the world to huge amounts: setting up think tanks to promote it, establishing academic departments and sponsoring academics, and promoting it through their newspapers. What they wanted was an unassailable position for the very rich. They wanted the very rich to be able to detach themselves from the demands and constraints of democracy. Similarly, the last thing Theresa May wants is a true meritocracy. Yet there are elements of the original neoliberal doctrine which still run through modern neoliberal ideology. These say that we have to create elite educational institutions in order to discover merit in people. And, of course, this sets up almost impossible expectations for a lot of children, pressure to which no child should be subject. This is a factory style of education where children, having been rescued from the looms of the cotton towns, are now forced to a similar system of absurd working hours and all the devastating complications that arise from that. And we’ve ended up creating severe mental health issues. One of the interesting points that Verhaeghe makes is that neoliberalism was supposed to free us from the stifling control of bureaucracy, but that it has had the opposite effect. This is because, in order to discern merit, you have to have total monitoring and surveillance. So, in the workforce, if you want to establish who are the most productive workers, you have to keep tabs on them at all times. There has to be constant quantification and assessment, which requires constant monitoring and micromanagement. If you look in any public service, for example, you will see people being absolutely crushed by this stifling regime of micromanagement. It’s the same in much of the private sector as well. Well, so much for freeing us from bureaucracy…"