Good piece Brett. Neoliberalism is a kind of social carcinogen. It eats away at the norms and laws that make healthy communities possible. Forty+ years of rampant neoliberal ideology have led to the rapidly metastasizing malignant community degradation happening now in the US. Curiously Karl Polanyi essentially elucidated this process in 1946 in “The Great Transformation.”
Great piece. "I have a long and complex history with libertarianism, because - socially and emotionally - I’ve often come close to its ideal. I’m what you might call a lone wolf, someone historically wary of social ties." Totally. George Sand used to say this about herself. She learned to live with the contradiction - weary of society even when one must advocate for it - after the failure of 1848. You might like some of her letters at the time!
Bit sceptical of the focus on the brain, as if to say it's minds and not human beings that seek and enjoy the company of others.
Two quotes for you:
The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
-- Iris M.
The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright colour that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part of it-all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree that he plants is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products...he has no regrets about leaving the place he has dwelled in for years.
--Talleyrand (cited in Calssso's The Ruin of Kasch).
Also, currently reading Peter Fleming's Capitalism and Nothingness. I really think the bourgeois individual of Econ 101 is over.
The supreme stupidity of libertarianism is that it requires utter and complete ignorance of both human biology and anthropology to believe it for more than a nanosecond.
This is excellent, thanks. I think it's really valuable to look at things through this sort of lens, because the same fault lines run through society and the individual. (As above, so below...) You really get some of that tension of the push-pull binary that is reflected in so many aspects of the world right now.
It prompted the reflection that although from one perspective, the general experience of life is of an ever-more atomised and alienated individual; from another, it seems as if there is more and more unconscious zombie-like herd behaviour, and most people are less and less able to act as 'real' individuals with their own free will, discernment, and expression of personal taste. It seems as if they are becoming more individual - everyone is told that they are becoming more individual - yet in so many ways, the opposite is happening.
This is the view which at extreme sees people as sheep, meekly following consensus, government, news, entertainment media, and marketing, and not making their own mind up for themselves. Of course, this very often rapidly becomes a strong binary opposition, with too much tension for any ambiguity, middle ground, or both-and thinking. And the choices that define whether someone is a 'real' individual or not are themselves quite limited, normally constructed to maintain the safety of an outsider identity. Which, ironically, is often very willing to unquestioningly follow the opinions of anyone who declares themselves against the mainstream, however bizarrely dissonant - perhaps the more dissonant and offensive the better. This feels like hardcore avoidant behaviour, the terrible fear of being overwhelmed by the state-family, which found in Communism a great screen for projecting onto. And is easily manipulable, despite part of the identity being that one has escaped manipulation.
Yet both these perspectives can, in balance, offer some truth and value - a healthy collective can only be formed of healthy individuals, and at the same time a healthy collective helps form healthy individuals.
Even the idea of individual, as it's being sold to us, seems off - a large part of the sleight-of-hand, masking a position of either consumer or resister. (And as you demonstrate, most people are in some degree both).
For libertarians, a stance of "I'm not like them" maintains and feeds the avoidant dynamic with the huge devouring mother culture, which threatens to take away all sense of self and identity. For those nestled safely in the bosom of that culture, the bewildering illusion of choice and agency as a consumer and voter seems as if it's fractally increasing, though only really in the sphere of lifestyle, while, as you show, all the complexity that feeds into actually reduces the consciousness of direct relationship with the world. Their will and ability to choose is being consumed by the culture that holds them, and the illusion of choice and individuality, and the anxiety that goes along with that functions as distraction from that process.
And the push-pull nature of the anxious-avoidant dynamic is highly destabilising and disempowering, not to mention abusive. It's a classic cult technique for psychological manipulation and removing people's wills. To go back to developmental psychology, unclear boundaries between parent and child create a huge amount of anxiety - what is my responsibility, what am I liable to be punished for, what am I allowed to do, all really parts of the greater "who am I?" The response to this anxiety is either to attach more strongly to a parent figure, or angrily over-assert boundaries, or a confusion of the two...
Community is essential to humanity - they are, really, the same interdependence, as you say so well - but it can also be a site of great blindness and unconsciousness, and hide a huge amount of toxicity and harm, so sometimes I find the opposing perspective can be very illuminating. In some ways I share your lone wolf tendencies and yet I've also (perhaps because of that) come from a few years of passionately seeking greater community participation, in large part inspired by experiences with indigenous communities. But right now I find myself in a moment of drawing back a little, and noting that the images of both individual and collective, as represented in the world at large, seem highly corrupted and lacking - and that there is something in the right's praise of self-suffiency that might in fact be neccesary to form healthier bonds of interdependency.
Bravo for such an intriguing way to explain the economy with the attachment theory, Brett. I studied the theory as well for personal/psychological reason but I never related it to the economy. And now reading your essay, everything clicked. The unhealthy attachments make us feel uneasy but we can't just leave, can we. Numbers 1 and 2 are my coping mechanisms 😭, feeling empty/helpless while marching forward with asceticism and David Goggins' motivational thinking :D
Oh, man - thank you! I'm still reading but this really cleared up a fog/confusion for me re: the whole market forces:
"The changing of their ‘heart and soul’ involved getting them to see themselves as atomized individuals who wouldn’t stand in the way of the natural forces of ‘free markets’, which - if left to run - were supposed to revitalize the world and bring spontaneous order and progress."
The whole debate about market forces avoids the whole question of what's actually natural and supports life. (That's the epiphany.)
Fantastic read! Spot on. Brilliantly explained and echoes my thinking, which I struggle to adequately articulate. Ps I’m an avoidant lone wolf as well 🐺
Loved this. The exhaustion of the constant role-switching is one thing that hit home with me; I imagine that it's easier to be a free, empowered consumer when you haven't spent all day anxiously fawning at a job. Not to mention that said business 'innovation' seems to be mostly dedicated to creating new things and ways to foster addiction and thus undermine/shorten those time periods spent in avoidance for consumers, or existential panic for the producer. And then, those of us in customer service can deal with the fallout from everyone's emotional rollercoasters, since, of course, we freely chose to be here! Huzzah.
Also appreciate the call out of the libertarian underpinnings of self-help. I've found frequent straight-up denial of economic precarity as a source of anxiety in the genre (i.e. "you're not getting chased by a lion, it's just your monkey mind telling you you're unsafe" is a common refrain) but your framing explains that as well - it's not acknowledging anything systemic or chronic as even existing in our case, and in fact will depict those in stable economies as the ones cowering in constant fear!
Good thinking, thanks! But somewhat complicated too.
I have a hunch that we over-fixate on the discourse of "the individual vs. the collective", matching our familiar right-left narrative.
Instead, we might benefit from thinking more in terms of "rights vs. duties". We are clearly overemphasizing rights - on all camps of Western society.
Without a consistent moral theory of consequence, like universal karma of Indian philosophy, we drift quite easily to either rights, or forced duties, which both look "individualistic" on the surface.
Good piece Brett. Neoliberalism is a kind of social carcinogen. It eats away at the norms and laws that make healthy communities possible. Forty+ years of rampant neoliberal ideology have led to the rapidly metastasizing malignant community degradation happening now in the US. Curiously Karl Polanyi essentially elucidated this process in 1946 in “The Great Transformation.”
Great piece. "I have a long and complex history with libertarianism, because - socially and emotionally - I’ve often come close to its ideal. I’m what you might call a lone wolf, someone historically wary of social ties." Totally. George Sand used to say this about herself. She learned to live with the contradiction - weary of society even when one must advocate for it - after the failure of 1848. You might like some of her letters at the time!
Can you do an article on how our monetary system is and/or is not like an ecosystem? I'd love to see what you can shake out of that.
Interesting and insightful. Thank you for writing this.
Glad you found it useful
So much to chew on!
Bit sceptical of the focus on the brain, as if to say it's minds and not human beings that seek and enjoy the company of others.
Two quotes for you:
The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
-- Iris M.
The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright colour that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part of it-all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree that he plants is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products...he has no regrets about leaving the place he has dwelled in for years.
--Talleyrand (cited in Calssso's The Ruin of Kasch).
Also, currently reading Peter Fleming's Capitalism and Nothingness. I really think the bourgeois individual of Econ 101 is over.
Solid piece, thank you!
It makes me think of Gebser's observations about the limitations of the "mental-rational" mind and we may be seeing the catastrophe he prophesied.
Had some commenters point to a similar trend under a psycho-political piece today:
https://open.substack.com/pub/heyslick/p/the-technate-of-north-america?r=4t921l&utm_medium=ios
Excellent work here. Looking forward to the next one! ✊
The supreme stupidity of libertarianism is that it requires utter and complete ignorance of both human biology and anthropology to believe it for more than a nanosecond.
This is excellent, thanks. I think it's really valuable to look at things through this sort of lens, because the same fault lines run through society and the individual. (As above, so below...) You really get some of that tension of the push-pull binary that is reflected in so many aspects of the world right now.
It prompted the reflection that although from one perspective, the general experience of life is of an ever-more atomised and alienated individual; from another, it seems as if there is more and more unconscious zombie-like herd behaviour, and most people are less and less able to act as 'real' individuals with their own free will, discernment, and expression of personal taste. It seems as if they are becoming more individual - everyone is told that they are becoming more individual - yet in so many ways, the opposite is happening.
This is the view which at extreme sees people as sheep, meekly following consensus, government, news, entertainment media, and marketing, and not making their own mind up for themselves. Of course, this very often rapidly becomes a strong binary opposition, with too much tension for any ambiguity, middle ground, or both-and thinking. And the choices that define whether someone is a 'real' individual or not are themselves quite limited, normally constructed to maintain the safety of an outsider identity. Which, ironically, is often very willing to unquestioningly follow the opinions of anyone who declares themselves against the mainstream, however bizarrely dissonant - perhaps the more dissonant and offensive the better. This feels like hardcore avoidant behaviour, the terrible fear of being overwhelmed by the state-family, which found in Communism a great screen for projecting onto. And is easily manipulable, despite part of the identity being that one has escaped manipulation.
Yet both these perspectives can, in balance, offer some truth and value - a healthy collective can only be formed of healthy individuals, and at the same time a healthy collective helps form healthy individuals.
Even the idea of individual, as it's being sold to us, seems off - a large part of the sleight-of-hand, masking a position of either consumer or resister. (And as you demonstrate, most people are in some degree both).
For libertarians, a stance of "I'm not like them" maintains and feeds the avoidant dynamic with the huge devouring mother culture, which threatens to take away all sense of self and identity. For those nestled safely in the bosom of that culture, the bewildering illusion of choice and agency as a consumer and voter seems as if it's fractally increasing, though only really in the sphere of lifestyle, while, as you show, all the complexity that feeds into actually reduces the consciousness of direct relationship with the world. Their will and ability to choose is being consumed by the culture that holds them, and the illusion of choice and individuality, and the anxiety that goes along with that functions as distraction from that process.
And the push-pull nature of the anxious-avoidant dynamic is highly destabilising and disempowering, not to mention abusive. It's a classic cult technique for psychological manipulation and removing people's wills. To go back to developmental psychology, unclear boundaries between parent and child create a huge amount of anxiety - what is my responsibility, what am I liable to be punished for, what am I allowed to do, all really parts of the greater "who am I?" The response to this anxiety is either to attach more strongly to a parent figure, or angrily over-assert boundaries, or a confusion of the two...
Community is essential to humanity - they are, really, the same interdependence, as you say so well - but it can also be a site of great blindness and unconsciousness, and hide a huge amount of toxicity and harm, so sometimes I find the opposing perspective can be very illuminating. In some ways I share your lone wolf tendencies and yet I've also (perhaps because of that) come from a few years of passionately seeking greater community participation, in large part inspired by experiences with indigenous communities. But right now I find myself in a moment of drawing back a little, and noting that the images of both individual and collective, as represented in the world at large, seem highly corrupted and lacking - and that there is something in the right's praise of self-suffiency that might in fact be neccesary to form healthier bonds of interdependency.
Bravo for such an intriguing way to explain the economy with the attachment theory, Brett. I studied the theory as well for personal/psychological reason but I never related it to the economy. And now reading your essay, everything clicked. The unhealthy attachments make us feel uneasy but we can't just leave, can we. Numbers 1 and 2 are my coping mechanisms 😭, feeling empty/helpless while marching forward with asceticism and David Goggins' motivational thinking :D
The -isms of it all!
Oh, man - thank you! I'm still reading but this really cleared up a fog/confusion for me re: the whole market forces:
"The changing of their ‘heart and soul’ involved getting them to see themselves as atomized individuals who wouldn’t stand in the way of the natural forces of ‘free markets’, which - if left to run - were supposed to revitalize the world and bring spontaneous order and progress."
The whole debate about market forces avoids the whole question of what's actually natural and supports life. (That's the epiphany.)
Fantastic read! Spot on. Brilliantly explained and echoes my thinking, which I struggle to adequately articulate. Ps I’m an avoidant lone wolf as well 🐺
Loved this. The exhaustion of the constant role-switching is one thing that hit home with me; I imagine that it's easier to be a free, empowered consumer when you haven't spent all day anxiously fawning at a job. Not to mention that said business 'innovation' seems to be mostly dedicated to creating new things and ways to foster addiction and thus undermine/shorten those time periods spent in avoidance for consumers, or existential panic for the producer. And then, those of us in customer service can deal with the fallout from everyone's emotional rollercoasters, since, of course, we freely chose to be here! Huzzah.
Also appreciate the call out of the libertarian underpinnings of self-help. I've found frequent straight-up denial of economic precarity as a source of anxiety in the genre (i.e. "you're not getting chased by a lion, it's just your monkey mind telling you you're unsafe" is a common refrain) but your framing explains that as well - it's not acknowledging anything systemic or chronic as even existing in our case, and in fact will depict those in stable economies as the ones cowering in constant fear!
Good thinking, thanks! But somewhat complicated too.
I have a hunch that we over-fixate on the discourse of "the individual vs. the collective", matching our familiar right-left narrative.
Instead, we might benefit from thinking more in terms of "rights vs. duties". We are clearly overemphasizing rights - on all camps of Western society.
Without a consistent moral theory of consequence, like universal karma of Indian philosophy, we drift quite easily to either rights, or forced duties, which both look "individualistic" on the surface.
Great piece. There are miseries in the economic system but trying to understand them is fun and we should all be enjoying the learning.
So that's my piece of self help advice. Oops, sorry, delete the "self" bit. That's my help advice.
Looking forward to the next one.