Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
The problem with bait-and-switch accounts is that they compartmentalize everyday experience in a way that utterly misconstrues how neoliberalism works. Tom Frank in an earlier incarnation had seemingly understood this: “Making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural and political operation as an economic one”; it was only when he artificially set them at odds that he attained best-sellerdom with Kansas, but at the price of losing his way. The core insight of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was that the cultural and the economic should not be treated as substitutes, much less discrete spheres of experience, but rather, as integrated into a virtuous whole: surrender your selfish arrogance and humbly prostrate yourself before the Wisdom of the Universe, as nurtured and conveyed by the market. “Be all you can be” had jettisoned the injunction to “know yourself” and replaced it with “Start your own business!” even if it only meant homeschooling your children. As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and “values” assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solid “interests” melted into thin air. After all, neoliberals deny that you are the unimpeachable judge of your own welfare, however much they worship at the altar of Freedom. The more the line between “The Sphere Previously Known as the Economic” and culture or religion was progressively obscured and erased, the more irreversible the neoliberal long march. Conversely, if citizens believed that the game was rigged and the fix was in, now the only way they could manage to express it would be with variants upon the dogma that the Government was encroaching upon the ever-flexible and blameless Me. Collective nouns were being slowly leached from usage in the language. The ideal neoliberal agent was a person who didn’t even need to know she was neoliberal, because the various aspects of her selfhood were conceived as being in natural harmony with the totality of the kosmos, whether she consciously aspired to be wicked vanguard rebel or placid conformist. As Foucault so aptly summarized it, “There is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship of self to self.”31
This may explain why Frank’s Pity the Billionaire comes off as such a letdown: he senses that something deep and structural is permitting the neoliberals to escape scot-free from the crisis, and it possibly has something to do with general comprehension of everyday life, but the best he can muster is endless sneering jibes launched at Glenn Beck and Ayn Rand. He can’t be bothered to immerse himself in what the neoliberal theorists and right-wing economists have written, and consequently misconstrues neoliberalism as the most superficial “rollback of the state”; in the language of the previous chapter, he never gets beyond the exoteric doctrines of the thought collective. Worse, he then attributes the political strength of the neoliberal resurgence to the superficial facts that many in the Tea Party get their information only from Beck and Fox News, combined with the notion that hoi polloi expected some breast-beating and bankster-roasting after the crisis, but that the Democratic Party declined to provide it. He quotes, but does not take to heart, the ambition of the leader of the Koch-funded Freedom Works, Dick Armey, “not just to learn from their opponents on the left, but to beat them at their own game.”32
The Rise of the Neoliberal Agent is not very easy to gloss, by any means. Anytime one resorts to Belief/Action scenarios, three centuries of philosophical qualifications loom, not to mention social psychology as indicated in chapter 1, threatening to freeze the argument in its tracks. And then there are the various objections that harry the attempt to draw determinants from political considerations. There is the recurrent unwillingness in giving up hard and fast distinctions between the economy and the world of the spirit, as we have been describing. There is the crucial distinction between the esoteric and exoteric versions of neoliberal doctrine, as outlined in the last chapter. The average person may be encouraged to believe all sorts of things about the government that have no correspondence to the esoteric neoliberal playbook, or untethered from any facts, for instance, and this is a key aspect of the construction of a viable neoliberal self under the sway of the double-truth doctrine. The average citizen severely underestimates the amount of their livelihood that comes from the government; and are utterly deluded about their current place in the distribution of income and wealth. There is the wild card of globalization: How much of the outlines of neoliberal agency has been contingent upon the cultures of the hegemonic centers of capital, curious artifacts of the parochial peccadilloes of its incubators, and how much can be regarded as a new model for cosmopolitan existence in a world that persists in thinking it shrugs off the trappings of the nation-state? There is a literature, located particularly in anthropology, which preaches that cosmopolitan aspirations of neoliberal “reforms” are deceptive, because more often than not they are predicated upon minor reconfigurations of long-standing local practices.33 And then there is the difficult question of just to what extent these particular innovations in agency are relatively new, and how much they come lumbered with a long, hallowed heritage, which obviously intersects with the question of the extent to which the NTC can legitimately appeal to small-c “conservatism” in its older Burkean sense. Does the neoliberal self have an archetype, or a birthday? With everyone from Jesus CEO to the “Founding Fathers” undergoing retreads, facelifts, and résumé rewrites, challenging the historical authenticity of many of the icons of neoliberal selfhood could become a full-time operation on its own.
These questions are all important, and deserve serious consideration, but this chapter is not the place to attempt to settle them. Friedrich Hayek once claimed to be able to separate “true” liberalism from its “false” pretender; I have far less confidence in my own ability to accomplish anything similar for neoliberalism. My more limited goal here is to establish some of the most salient facets of neoliberalism with a human face in the early twenty-first century. It is far too premature to write the definitive biography of the neoliberal self, so in lieu of comprehensive cultural history, perhaps we can peruse a few quotidian snapshots from various angles and profiles. Think of it as Five or So Vignettes on the Life and Times of John Galt.
The proof of the project will not come in adherence to some Identikit notion of accuracy, but rather with personal recognition of the subconscious prompts that lurk in each of our own lives, the attitudes that have grown to be the unremarkable furniture of waking life, and their possible instrumentality when it comes down to acquiescence in the neoliberal wisdom of crowds. The advent of the neoliberal way of being quite literally transforms the subject, and consequently, inhibits all tendencies to interpret the crisis as a system-wide failure of economic organization.
Five Vignettes from the Life of John Galt
A) The Freedom That Comes from Fragmentation.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective, as suggested in the last chapter, interprets freedom in a largely negative fashion, while simultaneously elevating freedom as the ultimate value. While this observation has become commonplace in the literature on political philosophy, that commentary has been strangely silent on how neoliberals have come to abjure or otherwise avoid the salience of positive liberty. The key to comprehension of the neutralization of time-honored traditions of positive liberty comes with the progressive fragmentation of the self, both in economic theory and in everyday life. The moral quest to discover your one and only “true self” has been rendered thoroughly obsolete by the reengineering of everyday life, and that, in turn, is the fons et origo of most characteristics of everyday neoliberalism.
I start with the notion that definitions of private property are bound up with the presumed definition of the self. The classical liberal approach to this question has been admirably summarized by Margaret Radin:
I have used the term “personal property” to refer to categories of property that we understand to be bound up with the self in a way that we understand to be morally justifiable . . . Since personal property is connected with the self, morally justifiably, in a constitutive way, to disconnect it from the person (from the self) harms or destroys the self. The more something takes on the indicia of an attribute or characteristic of the self, or at least the self as the person herself would wish, the more problematic it seems to alienate it . . .34
Radin builds upon this observation to argue in favor of imposition of spheres of “incomplete commodification,” and to prohibit some markets altogether, such as the selling of human infants. The Rosetta Stone of neoliberalism