Na zdrowie?
EDIT: As an aside, I saw someone linking this commentary on neoliberalism earlier.
Now, is it just me, or... Is this thing really rather difficult to read? I mean, I can read it, but I'm having a hard time getting any real meaning out of the words. I'm not sure how enlightened I feel by the whole affair, or that I could now accurately describe what exactly neoliberalism is.
It looks like somebody swallowed a book on buzzwords, then vomited it into the internet.
I don't know. I'm having no problem reading any of that. It's quite clear. There are some big words but the meaning is clear. even for a sentence like this:
There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.
the utopian ideal of the free market
... refers to the (very real) neoliberal and right-wing libertarian veneration of the concept of markets to almost religious level of zeal.
the dystopian present in which we find ourselves
... Trump, Brexit and all the stuff going on now
the market as unique discloser of value
... refers to the neoliberal / libertarian belief that only markets expose the true value of something. It's "unique" because they claim any other non-market mechanism must be a distortion of the "true value" of the things. Which only markets reveal, apparently.
guardian of liberty
"markets = freedom", basically. Very common part of the neoliberal rhetoric. Anything that impedes markets whatsoever is "anti-freedom". If people are starving and you hand out food, you're screwing over the market for people who currently have all the food, so you're a freedom-hating commie.
our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.
Kind of speaks for itself. The big picture from the article however is that neoliberal ideas aren't just some obscure economic policy ideas relevant to banks and governments, it's a "lens" through which society is viewed: a paradigm. The language and abstractions of corporate markets are applied to literally every facet of life, and to do otherwise is viewed as you being a luddite or an apostate. for example, in neoliberalism, you view religion as a marketplace, so the lens is that individuals "freely decide" which religion they want to be based "maximizing the value that the choice delivers" to the individual for choosing that religion. Concepts like self-sacrifice for some greater good become unthinkable in a paradigm like this, so we almost go crazy thinking about people who sacrificed their life for some ideal (whether that's a nation or a religion or anything else), since they obviously didn't maximize their "market self value" like good honest right-thinkers: since all men are corporations, and what corporations do is maximize the value for their shareholders (which is yourself in the individual example) then self-sacrifice is clearly crazy-think. Machiavelli's The Prince is the basic life-guide for everyone from corporate chairmen down to kindergarten kids in this new paradigm.
As for the "descent into post-truth and illiberalism" this is coming from both sides of the political spectrum, and is largely a reaction against the current paradigm mentioned in the article. Both sides have different rhetoric to describe the problem however.
I'll cite for example Ariele Schlesinger, the feminist tech evangelist, who wrote that designing human-machine interfaces on the basis of usability and/or efficiency is "capitalist". Which sounds bizarre, since there's no capitalist mechanism at work in using metrics to design a good UI system, but what she was calling out was really the value-system that underlies how we talk about things always using the language of the market: it's been so ingrained that we cannot perceive how we could
not use that language to describe things. We talk about "time management" and "efficiency" and being "organized" in our daily lives, which are corporate-speak.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14513192 times)