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Neoliberal Individuals

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Index to posts in this series

Note: This post may be helpful in understanding the ideas here and in other posts in this series.

Many of my early posts at Emptywheel were devoted to  neoliberalism. I focused on its impact on the national economy. I saw it as the intellectual (I use the term loosely) force behind the deregulation policies of both legacy parties in the post-Reagan era. These policies gave us several financial crashes that hurt millions of Americans. Also, they gave us at least 813 billionaires who have taken control of our government.

I thought that the success of Biden’s Keynesian economic policies proved once and for all that neoliberalism was trash. I was wrong.

Neoliberalism had another deadly barb: homo economicus. This cursed idea is that human beings are isolated rational consumers focused on maximizing their own utility in head-to-head conflict with other consumers. This is a stupid, evil idea. I thought that even religious fundamentalists would reject it because their preachers insist that humans were created in the image of the Almighty, and conflict-based consumption could never be an attribute of an all-powerful Deity. I was wrong.

People who hold this view of themselves think that everything they have is the result of their own actions, and is the just reward for their goodness and risk-taking. If they have little or nothing, it’s their own fault. They aren’t good enough at the conflict, and deserve what they get.

An ideal alternative

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition lays out a better view of human nature. I say better because it emphasizes the potential of our species. In my last post I quoted this summary of her thinking on our current situation.

For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …

Snip

Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.

Arendt thinks we have lost  the source of our power as human beings. In Chapter 28, she says that our power comes from our ability to engage with each other in the public sphere by speech and action. Power disappears when that ability is not present. She writes:

What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. Kindle Edition p. 200, my paragraphing.

I read Arendt as saying that we have the ability to make and enforce decisions as a group, but only if we are prepared to meet each other in open discussion, in a setting where “words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities” and actions are used “to create new realities”. I think she is saying that we have lost this capacity.

Arendt contrasts forms of government arising from her conception of power with tyranny. Chairman Mao said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Arendt disagrees. She says that isn’t power, it’s violence.

Tyrants destroy power by isolating the tyrant from the subjects, and by isolating the subjects from each other. The primary tool of the tyrant is violence, which, she says, is stronger than power. Subjects might be able to pursue their own interests in arts, crafts, or manufacture. But they are impotent, they lack the power to  dream new dreams, to create new realities. She says  that the tyrant has the ability even to take from the subjects their own projects. This is what happened in George Orwell’s 1984.

Discussion

1. The theoretical framework of Arendt’s views of power seems to harmonize with my story of human evolution through cooperation.

2. There is no place for speaking and acting in our current political structure. The Republicans are a top-down group. The rubes who support it take their marching orders from its lieutenants, especially right-wing preachers, right-wing talking heads, and the incredible array of anti-vaxxers, Qrazies, and grifters on right-wing social media. They gain power by isolating their voters from alternative views.

The Democratic Party is just as bad, but in a different way. How many times have you written a legislator on an issue and gotten a reply email saying thank you for your interest I love to hear from you little people vote for me and give me money now go buy stuff?

There are plenty of smart people identifying problems and offering solutions, and plenty more working to sharpen those ideas. But professional Democrats don’t listen. They pat you on the head and smirk behind their hands. When things don’t go their way they blame you. We have forged places to do this public work, but we are ignored by the rich people and out-of-date incumbents who dominate the party..

Democratic politicians do not see the left as an element of power. I have no idea where they think power comes from. Money? Incumbency? Their magnetic personalities?

2. The people who voted for Trump are responsible for our immediate situation. They refused to participate in good faith in the political system. Their motivation is irrelevant. They want something and like good neoliberals they don’t care how they get it. Politics is a field of conflict, just like the fight for resources. They have internalized the neoliberal view of themselves as chimpanzees fighting over a termite mound.

If that means supporting a tyrant, then fine. The tyrant will crush their competitors and give them what they want.

3. The people who didn’t vote in the last election abdicated their own potential power and their own capacity to participate in power. They quietly submit to whatever damage Trump and his henchmen inflict on them and their families. They have internalized the second part of Homo Economicus: they believe they deserve whatever happens to them. They are passive and unseeing, unable even to recognize the depravity of their treatment.

4. I think both Trump voters and non-voters are to blame for our current situation. They cannot escape their responsibility and I will not excuse their behavior.

But they didn’t act randomly. Their attitudes are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads.
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Front page image by Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,

Expressions Of Individuality In Democracy

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Index to posts in this series

I gave a tentative description of what it means to be an individual here, including speculation about mechanisms.  In this post, I will add some detail on mechanisms, and try to sharpen up the notion of individuality.

More on mechanisms

In his book The Evolution of Agency, Michael Tomasello describes self-monitoring as a feedback loop. We set a goal, then form a plan to reach the goal, and self-monitor to see how well the plan is working. Setting goals and making plans can also be seen as feedback loops. We consider possibilities,, consider their ramifications, and choose. Self-monitoring systems can be used to rank and to modify goals. The process of setting goals also seems close to the neuronal firing I discussed in the linked post.

That description suggests that our brains operate with nested and linked feedback loops. Years ago I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. There are lengthy discussions of Bach fugues, Escher’s astonishing prints, and Gödel’s theorems. It left me with a strong sense that our neuronal structures use recursion to formulate plans.

In math, a recursive function is a series of calculations using a single equation. The value of the equation is first calculated using a seed. Next the equation is calculated again, using the result of the first calculation. This process continues until the result of two consecutive iterations is the same, or until the value gets too large. The Mandelbrot Set is reached by such a function. The calculations start with a simple equation, and each point in the plane is defined by whether the calculations converge or grow to infinity.

We can compare Tomasello’s feedback loops to Hofstadter’s recursion. The crucial point for our purposes is that small changes in the initial conditions of both might (or might not) produce radically different outcomes.

There are, I think, limits to the amount of variation in human brains. We have physical limitations at every level of our existence, and presumably that’s true of our brain activity. From birth we train our brains to do the things we need to do to survive. That strengthens certain neural activity and weakens the possibility of other, different thoughts and actions. This comment by community member PeaceRme gives an excellent description of the impact of domestic violence on people’s thought processes.

Tomasello says social norms play a large role in determining our behaviors. We are likely to try to conform our actions and our thinking to the norms of our group. When a person’s brain produces actions that are too far outside the range our society thinks is normal, we consider the person sick and take action to protect ourselves from them, maybe even to try to heal them.

Of course, this is all rank speculation. I enjoy the speculation; it’s fun to think about things you don’t fully understand. It’s delightful when things you’ve read at different times and for different reasons seem to fit together.

A closer look at individuality

Several commenters point out that people show individuality in their personal lives, so what’s my point. This comment by community member Eschscholzia is an excellent example. Another way to see this is to look at random bios on Bluesky. People describe themselves in terms of their interests, favorite sports teams, or basic political stances. These are indeed facets of individuality.

When I started this series, I was thinking that the question was something like: what part of your persona consists of choices you made after due consideration, and what part are habits you learned without conscious choice. For example, I have thought a lot about why I support democracy. On the other hand, I never thought about why I don’t like celery. I just don’t like it so there. I have given at least some thought to almost all of my political views. I give very little thought to choosing sports teams.

I think some things are more important than others. Democracy is more important than celery. The things that establish the conditions under which we all live are more important than the activities that give us pleasure. So, democracy is more important than my singing career.

I’ve been trying to read The Human Condition (1956) by Hannah Arendt. Shortly after I started it, I read a discussion of the book in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to get an overview of the book.

Arendt thinks we have lost something important in the current era, something she sees in the past. This is from the linked article.

For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …

Snip

Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.

Arendt describes the active life as consisting of three parts — labor, work, and action. Labor is the things we do to keep ourselves functioning, sleeping, bathing, eating. Work is the things we do to produce goods and services necessary or useful in our daily lives. Action is, in essence, our participation in public life. There we use our rational skills in politics, poetry, the other arts, In the process make ourselves, our true selves, known to others, and, I think, indirectly to ourselves.

Arendt thinks that action is the most important aspect of our existence. As to politics, she thinks the ancient Greeks had the power to make joint decisions about crucial matters, from war to the rules that make society better.

She thinks the rise of totalitarian states, the rise of huge bureaucracies, and a change in our relation to work have changed us. We focus on material goods and our groups of friends and family, and we forego the power to plan for our future as a species.

I think this is right. Our highest and best calling is to contribute our thinking and our actions to making a society that will be better for us, all of us, and our children, all of our children. Of course that isn’t our sole goal, we want and need to attend to all our abilities, including the ability to experience pleasure.

Democracy gives us the opportunity to do both. We should consider our individuality to consist of our power of reason, our experience, and all our personal qualities, those we display in our family life, and among our friends. All democracy asks of us is that we use that individuality to form a shared intersubjective conception of reality, to identify our problems, and to devise solutions. We have the tools. We just need the will.