People often seem to talk as if some form of democracy was inherent in the future, whether it is based the current neoliberal form of energy use, or whether it becomes based in renewable decentralised energy. There is no necessity for this assumption. It is probably more accurate, and analytically useful, to assume the politics of transition will be complicated.
The Right, Climate & Ecology
Rightwing politics, and in particular right wing authoritarianism is often tied in with climate denial, postponement of climate action, support for ecological destruction and support for fossil fuels. They will not even accept that their sacred market seems to be in favour of renewables, they just plough taxpayers money into fossil fuels, and try and inhibit development of renewable energy through regulation and legislation. They also repeal regulation that stops ecological destruction. Conservative politics in the UK and Germany, can assume that conservation is possible, while the supposed Left in the English Speaking world (ie the Democrats, Labour and Labor), are less hostile to climate action but are still rarely pro-active. In Australia climate action can be joined to support for coal which endangers limited and precarious water supplies for major cities, and the Labor party can support the Narrabri coal seam gas project, and coal for export. It risks much less powerful opposition from the mining sector.
It would appear that many people think neoliberal capitalism cannot survive without its modes of pollution and destruction, or even if those modes of pollution and destruction are restrained. For them, capitalism is about liberty (even if that liberty, in practice, is limited to the wealth elites), and that includes the liberty to destroy, which appears to be the basis of the other liberties, as is the classic capitalist view of property (if something is yours you can destroy it with complete liberty). That would appear to justify a liberty to suppress others, who object to the destruction.
The neoliberal Right is not consistent about this. They sometime claim a care for the environment. Trump is well capable of saying he has produced the best air and the best water, [1] (although he seems to have had little to nothing to do with it), and that he wants to lower emissions, while removing nearly all boundaries and penalties for polluting and destroying, opening national monuments and national parks for drilling and destruction and shoveling taxpayers’ money to fossil fuel companies to keep them buoyant – especially during the Covid Crisis and the oil shock of early 2020. After the election he rushed to confirm the opening of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska to drilling for oil and gas [2], [3], as part of “advancing this administration’s policy of energy independence.”
Trump implies that you can have both rampant ecological destruction and a good ecological result, which could be a pleasant fantasy. However, more consistent thinkers have put forward a similar view, saying that capitalist countries tend to have gained cleaner environments over the years, and suggesting that only people who are financially prosperous can afford environmental care [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. The problem is that even if this is true, then do we have the time for it to work all over the world? and do we advance this movement by opening more land and country to destruction? Especially when the destruction is easily concealed?
There is also the possibility that, like many other risks, the risks of climate change are not equally distributed and will hit the poor and racially vilified first. Racism could be built into the current system, and not likely to be unwound deliberately. Apparently:
A disproportionately high number of poor and non-white people live in the hottest neighborhoods across the [USA]. It’s often the result of discriminatory practices by banks and local governments.
The other right wing approach to ecological protection is simple and based in a similar kind of discrimination. They suggest that there should be less population elsewhere in the world. It is the poorer countries who are to blame, not the wealthier ones.
However, between 1990 and 2015:
The richest one percent of the world’s population [were] responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth…
The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).
The argument about poor populations being the problem, is often joined with an attempt to reinforce borders and keep out refugees, because they supposedly spread the problem, producing ecological destruction because of their rampant preproduction, poor origins, or foreignness – the foreignness is part of the pollution of the national purity. The nationalist authoritarians don’t have to do anything in their own countries, except keep people out, no matter how much pollution those countries issue.
One US mass murderer is supposed to have written, mixed up with attacks on ‘migrants’: “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable” [9], [10]. This kind of attitude is likely to become more prevalent the more that climate refugees become common.
Like many contemporary conspiracy theories, this population argument deflects attention from the normal action of the wealth elites, and the corporate sector, with their unsustainable and destructive consumption, extraction and pollution, and puts the burden on people who individually, or even collectively, do very little damage and have very little power. In the US, it has been indigenous people who have been resisting fossil fuel pipelines, and who face the penalties of action, sometimes enforced by police and troops and sometimes by private military contractors (mercenaries).
Discounting the extremism, from my experience, the reality seems to be that many people think that by opposing climate action, and by supporting fossil fuels, or dawning imaginary technology (without use having to change anything, including power relations), they are supporting prosperity and liberty, and moving against potential tyranny, and that authoritarian tactics are sometimes necessary – especially against outgroups such as native Americans.
This move does not seem to be declining. The Left, such as it is, has to face up to the fact that there has been no boom in Left voting, and little acceptance of Left ‘common sense’, over the last 20 years. Trump increased his vote considerably, despite all his failures and despite the Covid deaths. Morrison won his miracle election, and shows no sign of being able to lose the next. Boris Johnson won. Bolsonaro won. Modi won and so on… While Greens in Australia occasionally increase their representation, so do One Nation and the Shooters and Fishers Party; there is no likelihood of a Greens government at either State or Federal level.
The anti-fossil fuel movement is not like the anti-nuclear movement, in terms of its effects or popularity. This is despite what can be considered ‘elite’ defunding and divestment movements – you have to be reasonably elite to own shares and attend corporate meetings. Likewise, no current international agreement is strong enough to prevent dangerous climate change – and action seems resisted, despite UN exhortations (it hints at the loss of some national sovereignty, for the global good).
Liberty and Energy
There is a sense the Right could be partly correct about fossil fuels. Available Energy does give freedom and capacity, and renewables simply don’t produce similar availability to fossil fuels as yet, and probably never will. Fossil fuels do increase capacity, but with cost to other people and the environment, which is primarily a problem if theses issues are counted, or if you wonder about the destruction resulting from climate change in the future. If you discount the unintended side effects, then in the present, fossil fuels could easily be thought to generate new jobs, and jobs generate the only liberty capitalism allows, namely consumption.
Fossil fuels have also allowed production of the energy, steel, transport and weaponry needed for conquest, extraction of resources and control over cheap labour, and the imposition of stability. Fossil fuels allowed the world wars and truly massive violence, which ties together with the authoritarian project. What do you do with all the people you have encouraged to be violent, when there is little violence to use at home?
Energy transition also requires excess energy, or excess pollution, to produce the new sources of generation in quantity. This is a further incentive to open more coal.
On the other hand, renewables do possibly break down centralised energy generation and allow people to make their own energy, independent of the corporate structure – but that form of energy is not widely promoted, and most renewables (at scale) are installed by standard neoliberal processes with non-consultation, non-care for the environment, and non-care for workers. They do not generate community involvement or enthusiasm when built that way.
The connection of the possibility of new forms of liberty with small scale energy generation is not obvious, and it may not happen, because capitalism appears to need, and profit from, large scale energy generation, and large scale is more likely to produce simple and stable pricing structures.
If Mitchell’s argument is correct, that modern democracy grew with coal, and the capacity of coal workers to hold the country to ransom and demonstrate workers’ power, then the abolition of coal based energy may indeed mean the end of that democracy, unless we approach transition with care.
Autonomism and renewable energy
The Autonomists argued that there was a process of interaction between workers and bosses in the use of technology. Bosses would introduce technology to control workers and to extract more labour, and workers would respond by finding ways to play the technology, take over the technology, control the technology, steal bits of the technology, or use the technology for their own purposes – “the street has its own uses for things” to quote William Gibson. Then the bosses would respond to worker’s creativity by trying out new technologies, and new processes of discipline, and so it went on for cycle after cycle.
The processes are more confused than this skeleton suggests because technologies have unintended consequences, which might end up producing new social results – as for example when workers have to develop ‘work arounds’ and an organisation around those work-arounds, to actually do the job they are expected to do, and which the technology no longer allows them to do. However, the point is there is a place for workers to insert power and creativity.
This is inherent in Mitchell’s argument mentioned above. The bosses’ energy technology used for the factories, disciplining labour and making it mindless and perfectly replicable, could be commandeered against the bosses, to extract concessions for workers in general.
The problem with renewables is that dynamic seems to be almost completely lost. Solar panels don’t require labour, after construction and installation, other than cleaning and a little maintenance. The same is largely true of windfarms. If so, then renewables have the capacity to eliminate the autonomist cycle – there are few workers to subvert the technology. Maybe people can steal a bit of free energy, or build a bit for themselves, but usually the panels are not near people’s homes and the theft would be obvious (wires leading to your house). Renewables, at a large scale, eliminate the need for many energy workers; the companies are not that dependent on workers or upon difficult to replace workers. The workers cannot easily withhold supply. This is part of the system’s profitability. Renewables, have the potential to make energy companies dominant with few checks, other than legislation and regulation, and that is controlled by neoliberals, and as the renewable companies gain wealth and control, what might stop them filling the gap in the socio-political ecology previously occupied by oil and coal? There is none of the Autonomist interactive construction of liberty that could be present in previous technology.
This implies that renewables are not inherently ‘popular’ in the sense of giving power to the people, unless the people commandeer the processes of production and organisation. And that is a situation which goes against the ways that the modern world is organised. The modern world is largely organised by the actions of the corporate sector, followed by the adaptation of the people to those actions. We no longer have community solidarity or self organisation as normal. When popular action occurs it is motivated by people like Trump, who misleadingly use that action to support himself and most of the rest of the dominant groups. He shares the dominant interests, and shows no sign of supporting the people in general – with the possible exception of tariffs, but even that seems geared at protecting particular types of industry or exerting commercial power on other countries.
We cannot dismiss either the possibility that politics will become more authoritarian to support capitalisms current destructions, or that it will stay as authoritarian as it is now, because of the way Renewable Energy is organised.
The Authoritarian and Anti-Democratic Background
It seems more or less indisputable that we are in a growing phase of authoritarianism. This authoritarianism generally is being put forward, by people who are also engaged in climate denial, or who support fossil fuels. There is no reason to assume that the two cannot link together powerfully. There is also the possibility of anti-climate change authoritarianism, to overcome resistance to necessary changes, but I’ll talk about that elsewhere – and I’ve just mentioned the possibility renewables could become an authoritarian technology. However, at the moment the authoritarian threat seems to be largely promoted by neoliberals and the Right. Neoliberalism always acts in an attempt to boost the power of the wealth and power elites to begin with.
In the US, neoliberals like Trump are currently dismissing election results and either encouraging or turning a blind eye to threats of violence against election officials or other Republicans who refuse to overturn, or throw out, the votes for Biden. This report may be exaggerated, but:
Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said the president had called her to declare there was fraud in the voting. But she said she had not been shown the letter to Congress, which was pulled together hastily, before its release.
Asked if she would have signed it, she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.
“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”…
sought to invalidate the state’s 2.6 million mail-in votes, 77 percent of which were cast for Mr. Biden…
Republicans argued that a 2019 state law authorizing no-excuse mail voting was unconstitutional, although it passed the Republican-led legislature and was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat….
Rudolph W. Giuliani aired false charges about the election, including an assertion that mail-in ballots in Philadelphia were “not inspected at all by any Republican.” The claims were debunked in real time on Twitter by a Republican member of the Philadelphia elections board.
It seems that Republicans are basically saying election results, and votes, are only valid if they give Republicans victory, probably because they think Democrats are not truly American, but are truly monstrous, in all possible ways. That is what their media tells them, and it helps explain a distressing loss. Republicans who disagree with them are made outgroup. A tweet from the Arizona Republican Party suggested that people should be willing to die for Trump and to overturn the election, and another (later taken down, officially because of copyright concerns) said “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something” (apparently a quote from the film ‘Rambo’). It is hard to see this as anything other than a call for violence on behalf of the party, or a call for people to sacrifice themselves for the party.
For what its worth, I suggested that the Republicans were trying to prepare for, and encourage, a Civil War back in July. Since then, Trump has been preparing his supporters by repeatedly arguing that the only way he could lose was through fraud, and that there is some massive Democrat plot against him. No one can guarantee election results unless they are successfully trying to fix them. This ‘protest’ against the result was not an unforeshadowed event, but one involving some long term planning. Trump warned he would protest the results and he did.
If Trump has real evidence of electoral fraud, then why is he generally presenting ambiguous, or hearsay, evidence to the public and not presenting solid evidence to the courts? The Courts have asked for evidence, and been refused or ignored. One possible theory is that Trump’s teams do not have any such evidence, and his lawyers do not want to face perjury charges by putting faked evidence to the court. Another is that he does not need success. Indeed the court cases he is putting forward and supporting have largely seemed engineered to be rejected by the courts, perhaps to give the impression that he is being victimised by the system or the ‘deep state’. He may just be trying to build up suspicion about, and resentment over, the results. That is much easier, it does not require real evidence, and appears to have a massive persuasive impact on his followers, and will keep them motivated.
Even William Barr, after displaying massive support for Trump, has determined “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Another official, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said “I’m here to tell you that my confidence in the security of your vote has never been higher… because of an all-of-nation, unprecedented election security effort over the last several years.” Krebs was sacked.
Trump may be planning to leave the Covid crisis and the likely economic collapse, to his enemies, and come back arguing everyone was prosperous under him, which shows how bad Biden and crew are. This could be why he seems to be ignoring Covid in his last months. Why should he try and fix it? Why not let deaths increase exponentially to make it harder for the incoming administration?
There is also a double standard. Trump is not complaining about Republican attempts to fix the election or his own attempts to sabotage mail voting during a pandemic, as he had reason to think that mail in voting would favour Biden, as Biden voters would be more likely to believe in the Pandemic. (Indeed, mail in voting did favour Biden, by a considerable margin, which Trump then used to suggest it was fake.) Similarly, it appears if armed protestors threaten death to people who are standing up for the Elections and not following the Republican line, then that is not a big deal at all.
Likewise when people drew up to shoot paintballs into protesting crowds, this was not a problem. How did the crowds know there were no bullets in amongst this? Paintballs can injure, that is why players wear protective clothing and goggles (dye in the eyes may not be pleasant never mind the impact), and paintballs can certainly vandalise clothes and property – which normally you would expect the right to complain about, but nothing.
This is authoritarianism displaying its muscles.
In some states in the US, we reportedly have armed right wing groups seeking non-existent Antifa arsonists, and threatening people photographing or fleeing the climate induced fires. Some people risked staying in their homes to protecting them from equally non-existent marauding Antifa terrorists. [11], [12], [13], [14], [15],[16], [17]. The point here is that the misinformation machine easily seizes on the fear of fellow Americans in the outgroup, and this suspicion is now normal.
The violent Right is in action, the democratic Right is largely silent, and the action is not likely to dispel if Biden gets past all the hurdles, or even if Trump manages to persuade the electoral college to vote for him, or if he persuades congress to refuse the vote for Biden. If Trump ‘wins’, he will have the violent Right to deal with any protests against his denial of the electoral process, assuming the Democrats do not cave in as usual. If Trump loses, then the Violent Right has all the excuse it needs to fight against a supposedly stolen election.
There is no reason to assume that if Trump is successful in building up a popular disturbance, whether he gets back into power or not, that the techniques will not be emulated elsewhere in the world.
While it is not evidence, of much except the building oppositions, and fears the following comment seems reasonably accurate to me.
It turns out that Trump wasn’t an aberration. He was the result of long-building extremism and reality-denialism on the right. And when he came to power, far too many in the Republican party didn’t see a cruel, incurious, dictatorial madman, but a kindred spirit – and the kind of leader who would happily override inconvenient democratic norms, basic standards of human decency, and even the rule of law. That became increasingly clear the longer Trump was in office; yet, out of naivety or perhaps just misplaced trust in other human beings, too many Democrats, pundits, and average citizens chose to believe that Republicans were simply caught between a rock and a hard place, and that Trumpism would end with Trump…..
[However] a request that a high court disenfranchise millions who voted according to the rules and overturn the will of the people – isn’t an issue on which reasonable people might disagree.
This kind of aggressive attack on political processes, meets up with attempts to criminalise protests against fossil fuel pipelines in the US, and the hardening of penalties for protests in Australia. This is a violence aimed at suppressing even mild dissent against the neoliberal establishment.
While the wealth elites can well support, encourage or turn a blind eye to this violent authoritarianism in the belief it can, and will, protect them, they can also find out, as they did with Mussolini and Hitler, that once violence is established, the supportive elites can be threatened along with anyone else.
Weaponising hatred
I’ve argued elsewhere in this blog [18], [19], [20] that fascism needs to find or manufacture vile enemies at home and abroad, to be successful and to give its supporters the ability to excuse their side’s violence. Fascism’s rhetorical process requires hardening social identity categories and that has been building up in the US, Britain and Australia over the last 40 years of normal political action, providing a good basis for fascists to work from. The election fuss works for them, in that it delegitimates anything other than a Trump win, suggests the left cannot be trusted, allows authoritarian right to plough on in its quest for liberty for some, and allows the potential threatening of Republican officials in future elections – they now know what happens if they stand up to agree a Democrat won, and the positions will attract those who are determined that their side shall win.
Earlier in this post I remarked on the righteous idea that it is the size of population in other countries that is to blame for climate change, should it be happening. This seems to be linked to the increase in ingroup political identities, racial tensions, and that general collapse in dialogue between political groups. Naomi Klein suggests that it is no coincidence that “these two fires, the planetary one and the political one, are raging at the same time.”
What all of these demagogues understand, is the power of fear. They are tapping into feelings of profound unease and scarcity, in their respective countries. Some of that scarcity flows from decades of neoliberal economic policies, the attacks on labor protections, the shredded social safety nets, the opened chasms of economic inequality…. [but]
We all know on some cellular level that life on this planet is in crisis. That our one and only home is unraveling. No one, no matter how much Fox News they watch, is protected from the feeling of existential terror that flows from that. And that is what men like Trump and Bolsonaro know. Their one true skill is how to make other people’s fear work for them. And so they rile up hatred and they weaponize desperation and they run campaigns on building walls and stopping pending invasions. And most of all they sell their respective in groups the illusion that they will finally be secure in our age of rampant insecurity….
all of this leaves them free to get on with a real business at hand, which is plundering the last protected wildernesses on this planet, from the Amazon to the Arctic.
Generating enemies, gives the leaders the excuse they need to declare martial law, to declare elections that reject them rigged, to declare war on the outgroups – which are those that oppose them – and support violent people on their side (if indirectly at the beginning). It gives them the power to stop speech in the name of protecting their own speech. It makes it patriotic to continue the economic war which siphons money from ordinary people and protects the neoliberal elite and their liberty, and which destroys the environment and makes people more insecure.
This potential fascism is a destructive positive feedback loop, and it is hard to evade.
Conclusions
Neoliberalism generates the conditions in which authoritarianism becomes natural, and fights against it can also become authoritarian.
Democratic Communists thought they were winning in the 1920s and 30s, partly because they refused to take fascism seriously, or thought the workers would recognise that their interests were not served by fascism and would join the parties on their side. They also failed to win the middle class. They forgot the effectiveness of orderly violence which was deployed by fascists, and they thought the process of history would inevitably lead to workers’ revolution. It didn’t.
This lesson should not be ignored.
The future is never guaranteed. We cannot assume climate democracy is inevitable or even likely.
[20 December 2020 – the original blog post has now been broken into two posts. The part here can be considered the summary of the argument, The part now placed here is a consideration of the plausibility of the argument]
What is the theory of Neoliberal Conspiracy?
The idea of ‘neoliberal conspiracy’ is simple. It is that many of those in the wealth elites, or working for them, have acted to increase established corporate power and wealth at the expense of the general public, while pretending that ‘free markets’ result in liberty and prosperity for all.
Neoliberalism has been the dominant real politics in the English speaking world since Thatcher, Reagan, and Keating, although (in the conspiratorial mode) it often presents itself as a minor oppressed player, that is struggling valiantly against government and socialists.
Over the last four decades since 1979… those in the top 0.1% had wages grow… 340.7%. In contrast those in the bottom 90% had annual wages grow by 23.9% from 1979 to 2018.
People are also less likely to increase their wealth class than they used to be. Some even claim that in the US and UK life expectancy has recently begun to decline [1], [2], [3] (possibly due to suicide and drugs) and hunger appears to be increasing in the US [4] (the pandemic response does not help) and elsewhere.
After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise, affecting 8.9 percent of people globally. From 2018 to 2019, the number of undernourished people grew by 10 million, and there are nearly 60 million more undernourished people now than in 2014
Wealth seems spread so that while the top 10%, or so, of the population can be said to be comfortable, or extremely wealthy, the bottom 90% (especially younger people below 35) are heading towards a precarious existence, while the middle class is shrinking.
there is a recognition amongst these people of the novelty of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus frustration and disquiet at the nature of these circumstances. The ‘new normal’ is in fact recognised as abnormal.
[However] they focus on how they can succeed within this inherited structure rather than on pursuing structural change. There is a degree of resignation to a situation wherein precarity is deemed largely immutable…. many young people understand the prospect of improving labour market outcomes in terms of personal development and their ability to successfully navigate this more competitive environment
Neoliberal media, rarely suggest an approach based on structural or economic change, that might challenge the dominant power relations, or they aim to misidentify those power relations. Another important marker of neoliberal effect, is that there appears to have been growing concentrations of economic power, with higher profits going to fewer people [5].
We used to think that high profits were a sign of the successful working of the American economy, a better product, a better service. But now we know that higher profits can arise from a better way of exploiting consumers, a better way of price discrimination, extracting consumer surplus, the main effect of which is to redistribute income from consumers to our new super-wealthy.
I probably don’t have to remind people, that the neoliberal response to almost every problem involves tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate sector, possibly mixed in with some taxpayer subsidies for established big businesses not doing that well. It would seem obvious that this might help boost the wealth differentials, and gives the wealthy even more money to invest in political control. Of course they say this boost to the wealthy helps the lower classes, but the wealthy always make that argument, and it never seems to work. One study of 18 OECD countries, simply remarks:
We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.
Let us be clear. It is a reasonable hypothesis that distribution of wealth results, not from the nature of life, but from deliberate social struggle, or social engineering. In which case, the way wealth is being distributed now, as opposed to 50 years ago, marks the triumph of class war against the people. As Warren Buffett said in the context of a discussion on taxes:
BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good.
DOBBS: What a radical idea.
BUFFETT: It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.
He is also reported as saying in an interview with the New York Times “There’s class warfare, all right,…. but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Part of that class war undoubtedly involves the attack on, and the decline of unions, which gave workers the power to organise and challenge employers who were richer than whole countries, and who cronyed up together with other employers. Unions also meant that workers had direct input into party politics, as opposed to mainly business having input.
The period is also marked by growing ecological crisis, as capitalists and developers abandoned restraint, found profit in attacking science and in locking people into expanding fossil fuel use.
Neoliberalism appears to have generated a growth of alienation from politics experienced by ordinary people, as the political system consistently ignored their interests, no matter how large the protests (such as those against the second Iraq War, or against climate inaction). This alienation seems to have lead to an increase in culture wars, and polarisation, as the neoliberal Right sought to retain support and votes by whipping up an identity politics of self-justification and hatred against ‘out-groups’. For example, making claims that the left says you are racist simply because you are white (no other reason is possible), and that the only real racists are active black people, the only sexists are feminist women and so on. This leads to the part of the neoliberal conspiracy I will discuss later in this blog.
We don’t need to look so much at what neoliberals claim they believe, some of which might be well intentioned and genuine, but look at what neoliberal politicians actually do.
Neoliberals and the Government takeover
With the mixed economies, Keynesian interventionism, and union power, of post-world war II Europe, US, UK and Australia we had a steady rise in living standards, working conditions and increasing levels of political participation. This was alarming for the corporate elites. We could have ended up with a participatory democracy. This situation has now changed.
The first part of the current version of the neoliberal conspiracy has to be to negate the obvious point that “We’ve had forty years of free market boosting, and the world is not getting better.” As we might expect, the main idea that neoliberals want to promote is that we need more neoliberalism, and more of their ‘free markets’ to fix the mess generated by neoliberalism and their ‘free markets’ – truly what you might call ‘positive thinking’: lets ignore the counter evidence and persist in destruction as long as it pays us off. Thus almost their first effort is to convince people that most of the problems we currently observe, do not stem from neoliberalism, but from the ‘fact’ we have “too much government”, by which they mean too much government which might attempt to be responsive to the people.
Now they have a point. Governments can, and often are oppressive. Sometimes this is because of “one size fits all policies” which don’t fit all (like ‘free markets’), sometimes it is because the governors want total order and rule of one principle alone (like ‘free markets’), sometimes it is because they want to build things or go to war (say in favour of protecting investment and ‘free markets’), and sometimes it’s because they govern on behalf of a particular class (like neoliberals do). Scrap the last point, we are not meant to think about the last point, we are meant to think neoliberals are against government, not trying to commandeer it, away from you.
Neoliberals tend to pretend, that in a free market, business and the State (‘government’) have nothing to do with each other, rather than that they interact all the time. In neoliberal rhetoric, government and business are somehow completely different, or their intersection is of no consequence. Thus I can be told, by quite a few people over the years, that obviously crony capitalists only have an effect because of the government, and not because of the existence of cronyism, or the intersection of business interests with the State, or business influence over the State. This argument occurs while neoliberal politicians are overtly trying to win over the State completely so they can change it, and change the regulations of that State to benefit them.
Pretending to roll back the State is part of the strategy of increasing corporate power. Rollback of the State under neoliberalism is not remotely anarchistic. It is about rolling back those parts of the State that were moderately helpful, sensitive or responsive to the people, while keeping the parts of the state which are helpful to maintaining corporate power, and providing taxpayer subsidy to that power and suppression of protest. This is one reason why government size, regulation and ‘heaviness’, has not decreased, despite the years of neoliberals apparently pushing for a smaller State. At best it has just increased the powers of bosses, in general, over their employees.
As part of the process of increasing their power, Neoliberals attempt to remove any regulations which hinder corporate ability to freeload on the public; such as regulations which impose restrictions on their ability to injure and poison people, or pollute and destroy ecologies. Trump and other hardline neoliberal politicians have been extremely helpful in removing these kinds of regulations. Such regulations can diminish profits, although they may increase the possibility of prolonging people’s lives and physical comfort. Neoliberals think that if people want prolonged lives or comfort then they should pay for it, not rely on nature.
It is fundamental to neoliberalism, being a politics of established wealth, that any living being should only get what they can afford, and if they cannot afford to live, or fight against action that harms them, then they should suffer as the judgement of the market, is against them, and they are of no worth. Neoliberalism considers protecting established capitalism more important than protecting life.
Neoliberals buy government policy which benefits corporate power, and then, when it turns out badly for people in general, claim that the situation would be much better if, rather than supporting the harmed, we did not have any government intervention at all and we just left everything to the corporate class to sort out – as if benefits inevitably flow through to those who don’t participate, and the people who caused the problems will necessarily fix them by accident.
The great thing about the strategy of pretending to be anti-State while using the State to enforce their rule, is that whenever the neoliberals use the State to shaft their supporters they can claim they could have had nothing to do with it. It was the dreaded socialists of the ‘deep State’ that are to blame. And they get even more leeway to rollback the State useful to others and build up the State useful to them.
It is common sense in neoliberal land for corporate lobbyists, or ex corporate executives to write legislation or even occupy positions in government departments. Despite his claims of employing outsiders this is what Trump has done in a big way [6], [7].
Steve Mnuchin from Goldman Sachs became the first Treasury Secretary. Gary Cohn president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs was picked to head the National Economic Council and manage economic policy. Steve Bannon once worked for the same organisation, before becoming a Breitbart executive chair and also obviously worked for the administration. Jay Clayton, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, was a partner with the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and Goldman Sachs was a client. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was made Secretary of State.
At the EPA, nearly half of the political appointees hired by the Trump Administration have had strong ties to industries regulated by the agency industry, according to research by the Associated Press. About a third of these EPA appointees – including the current acting administrator – formerly worked as registered lobbyists or lawyers for fossil fuel companies, chemical manufacturers, or other corporate clients….
The Administration has been pursuing a de-regulatory agenda that benefits many of these same industries by rolling back air and water pollution control regulations. This inverts the purpose of the agency, which is to protect the environment and public health, not industry profits.
The number of lobbyists Trump appointed was quite extraordinary
A lobbyist for every 14 political appointments made… The number of lobbyists who have served in government jobs is four times more than the Obama administration had six years into office. And former lobbyists serving Trump are often involved in regulating the industries they worked for….
It’s a “staggering figure,” according to Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the D.C.-based legal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
A report from early in Trump’s administration states:
The president-elect, in filling out his transition team and administration, has drawn heavily from the vast network of donors and advocacy groups built by the billionaire industrialist [Koch] brothers, who have sought to reshape American politics in their libertarian image.
From White House Counsel Don McGahn and transition team advisers Tom Pyle, Darin Selnick and Alan Cobb to Presidential Inaugural Committee member Diane Hendricks and transition-team executive committee members Rebekah Mercer and Anthony Scaramucci, Trump has surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs….
many more Koch-linked operatives are expected to join Trump’s nascent administration in the coming weeks, according to Trump transition-team sources.
This network of lobbyists appeared to influence the taxpayer handouts to business during the Covid response:
lobbyists with ties to the president have successfully secured billions in aid for their clients—and several lobbyists may be violating President Donald Trump’s own executive order on ethics in the process.
Instead of staring down “the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests” as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.
No clearing ‘the Swamp,’ but a lot of importing alligators.
Neoliberalism deliberately tends to ignore how much government intervention there was in the economy in the years of rising prosperity for everyone, or tries to portray these years as some kind of disaster. They buy revisionist history, so that we can argue the Great Depression was actually caused by government and that the recovery was hindered by the New Deal. The point is that capitalism depends on a State, and capitalists attempt to control the State, so there is always state action which can be blamed, and used to direct attention away from how business was behaving, or what it was attempting to do. For example, if Hoover’s trade embargos and tariffs were the only factors causing the Great Depression, then what businesses was he defending, and why are Trump’s tariffs not going to be equally destructive?
The question about governments really should be, “Who controls the rule making and enforcement, that allows the market to be maintained?” And the answer to that, is the established corporate sector and not the people. So the market is structured and regulated to benefit the established corporate sector and not the people. That is why the proportion of wealth distributed to the people is going down, and the proportion of wealth going to the wealth elites is increasing.
Ronald Reagan was a classic example of neoliberal action, cutting taxes for the wealthy, cutting back social security and making welfare more onerous and expensive, while massively increasing military spending which benefitted corporate arms manufacturers, and increased the deficit. The idea was that the deficit should eventually be curtailed by ‘reluctantly’ cutting ‘helpful-to-the-people’ spending. Reagan’s ‘free market reforms’, not only crashed the S&Ls which severely impacted many ordinary people, but it allowed much of US industry to be asset stripped and destroyed. This helped produce the US’s current manufacturing problems and rampant business oligopolies, as small scale business was harmed. Neoliberals may say they are in favour of small business, but their actions nearly always help destroy small business, as do the actions of Wall-Mart and the other large retailers who they support.
The big difference between US Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans are hardline neoliberals who pretend to like rightwing Christians, while Democrats are more humanistic neoliberals who are suspicious of Rightwing Christians being Christians at all, and who think that people don’t need to be suppressed and persecuted by big business all the time. For example, Obama thought that bailout money given to established financial institutions should be paid back, and should not explicitly pay for parties and executive bonuses, unlike his predecessor. He did not, however, think bailout money should go to people who were going to lose their home through financial institutions calling in misleading loans, as a democratic socialist might do.
Neoliberal Media
On the whole the media is pro-capitalist, as it is largely (if not totally) funded and controlled by corporations or billionaires. Who else has the money? Most of it is hardline neoliberal, taking neoliberalism as the only position possible – especially media associated with the Murdoch Empire (like Fox, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Post in the US, or Skynews in Australia, The Sun and The Times in the UK), other Trump supporting media is similar, but it also includes Facebook and Twitter, who helped Trump win the previous election because they happily sold data to neoliberal conspirators like Cambridge Analytica, and gave them a free playground. Social media (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter) also keeps channeling people into more extreme forms of the neoliberal conspiracy if they show any interest in going along with it – so they act as advertising channels for this material. There is little escape – the internet, as currently organised, does not widen the opinion and news people are exposed to; it narrows it.
The basic principle for any analysis, given the neoliberal environment, is that no media should be trusted, and that includes small media. Small media can as easily be funded by billionaires as large media; it requires less capital and is more disposable when it has served its purpose, so it may be a better investment. Some big-billionaire-media like Breitbart or Skynews may pretend to be ‘alternate’, but they are just heavily controlled neoliberal propaganda channels – which sometimes seem coordinated in their decisions about what counts as news and what does not. They are certainly not going to portray the situation accurately or impartially.
Neoliberal Science
It is a remarkable co-incidence that nearly all science which might cause constraints on corporate action is attacked by supporters of neoliberalism, while science which allows corporations to build or manufacture products is not. Thus climate science has to go. Ecological science has to go. And the idea of pandemics has to go, even it pharmaceutical companies can make money out of vaccines.
Neoliberal Covid
Covid-19 policy and responses can be analysed in terms of their support for neoliberal principles. The main aim of neoliberal government is to keep the economy going, and keep the power relations of the established economy intact. If it cannot do that then the aim is to protect and subsidise the wealth elites during the crisis rather than the people. It is a response based defending corporate power and liberty to use workers, even if it hurts the workers. If quarter of a million, and now many more, die to keep the economy roughly intact, then that is surely a small price to pay for corporate comfort?
Neoliberal responses may not have caused redistribution of wealth, but it is clear that in the US those responses have been used, under Trump and the Republicans, to further redistribution of wealth with massive subsidies and tax breaks going to wealthy people and wealthy organisations. Some of this going to oil and fracking companies, who were already doing badly without Covid [8], [9], [10], [11]. It is well known that many billionaires have increased their wealth substantially during the crisis, as you would expect of such a pro-established wealth based response [12], [13], [14].
Interestingly I have noticed amongst Republican friends and news sources a marked hostility to the increase in the wealth of info-tech billionaires in particular, without much protest about the increases in the wealth of other kinds of billionaires. I’m not aware of any subsidy, regulatory favours, tax breaks etc, which were specifically, or only, aimed at Info tech, or at Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg etc. However, this kind of thing tends not to get reported in the mainstream media, so if these special government aids exist, then I would welcome being informed about them, as it would add to the evidence about how the system works.
However, that some industries flourish and get ridiculously rich while others suffer and decline, would seem to be what we would expect from the free market in action. This is how the market supposedly works, and how it is meant to work, culling inefficiency, bad management and unwanted products and massively rewarding services that people need. So I’m not sure why this should be praised in some circumstances and damned in others. My current hypothesis is that the Republican party and its elites are owned by established industries and big business, and are hostile to newcomers, but I have no real idea if that is correct.
Surprisingly (?) it does not appear that many of these billionaires (tech or otherwise) have used their increased wealth to protect their workers, or make sure they have good health leave. Indeed:
One in eight workers has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns during the pandemic. Black workers are more than twice as likely as white workers to have seen possible retaliation by their employer.
Well it might lower profits, and if some people get really ill and have lasting consequences, or some people die, its for a good cause.
The Republicans, in the US, are also demanding protection for companies from any liability law suits which claim they not properly looking after workers [15], [16], [17]. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the US Senate, said:
as the Majority Leader I can tell you no bill will pass the Senate that doesn’t have the liability protection in it…..
Republicans almost to a person support the liability reform and that’s not about companies. It includes companies. It’s about hospitals and doctors and nurses and teachers and universities and colleges and K-12. This is not just liability protection for businesses. They’re included along with everyone else dealing with this brand new disease. Unless you’re grossly negligent or engage in intentional misbehavior, you’ll be covered. And it will be in a bill that passes the Senate.
Strange to protect companies from being sued over a condition which Republicans apparently claim is not real, or not that harmful.
This reminds us that the majority of times we are censored, or self-censored, or forced to do unpleasant things it is not because of the government, but because of our employer. Neoliberals want most people to be subservient to bosses. Again neoliberalism is not anarchism or the activation of liberty.
Discouraging social distancing, has the side effect of boosting pharmaceutical company profit, just as Trump’s promotion of unproven drugs helped boost their profits, and as will reliance on vaccines. However, this result may not be entirely deliberate, only a ‘fortunate’ consequence of the general approach to business.
To repeat, neoliberalism has no concern over whether ordinary people survive, or not. It holds that if people can’t afford to survive, they should suffer.
What I hope is the final part of this ‘Neoliberal Conspiracy’ project, will be a simple consideration of whether the Neoliberal Conspiracy is plausible.
For what its worth I argue that what people call ‘Crony Capitalism” is the normal form of capitalism. It is not, in any way, aberrant, even if it supposedly ‘corrupts’ the market; that is what happens in capitalism. Neoliberalism is a particular form of crony capitalism which aims at total control over all forms of human life, and the sacrifice of human life to capitalism.
Crony Capitalism
Wealthy people (or people who succeed in the market, if you prefer) naturally team-up with each other to:
protect themselves
defeat their enemies,
defraud the public,
suppress rising competition whenever possible,
secure their wealth and property,
attain maximum profit at minimum risk (which is the origin of the modern corporation),
disperse the costs of business, or business expansion, onto the public,
get maximal labour for minimal costs,
plan for a favourable future for themselves,
propose what they consider to be sensible government,
reinforce, or set up, a State to govern on their behalf,
buy legislation and regulation that supports them,
support people in the State who give them good results,
support people who can intellectually and rhetorically justify their actions and dominance,
deceive the public to distract from what is really going on, and so on.
Some of these normal aims obviously overlap.
Friendly people who work in the State, and elsewhere, benefit from this association. They get:
supplemented incomes,
extra entertainment,
prestige,
power and back up,
association with people who might support them in times of need
high paying jobs, after they leave the State, with little real work.
It is a mutual association that works well. State workers tend to work with the powerful as it makes life easier, capitalists tend to want the State to defend them, or be useful to them, and business people want to work with other business people for mutual profit. This is just normal business in action.
Historical issue?
I am not aware of any historical form of capitalism or mercantilism that does not work this way. If crony capitalism is not dominant in any period of history, then it’s probably because the existence of at least one other organised (or ‘crony’) force that is equally, or more, powerful: an Aristocracy, Church, Military, Organised Labour etc. That does not mean that crony capitalism does not exist in those societies, merely that it has to struggle and does not win all the time.
Cronyism is normal
The simple point is that people who identify with each other as being similar, will often collaborate against others they identify against, even if they are often competitive with each other as well. Any formal group working for its own interests will always have people competing for positions, dominance and so on, within that group. This does not mean the group’s people are not also collaborative, and do not team up to:
protect each other,
gain power as a group, or
fight against those in groups they do not like.
The people who are considered similar might change depending on who the opposition is. In war, business people might see themselves as more similar to workers than they are to the enemy, and thus work with workers while the war is on, even if they still try and maintain ultimate dominance, or try to reassert the established hierarchy when the war is over.
This can be considered a common human dynamics (‘human nature’ if you like), and if it is left out of an economic theory then that theory is deficient. Almost always pro-corporate economics ignores the collaborative nature of the corporate system, or makes collaboration something that is acceptable within the firm, but condemns collaborations of workers (an outgroup) in general. These kind of economic statements could be seen as political statements, acting for the benefit of business, not statements aimed at discovering anything about real economic behaviour.
If humans were not prone to ‘cronyism’ then society would not work very well. If we did not compete and co-operate for personal and group advantage, we would not have firms, corporations, gangs, rock bands, political parties, discussion groups, organised religions, families and kin groups, and almost any other feature of social life you might care to mention.
That capitalists and business people engage in cronyism is to be expected. The more society is structured by wealth, then the more effective that cronyism will be, and that leads us to neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism seems to be an intensification of crony capitalism, or a tool of crony capitalism, that effectively acts as if to argue:
the State only exists to support the big-business (corporate) sector,
the State should not encourage or support any other sector at all,
the State should leave ‘planning’ to business,
the State must support the ecological destruction caused by business and allow pollution and poisoning by business, unless it threatens the activities of other big business,
everything must be organised for business,
every activity must be organised like a business as there must be no other organisational form with any public validity. Every organisation from Church to mother’s group to the army is really a business.
public monopoly is bad, private monopoly is good (one of the big differences between neoliberalism and classical economics),
‘the people,’ or the State, must be stopped from interfering with business profits as that will lead to disaster and tyranny,
democracy is only good, if it protects business, and is disciplined by corporate (‘market’) needs,
free markets solve every problem as satisfactorily as that problem can be solved.
By promoting these positions, neoliberalism not only threatens human ways of life, but human life itself.
These positions seem marked in early neoliberal theorists such Hayek, Mises and the like, as well as in neoliberal politics.
Neoliberal politics came in to prominence when the possibility seemed strong that ‘the people’ might start working to stop business and State from causing ecological catastrophe, in the late sixties to early seventies. Neoliberals saw this as an unforgivable democratic attempt to interfere in business operations, liberties and profits, and neoliberalism seemed the way for crony capitalists and friends to go – especially after the only major challenge of Communism collapsed.
Corporately controlled markets were said to be the only way to bring liberty and prosperity. In Thatcher’s famous words: “There is no alternative.” Her words can also be seen as an attempt to stop the search for alternatives, which is one of the strategic aims of neoliberalism; it tries to present itself as inevitable when it is merely a hierarchical political and utopian movement.
A term central to neoliberal practice, is ‘free market.’ In practice, this term simply refers to whatever big business does. Interfering with nearly anything established business does is immediately said to be bad. Boosting free markets also means that the State should not help ordinary people, because that can free those people from the markets, and that might lead to a challenge to those markets. Business is the model for everything.
In practice neoliberal political parties are not ‘hands off’, and always seem eager to throw money at businesses they like; bail out failures (currently oil, gas and fracking companies) and to choose winners when they like them, or need to suppress some up and coming challenger. This is one reason why it is important to observe what neoliberals do, rather than what they say they do. The dogma of ‘free markets’ is an attempt to make this power grab seem aspirational; it easily passes from a position of putting the interests of established business first to claiming this gives everyone else liberty rather than servitude. In neoliberalism, the term ‘free market’ usually functions as a misdirection.
Preventing interference with whatever established corporations want to do can also involve:
Lowering taxes on business, as that interferes in profits.
Removing protective regulation such as minimum wages, good or safe working conditions, prevention of ecological destruction, lowering pollution etc., as they all interfere with business liberty and profit maximisation, and thus the ‘free market’.
Increasing regulation and penalties which inhibit protest against business, as this stops interference with business.
Arguing that taxpayers should not support ‘free education’ or ‘free’ healthcare for those who need it, as that impinges on ‘liberty’ (it probably is an added cost to business), presents a non-business form of organisation, and businesses could profit themselves from running these services.
Reducing any social security which allows people not to be forced to take very low wages or working conditions to avoid starving to death, as this interferes with the threats business people can use to discipline workers and increase profits. The more neoliberal the powers that be, the more they are happy to sacrifice people to disease to keep the economy, and profits, going.
In neoliberalism, the ‘free market’ never means a market that is not structured to support big business, and it always allows giving big business subsidies from taxpayers if needed – whatever neoliberals say to the contrary.
Neoliberalism is not about ideal, or really, free markets and never has been – partly because to get real free markets you would have to scrap some forms of accumulation (particularly destructive accumulation) and stop companies getting so large they influence the market or the State (or become “too big to fail”), so that people could compete relatively equally in the market. This would be interfering with business as it is, and hence interfering with what neoliberals call free markets.
You would have to break up existing crony capitalism to get free markets, but eventually the process of control would restart unless you had inhibitors, such as limited lifespan for corporations, wealth taxes, customs such as dispersion of assets on death, or you had other powerful groups which were organised to resist capitalist control.
Conclusion
Crony capitalism may be unavoidable, just as crony communism, crony conceptualisation, or crony Christianity, are unavoidable. Neoliberalism is avoidable and challengeable, provided we recognise what it is and what is aims for (deliberately or not): that is, total dominance by the corporate classes or plutocracy.
However, fighting neoliberalism calls for ‘cronyism’ amongst all those in the population who are victimised by it – which is another reason the term is condemned by neoliberals. If we are all neoliberal ‘individuals’, then how can we team up to defeat it? Co-operation by the people is necessary to struggle against co-operation amongst the wealth elites.
The big question of the next few weeks is whether Trump’s lies, confusion and manipulation win in the US. If Biden wins there is no guarantee that Trumps lies and confusion will not win also, as to Trump’s followers and himself, he can only loose if there is fraud and that would justify violence.
Trump has repeatedly made it clear, since his last election campaign, that he is in favour of his supporters engaging in violence against those who dissent against his rule.
So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.
We`re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were at a place like this? They would be carried out on a stretcher, folks.
I`d like to punch them in the face, I`ll tell you.
they used to treat them [protestors] very, very rough. And when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily. But today they walk in and they put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air at everybody. And they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.
He always gives the violent on his side acknowledgement, and clearly finds it hard to denounce white supremacists and neo-nazis outside of formal scripted speeches, making clear that to him the problems are on both sides. If he does denounce them one day, he makes it clear in a tweet the next that he is fine with them. In fact any form of disagreement is evidence a person deserves to be ‘cancelled’. His primary imaginative response seems violent.
Consequently, it seems almost certain Trump would encourage violence against people who could be identified as not being Trump supporters in order to keep power.
He will not accept a loss. Some people are suggesting he will declare victory early before most votes are counted, and the speech will be widely reported. That way he can later declare the election was stolen. This we will have to see The indications are that he will invent ‘evidence’ and believe it, and many of his followers will believe it passionately – whatever its probability. Barr will set in motion the moves to keep Trump in office and arrest dissenters probably on ‘trumped up’ charges. It does not matter, as long as power is demonstrated, and those held responsible are punished, as an example for the others.
The Republican party will likely go along with this, especially if any brave souls in the party protest and end up shot, or attacked, by Trump supporters or the police. The Republican party has demonstrated total compliance whenever they had an opportunity to stand up to him, and that was without threat.
The corporate mega-powers will go with him, as Trump provides them with security, a license to continue the growth in their wealth, and welcomes their presence in his new hyper-swamp, as long as they praise him.
At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp,” many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of. We’ve also discovered ethics waivers that allow Trump staffers to work on subjects in which they have financial conflicts of interest. In addition, at least 254 appointees affiliated with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and at least 125 staffers from prominent conservative think tanks are now working in the federal government, many of whom are on teams to repeal Obama-era regulations.
at least 35 Trump political appointees worked for or consulted with groups affiliated with the the billionaire libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch… At least 25 Trump appointees came from the influential Heritage Foundation
The Murdoch Empire will do its best to flood the world with fake news to keep him going and to break up any attempts to deal with the environmental and other crises we face – this is, after all, what they do normally.
When I first said, a few years ago, that Trump would not go if he was rejected at the next election, Republicans used to tell me that Trump could not stay in power if he lost, because Republicans would support due process, and the military would intervene and remove him if he would not go. We have no evidence of either of these points – they seem wishful thinking. What does it matter if the law says he has to go? The law is a matter of interpretation and convention, there are always possible fudges. Anyway, if the military did act, then his supporters would have it ‘confirmed’ that he was being displaced by the ‘deep state’. They would again rise, and start attacking people. The military would eventually loose and, if Biden depended on them for his presidency, he would have no widespread legitimacy.
Because of the US system Trump does not leave office until January so, even in the best case of him accepting a loss, he can do his best to sabotage transition. He may start a war with China, or declare a State of emergency to put down his opponents. He may charge Biden and claim he is unfit to be President, and thus Trump has to stay on. He is desperate to keep power, perhaps because this is where most of his wealth is now coming from.
The only hope for democracy is if the Democrats win overwhelmingly – even then he will probably argue that a large victory is just more evidence of fakery. After all Trump is one of the few people to argue an election he won was fake, perhaps because he didn’t win the popular vote and this was not acceptable.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
There is no evidence to suggest this is remotely true – it is pure positive denial of reality – but it laid the foundations for his current claims. This was soon followed up by the claims of the largest inauguration crowds ever, media fakery and the use of the term “alternative facts”.
Chuck Todd: why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood? Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office–
Kellyanne Conway: No it doesn’t.
CT: –on day one.
KC: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What– You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that….
CT: Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right–
KC: -hey, Chuck, why– Hey Chuck–
CT: –was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.
‘Facts’ are now defined as statements which put the best light on the Administration. They seem true because they do that. While Trump may not be responsible for the term, it indicates his administration wants complete submission to his positive thought. Things which they would like to be true are true – and this is so from the beginning, it is not a recent aberration.
Trump’s overt threats to dispute the results and not leave, show the dark side of the positive thinking cult. If reality is not what you want it to be, then deny it. Reality is wrong. OR its the result of a plot by shady characters who you already dislike.
If the world exists to serve you, then it becomes a time for full shadow projection. If you cheat most of the time from golf to taxes, then the others must have cheated. If you engage in fraud taking money for your personal use from your campaign funds or your charitable foundation, then the others must be even more fraudulent.
Reality must bend to accomodate the leader’s will, and if you don’t believe the positive victory which should have happened, or did happen, you are a traitor, and deserve what you get. One likely way to make the facts be the real positive facts is through repetition of fake facts, and violence.
There are no problems to be faced. This is a popular refrain in the US. Reagan won massively by saying there was nothing to worry about, while Carter saw problems.
We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything, nor can we afford to lack boldness as we meet the future. So, together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best.
So positive thinking is open to manipulation, especially when people seem alienated from the political system, from the economic system, and from the ecological system, and who are vaguely aware of encroaching, massive and unwelcome ecological upheaval. The merge, the deep need to overcome alienation, happens in fantasy, propelled by fierce emotions, and a turn to avoid the real serious problems of the world, which press on us all the time, as they are too big, and it is clear we are going to do nothing to help slow those problems.
I suggest that the Western World has given up dreaming, imagining and attention to its inner states, and has been captured by an encouraged political fantasy and unconscious shadow projection.
We are currently enmeshed in automatic complexes which will not let us have free, or informed, action. We are creating a violent and uncontrolled unconscious through suppression.
Partly this occurs because the internet allows the circulation of conscious memes, which are selected for their grip and ability to be passed on, rather than their accuracy. This makes fantasy formations the main decider of what people take as true…. It helps stop people from perceiving what is really happening, and enables them to retreat into a false reality.
This will obviously repeat what I have said before, in various places, but it comes out of a circling process and hopefully is more precise than previously. This repetition is also relevant to this blog as neoliberalism appears to form the main institutional block to climate action, energy transition, degrowth and repair of the world ecology. It may also be the main danger to democracy and liberty, as it protects corporate power at the cost of human life.
Introduction
First of all, like fascism, neoliberalism is not primarily a body of theories, although it does point to landmark theorists in neoclassical, monetary and ‘Austrian’ economics. It is primarily a set of techniques for increasing and entrenching the power of the corporate sector, which organises the economy so that most of the wealth goes to the already hyper-wealthy. It is quite happy to ignore its pet theorists, and official principles, if they are inconvenient for these aims.
Origins
Neoliberalism seems to have arisen in the context of a series of challenges to corporate power by governments acting to regulate corporations for the public good.
It seems to have begun in the 30s, with corporate sponsorship, during the great depression. It went to sleep during the second world war, when governmental organisation seemed necessary for corporate survival. It survived primarily as corporately sponsored anti-socialism after the second world war when socialism, or a mixed economy, was boosting the standards of living of the general populace to an extent never before seen. This was the era of the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, home of Friedrich August von Hayek and Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises among other anti-socialists. However, they had relatively little influence as the elite also feared the possibility of worker revolution, which could be stopped by a little wealth and power sharing.
Neoliberalism returned, with the usual sponsorship, in the early 1970s as a response to the fear that democracy and activism (of all kinds, including environmental) was taking power away from the corporate elites to do what they wanted, and that confusion would result. It also proposed a simple ‘solution’ to the problems of stagflation, and the oil shock – which effectively increased levels of unemployment and reduced wages for most people. It came into its true ascendency after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there seemed no longer to be any fear of a workers’ revolution, and we were faced with what some called the end of history, namely the triumph of capitalism and its then neoliberal ideas.
Neoliberalism was also helped by the Left arguing that the welfare state was a mode of control over the working class. This was partially correct, but the welfare state was clearly better than the previous alternatives. The solution would have been not to attack welfare but to improve it and liberate it.
The left had little defense against neoliberal ‘liberty’ but naïve anti-capitalism or accommodation. Accommodation won out, as it often does, and we got market based Labour parties in the UK and Australia, who followed the neoliberal lead and treated the corporately dominated ‘market’ as the most important social institution and thus the corporate sector as the most important and privileged part of society. The Democrats likewise largely followed the Republicans in the US, as with Bill Clinton’s slogan “Its the economy, stupid.” Socialism was dead.
Neoliberal “Free Markets”
The language that neoliberalism uses tends to resemble the language of libertarians, but it is not the same, even if libertarians can themselves be confused by it, and used by it.
To explain the confusion, we can return to the primary function of neoliberalism which is to extend the power of the corporate sector and prevent it from being “interfered with”, made to act responsibly, “civilised” or encouraged to share wealth, on behalf of the people. Neoliberalism tends towards corporate authoritarianism not libertarianism. Once we understand these are the aims, then many otherwise puzzling features of neoliberalism become clear.
Thus neoliberals talk a lot about the “free market” but they do not mean a market open to all without regulation within which people can live freely, they mean a market that is regulated in favour of the corporate class. This is a market which allows tax evasion, suppresses unions, lowers wages, transfers wealth upwards, hinders organisation against corporations, lowers corporate responsibility towards anyone other than their shareholders, makes it harder for corporations to be sued for harm, lowers environmental regulation or other forms of prevention of damage, and otherwise distorts markets to favour the wealthy and what they do to get wealthy.
By focusing on the market, they also tend to undermine any realisation than societies are more than markets, or more than obedience to markets and the corporate sector.
Neoliberals also try to “externalise” the costs of the markets. That is, in more normal English, put the costs of market operation upon the non-corporate sector. For neoliberals it is the people who ideally, should bear the costs of pollution, poisoning, ecological destruction and worker injury, and not the corporate sector. They make it harder to hold corporations legally responsible for damage, or for people to protest against that damage. Although they have not yet suppressed public opinion, they can suppress public information.
Likewise, in neoliberal thought, the corporate sector should own anything valuable, and the people should own everything that costs, or ‘anything which costs’ should be abandoned. This is what privatisation is about. The idea is to make the state, simply an arm of the corporate class, so it can exert maximal control over your lives.
Public or common property, like tax payers money, should be gifted to the corporate sector, or provided as a service at minimum charge. This, of course, encourages governmental corruption, as it becomes normal to sell public property off to the wealthy. It also becomes normal to have corporate lobbyists embedded in government.
In this framework, mining companies who take the public’s resources, should pay minimum cost for that privilege and the public should get as little as possible. If the mining destroys villages, towns and countryside and uses or poisons water supplies, that is a problem for the people not the company.
If gas pipes and drilling sites leak, helping to increase global warming, that is not the company’s problem, and so on. Again this is a major aim of neoliberal activism.
Neoliberalism can also support monopolies as an efficient and competitive form of trade, as long as they are private corporate monopolies. Partly this was to challenge anti-trust laws, partly to keep the new monopolies safe, and partly to justify privatisation of governmental monopolies. This, of course, violates the normal standards of an open and competitive market, but it does justify and protect corporate power. It is done by pretending that competition could enter the market if the monopoly was abusing its privilege. This idea ‘forgets’ that market occupiers have power and resilience, that consumers have to have a no-risk transfer of allegiance, that new competitors do not face a deficit of experience or have to sink lots of losable capital to get going in the market, that they cannot be undercut until they leave the market, or regulated out of the market by politicians indebted to the monopoly. The reality of actual capitalist economic behaviour is not the same as in the fantasy markets promoted by neoliberals.
One of the main neoliberal fantasies is that the wealthy and powerful will not team up to gain benefits for themselves, and that it is only the envious workers who will exert political force on markets. In a capitalist economy, everything is up for sale, virtue, integrity, and power, and it is much easier for team-ups of the wealthy to have an effect. This is rarely to never considered, or it is thought that these people will always be in competition and so never team up – this simply shows probably deliberate, selective ignorance of human nature, which just benefits the wealthy.
It is correct that, just occasionally, neoliberals do acknowledge this problem and call it ‘crony capitalism’ which aims to imply this is an aberration, which can be blamed on State action, and normal capitalism does not work this way normally, but this is unreal. This is how capitalism generates the State it can buy, and how neoliberalism itself manages to gain influence.
In practice “free markets” in neoliberalism can be defined not as voluntary trade or exchange, but as allowing powerful corporations to behave as they will with any deleterious consequences to the public being ignored, or being claimed to be good. Whatever corporations do, is the neoliberal ‘free market’ in action. The idea of the free market exists to prevent people exerting power over their corporate masters.
The State
Neoliberals need the State to protect: what they define as private property; the organisation of labour; military defense and expansion; contract; investment and; the power of the corporate sector.
While neoliberals make a great deal of fuss about shrinking the State, they wish the State to be shrunk, not to provide people with liberty or to encourage an active local politics, but to provide the powerful with more wealth and the liberty to stand over and exploit everyone else. What neoliberals mean to end forever, is the idea that the State might be useful to the general populace, as opposed to the wealthy. In this they have been extremely successful; people nowadays generally have little faith in the State, in political action or in the power of non-neoliberal political parties to change anything (“both sides are equally bad”).
Thus despite neoliberals having power since the 1980s, there has been no diminution of the State or decline in State regulation. What has declined is the ability of ordinary people to affect the State, or the ability of the State to help people. The State has made the welfare it provides interfering and dominating. The point of neoliberal welfare is to penalise people and encourage people to get off it, not to support them through difficulty as a humanitarian right, and certainly not to support them while they start a new venture.
However, despite this neoliberal hostility to the State possibly helping people and the amount of effort they put into discouraging small frauds by ordinary people, neoliberals think it quite acceptable for financial corporations to be bailed out at taxpayer expense, even if (particularly if?) the corporation has behaved stupidly and and dangerously, and the bailout money is used fund executive bonuses, or share buybacks, rather than to support the workers, or stop them being thrown out of their homes (even if workers loosing their homes is bad for the economy as a whole – maintaining power is more important). A non-neoliberal state might think that the best way to help everyone in a financial or loan crisis, is to subsidise ordinary people’s mortgage payments, so they can keep their homes, eat and keep spending so small local businesses survive. But that is not the aim of free market talk.
Again if a powerful corporate group is affected by neoliberal policies, for example agribusiness, then it can be said farmers are being helped out, when all the money goes to the wealthy parts of the sector, not to the more precarious smaller famers.
This strategy helps make the State more unpopular, and thus justifies rollback of the State’s democratic helpfulness, while keeping the State as the support for the elite. The State becomes more traditional, a thing which protects hierarchy, wealth and property alone.
Neoliberalism also encourages an unrealistic individualism which denies human sociability, interdependence and collaboration for ordinary people. This functions to discourage collaboration against the neoliberal state and corporate sector, while allowing people to seek individuality through supporting neoliberal propaganda.
Deliverables
Neoliberalism has delivered what you would expect, given its inclinations.
Inequality of wealth and power has increased. Vast amounts of wealth have been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Social mobility has lessened – it is now much harder for most people’s children to be wealthier than their parents were, or for a person to crawl out of the working class into the middle class, than it was in the 20-30 years after World War 2. Political alienation has increased. Corporations rule the Western world. The rise and success of neo-fascism seems probable. The World is on the brink, possibly over the brink, of ecological crisis. Nothing is likely to be done to prevent, or even accommodate to, this crisis, if it causes problems for the corporate establishment.
Positive psychology and ‘information mess’
As I have suggested elsewhere positive thinking is a hallmark of neoliberalism, and this leads to distortion and suppression of information.
The neoliberal “free market” is dogmatically thought to always deliver the best result possible. The only thing that can ever officially go wrong with the market is government intervention.
Unfortunately markets often go wrong and have unintended and sometimes harmful consequences – this is life – this is what happens in complex systems, and anyone who denies this is a property of all such systems is engaging in selective truth.
However, because the neoliberal State and neoliberal policy exists solely to protect the market and its big players, and it is impossible to separate the market from politics, or from attempts at control, it is always possible to say that something a government has done is the cause of the problem. Even when that action was a result of neoliberal protections for the corporate sector.
Neoliberals are positive the market delivers good things, and that paradise will emerge in the future (even when the market appears to be delivering global destruction), in order to defend corporate power and action.
To keep this positivity, neoliberals have to ignore all the counter evidence, or define that evidence as political bias, again because the purpose of neoliberalism is not to deliver a good economy, but to deliver an economy in which established power is preserved. Counter-evidence is defined as political as it shows the politics of neoliberalism does not deliver quality results for the majority of the population.
Neoliberalism can only flourish an environment of ‘positive’ or cheerful lies, that hide difficulties. Truth would demand the system be changed as it is not working.
Neoliberalism needs misinformation, just as President Trump does, because it is unlikely to be successful campaigning on its real aims of increasing corporate power and wealth, and decreasing the power, wealth and security of everyone else. This need for misinformation is magnified when society as a whole faces great challenges, which may not be able to be solved by maintaining the old ways of life and power.
Neoliberals act to impoverish information and education, to preserve ignorance, so as to increase support.
It is also standard for corporations to use misinformation to boost sales, halt competition, misdirect competition, claim they have working products when they don’t, shift away responsibility for disaster, promote false financial statements and so on. This is the normal behaviour demanded of business people. Support of corporate power without responsibility, is simply to support this already existing flood of misinformation. Misinformation is part of capitalist power, just as much as it is part of other non-democratic sources of power. Capitalist Advertising and PR are big businesses, and it is naïve to think they do not know how to manipulate people with fiction.
Corporations control almost all the media and promote neoliberalism, a good example being the Murdoch Empire. Corporations control and fund large numbers of think tanks, while neoliberal policy aims to make sure that universities are servants of the corporate sector and only do research useful to consolidate the profitability of that sector.
Some extremely neoliberal pro-corporate media has developed the strategy of arguing that other media is left wing and socialist. This is simply not true, as they are nearly all corporately owned, and dependent on corporate advertising for survival. However, it does help to smear any possible alternative to hardline neoliberal corporate domination, and keep its audience loyal and thinking they are being radical, rather than supporting their own submission.
As suggested elsewhere in this blog, neoliberals will embrace fascism to keep power in a crisis. They will attack socialism and communism, because however defective those movements are, they are intended to end the domination of people by corporate wealth, and that cannot be thought.
For neoliberals the lives of ordinary citizens are unimportant when compared to retaining corporate profit – hence they have no difficulty pretending there are no problems with climate change or pandemics.
Neoliberal Conspiracy
In the series of posts on this blog called “Neoliberal Conspiracy” I have suggested that because Neoliberals cannot campaign easily on the grounds of their real policies, they conspire together to try and manipulate people into thinking that hardline neoliberal politicians have another, more populist and libertarian, agenda. In practice, by liberty they mean the equal liberty of all to crush those weaker or less wealthy than themselves. The Murdoch Empire has been an important part of this propaganda war for a long while.
The main aim of the conspiracy is to maintain corporate dominance amidst ecological and other forms of collapse.
However it is important to remember, that due to this conspiracy, most people who end up supporting neoliberal politicians are not neoliberals themselves.
Neoliberalism as capitalism?
I would argue that while neoliberalism is a ‘happy’ form of capitalist ideology, it is not an inevitable part of capitalism itself. It is common, because capitalism is not just about trade, but about forms of power, organisation, and exclusion of others from property. Neoliberalism is simply a tool used to protect and intensify those forms.
I personally feel that 1960s capitalism was much more realistic. It would probably have been less suicidal and able to deal with the pressures of climate change, even without the alternate energy sources we have now. There would have been big research projects, massive amounts of investment and so on. People would have accepted rules to lower emissions, just as they accepted the rules to lower deaths from smog, even if it cost profit.
There is, of course, no evidence for this because they did not face the same problems with the same intensity. Perhaps if they had, then they would have locked down into protecting wealth and ending democracy so as to preserve the inequalities of the system as a whole, but they may not. We cannot know what would have happened, but we can expect that neoliberalism will continue to prefer to kill us, before it does anything to solve the problems.
However, it might be possible to change the forms and ideology of Anglo-capitalism, and help people to become aware that neoliberalism is a useless, deceiving and harmful, ideology.
I have previously discussed “positive thinking” as a way that Neoliberalism engages in information distortion and suppression. Let’s look at this in more detail with the case of Covid-19.
There is a lot of use for some kinds of positive thinking. Realising that life presents problems, that solving problems can generate more problems, and that persistence and a willingness to learn from failure and mistakes, by changing tack rather than giving up, is useful. Life is complex, and enmeshed in complex systems – it is not easy for most people to do much of anything. If I can quote a relatively famous musical philosopher – John Lydon…
“Every problem at first seemed insurmountable,” he says. “Until one worked harder and harder at solving it. It’s a process I enjoy.”…
“I try to say that in the book,” he says. “Everything is a test. You’ve got to solve these problems. You can’t just run away and hide, shirk your responsibility. You’ve got to meet it head-on, get on with it. Sorry, there it is. These are the cards handed to you and you’d better play the game.”
This seems to be relatively realistic, if you assume Lydon also learns from mistakes. Gratitude and thanks for life and for what you have is probably good for you as well.
However, neoliberal positive thinking seems to insist that one should focus on imagined success and not focus on the problems. In the version of life it promotes, it seems you only get what you attract by your thoughts. If you think positively you attract good things, if you think negatively you attract bad things. Therefore, if you are miserable, poor or sick, it is your fault for choosing bad thoughts, and the successful are always virtuous and strong. They control their thinking so it is always positive, always envisioning what they truly desire.
This is far more problematic, especially with the implied addendum, that given a free market if you are virtuous and hardworking then only good will happen to you, if you think good things and are good. This acts as a way of reinforcing inequality and plutocracy – bad things only happen to bad, uncontrolled, or weak people.
This post is rather long, so in summary:
Neoliberal positive thinking
ignores experience,
plays down a whole range of problems,
blocks information flow,
denounces those with different views, no matter how knowledgeable they might be, and
leads to lying, shadow politics and scapegoating.
It also leads to unjustified optimism about:
‘solutions’ which have not been properly tested but which feel good, and of
the ruler’s better understanding of the problems than people who have studied the areas involved.
By helping people to turn away from real problems, it makes the situation worse.
Trump privately recognises the Danger
We now know that Donald Trump confessed on tape to Bob Woodward on 7th February 2020, that he knew the Corona virus was a problem:
You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. People don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?…
This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff….
Young people too. Plenty of young people…..
I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.
A standard defense of the President’s reaction to Covid-19 is that he was distracted in early February by an Impeachment in the Senate, which the Republicans were never going to agree to proceeding, that no one could possibly be aware of what would happen in the future, and that he stopped travel from China when other people warned against it. However, in this interview, he clearly shows that he understood the danger of the problem, but he presented a completely different view of its magnitude to the public.
Publicly Trump plays down the Danger
About three days later, on the 10th February, at a public session at the White House, he showed his strategy of playing down the danger. He said:
Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.
I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.
There is no evidence to assume that the President received further information in this period which could justify modifying his position, (certainly he has not claimed this, that I have seen) so we can assume that his downplaying of the danger was based entirely on wanting to be positive.
This neoliberal positivity went into the policy. It was reported, and confirmed, by Dr Fauci that he and other Trump administration officials had recommended physical distancing to combat the spread of coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month – and this despite Trump’s apparent awareness of it seriousness, as revealed by the Woodward tapes. However, Trump seems to have been seduced by wanting to play it down. In neoliberal positive thinking, if you do not focus on the problem, but on how the problem is diminishing or the dawning light, then you will succeed.
what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
The President did not make public social distancing recommendations until 16 March. [Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing]. He can be said to have consistently undermined these recommendations, by a refusal to wear masks or be physically distant, except on occasions. He also seems to have attacked State Governors who tried to enforce, or recommend, distancing. I suspect that the worse the pandemic became the more he rejected caution as a mode of showing he was in charge.
An interview on Fox got to the point about optimism, but illustrated how it is tied up with flattery and boosterism:
Bill Hemmer: Mr. President. Thank you. Did we get out here in the light? Right about now – a big part of your job is to be an optimist. Donald Trump: Right. BH: You say that yourself. DT: My life…. We have to do what’s right for our country. And, you know, we have a very optimistic country, but this was a very sad thing that happened…. our people are incredible. And the way they’ve handled it and what they’ve done and what they’ve gone through is to me, it’s it’s really sort of shocking because as we discussed, they want to go back.
They want to go back to their restaurants and they want to go back to their places where they work. They want it. This is our country was built on that whole concept. I never realized how much. But they want to get it back. But we have a great country and our people are just truly amazing people.
Much later at a press meeting at the White House, 7 to 8 months after the Woodward tapes were recorded, and just after they were published, President Trump explained:
The fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country, I love our country, and I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic, as you say. And certainly, I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.
We want to show confidence. We want to show strength. We want to show strength as a nation. And that’s what I’ve done. And we’ve done very well. We’ve done well from any standard. You look at our numbers, compared to other countries, other parts of the world. It’s been an amazing job that we’ve done….
you cannot show a sense of panic or you’re going to have bigger problems than you ever had before.
Looking at the numbers, shows us that the US has done amongst the worst of all nations, in terms of deaths per head of population, but recognising that would not be positive or amazing (in a good sense).
As Dr. Fauci said:
There were times when I was out there telling the American public how difficult this is, how we’re having a really serious problem, you know, when the president was saying it’s something that’s going to disappear, which obviously, is not the case. When you downplay something that is really a threat, that’s not a good thing.
Another relatively positive technique is to emphasise how bad it could be so by comparison everything looks good. And then decide on the lower figures as reasonable.
we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead. Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower — as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people.
We now know 50-60,000 was an a considerable underestimate (at time of writing it is 217,000), and the US deaths and serious illness are likely to increase. The more people get sick, the wider the transmission and the harder it is likely to be to halt. We now don’t know how badly the country will do from now on, even if people do start facing the problem. Trump’s remarks about over a million people could be more to the point now, almost whatever is done.
Addenda:
We are now in the last days of the election campaign. The president is continuing the optimism, and saying how bad not being hyper-positive is.
Joe Biden is promising a long, dark, painful winter. Did you see him at the debate? Did anybody see the debate by any chance? No, he said, “A long, dark winter.” Oh, that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s just what our country needs is a long, dark winter and a leader that talks about it….
Just like he said on the debate, “You’re going to have a dark winter.” That was really depressing. It was even depressing even though he did so badly in the debate, I was depressed because I said, “It’s such a depressing thing he said.”
A few Republicans, such as Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed the same public line as the President writing:
Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.
On the 24th of February it is reported that senior members of the president’s economic team, privately told board members of the Hoover Institution, they could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.
“What struck me,” [A consultant at the meeting] wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”…
traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
“Short everything,” was the reaction of [one] investor, using the Wall Street term for betting on the idea that the stock prices of companies would soon fall.
It is possible that anyone with a sense of realism could have worked out the same advice, but the formal information was only directed at particular people.
Panic elsewhere
Despite his proclaimed desire to avoid panic at all costs, Trump does seem to manage to promote panic when it serves his political purposes – panic at ‘rioters,’ ‘liberal communists’, Anti-fascists etc., just not when it could lead to over 200,000 dead Americans, and no one yet know how many mutilated and long term sick.
Suburban voters are pouring into the Republican Party because of the violence in Democrat run cities and states. If Biden gets in, this violence is “coming to the Suburbs”, and FAST. You could say goodbye to your American Dream!
The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, “Friendly Protesters”.
There is apparently no positivity spare, to try and reduce racial discrepancies in deaths at the hands of police. Positivity helps boost fear of problems you don’t want to solve, and helps shadow projection
Positively control information
This kind of determination to be ‘positive’ about particular problems, leads to a position in which lying, ignoring or suppressing data, and hiding the reality is inevitable. Being positive in the neoliberal sense, creates a fear of real data and a desire to blame those who try to uncover the extent of the problem.
Suppression or hiding
As early as March an anonymous official told AP that
The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.
Dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room…
Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings… “We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”….
‘Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilit[ies]’… are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. Ordinary cell phones and computers can’t be brought into the chambers.
No one outside ‘the elite’ is to know what is discussed, even people who might know something about the problem. Information is suppressed.
‘Shoot the messenger’
Information which cannot be suppressed can be attacked and ignored. A report from the Inspector General of Health and Human Services, based on interviews between March 23-27 with administrators from 323 hospitals, gave its ‘key takeaway’ as:
Hospitals also reported substantial challenges maintaining or expanding their facilities’ capacity to treat patients with COVID-19. Hospitals described specific challenges, mitigation strategies, and needs for assistance related to personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, staffing, supplies and durable equipment; maintaining or expanding facility capacity; and financial concerns.
severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff. Hospitals reported that they were unable to keep up with COVID-19 testing demands because they lacked complete kits and/or the individual components and supplies needed to complete tests. Additionally, hospitals reported frequently waiting 7 days or longer for test results.
ibid: p.3
Trump responded, by politicising the report and dismissing the authors:
It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word “inspector general”? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong.….
we’ve done more testing and had more results than any country, anywhere in the world. They’re doing an incredible job. Now they’re all calling us. They want our testing. ‘What are we doing?’ ‘How do you do the five-minute test?’ ‘How do you do the 15-minute test?’
So, give me the name of the inspector general. Could politics be entered into that?…
Any information which presents problems, to the positive view, has (in that view) to be provided by people who are actively hostile, or politically motivated. There is therefore no need to pay attention to any information they might give. This reinforces information suppression.
The House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus reported that the White House coronavirus task force privately warned state officials that they faced dire outbreaks over the summer, but top Trump administration officials publicly downplayed the threat:
“Fourteen states that have been in the ‘red zone’ since June 23 have refused to impose statewide mask mandates per Task Force’s recommendations — including states with severe case spikes like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee,” the subcommittee says.
Regardless of how the reports line up with the administration’s messaging, public health specialists have repeatedly called for the reports and data contained in them to be made public. Such information can help local and state officials as well as individuals to better respond to the outbreak
“We’ve got a lot of Covid response-related data that’s all ready and prepped to be shared with the public and it just isn’t being shared,” Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, told CNBC in an interview in July.
According to the same news report, the White House condemned the committee for being partisan, with “the purpose of falsely distorting the President’s record.” Again we have the dismissal of problems. There was nothing to take on board here, everything was going well.
Politico reported that:
emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the [CDC] agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak…
The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer…
since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening… that was the aim and that’s how it reads and its disingeneous. Very misleading by the CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear. This hurts any President or administration. This is designed to hurt this Presidnet for their reasons which I am not interested in. I am interested in this or any President being served fairly and that tax payers money not be used for political reasons. They CDC, work for him.
ibid. [spelling and grammar as reported]
A unreviewed study from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences Columbia University argued that:
Counterfactual simulations indicate that, had these same control measures been implemented just 1-2 weeks earlier, a substantial number of cases and deaths could have been averted.
As we have seen, Fauci and other advisors had recommended control measures in mid February while the President did not introduce them until mid-March. President Trump’s response was, again, to damn the report and its origin:
Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me, they said we shouldn’t close it. I took tremendous heat, you know this. When I ban China from coming in, first time anything like that ever happened, I took tremendous heat…..
And I saw that report. It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.
It was clearly unnecessary to say more than something like “There are always disputes about models,” or “they have the benefit of hindsight,” or “I acted on the best information available” or, assuming he had really seen it, “that this article is not yet reviewed – there could be considerable problems with their method or conclusions”, but instead he has to try and make them motivatedly bad and imply their research was subservient to an otherwise unknown “little group of people that tell them what to do”. An evil conspiracy is the only possible explanation for suggesting the Trump government could have done better.
Trump is not alone in the denunciation of people saying coronavirus is series. Dr. Fauci and other health officials, and their families have received death threats [2]. Even people appearing in anti-covid announcements can suffer similarly, presumably in an attempt to silence them, and stop the negativity about the virus. Fauci said:
I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you…
There’s one thing about that nonsense that I do object to, and that is the effect that it has on my family…. Because when you get death threats that require you having security protection all the time, and when they start hassling your children on the phone and at their job and interfering with their lives, that pisses me off, I must say.
On the other side, some people with Coronavirus have also received threats, but its not clear, from what I’ve seen, whether that was politically motivated or not – fear of people with a contagious disease is fairly normal if not the best behaviour.
As said in the previous post, shadow politics tends to be denunciatory, rather than curious or information gathering, and that is certainly the case here.
Dislike of Data Leads to Information Mess
The President does not seem to like data and has apparently blamed testing for a rise in cases. Right at the beginning, there were some Americans on a cruise ship, the Grand Princess, which was denied entry into San Francisco, because of the presence of Covid. While the President allowed other people to make the decision, he made his preferences clear.
I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them [the officials] to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.
That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship, either. Okay? It wasn’t their fault either. And they’re mostly Americans, so I can live either way with it.
A few months later on Fox news he made a similar argument, that implies testing for disease increases knowledge of the numbers of those infected, and thus was not a positive thing.
[Chris] WALLACE: Then — then it [Covid] went down and now since June, it has gone up more than double. One day this week 75,000 new cases. More than double…
TRUMP: Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world. If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.
Cases are up — many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases. Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing….
I’m glad we do [testing], but it really skews the numbers….
You know I said, “It’s going to disappear.” I’ll say it again…..
It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right….. Because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.
When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please.
A review entitled Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, authored by a group led by led by Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2009 to 2017, was released a few days after the interview above. It claimed that the US “does not have standard, national data on COVID-19. The US also lacks standards for state-, county- and city- level public reporting.” In the press release for the report, the group said:
The report found critical gaps in the availability of information necessary to track and control COVID-19: across the 50 states, only 40% of essential data points are being monitored and reported publicly. More than half the essential information—strategic intelligence that leaders need to turn the tide against COVID-19—is not reported at all….
because of the failure of national leadership, the United States is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
In other words, there is no pressure, or direction, to gain clear information about Covid, or to make that information generally available. Information is a mess, because in the world of positivity, we do not need that information and do not attend to ‘negative’ information. Accurate information may possibly make the Administration, and the situation, look worse, and that would make the problem worse.
As a footnote it may well be the case that because the reporting is of cases and deaths, we automatically ignore or play down those people who seemed injured by Covid, or who do not recover their full health. Thus the situation could be far worse than is suggested by focusing on death and assuming that if people don’t die they have fully recovered.
Imagined Optimism
The President also positively promoted treatments for the disease, based on early projections of success, rather than waiting for test confirmations – even against his medical advisors’ advice. He said things like:
Look, it may work and it may not work. And I agree with the doctor, what he said: It may work, it may not work.
I feel good about it. That’s all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough….
You know the expression: What the hell do you have to lose? Okay?
There is no evidence I am aware of, that this harmed people who then insisted on receiving the unconfirmed drugs from their doctors, but it could have. It did boost pharmaceutical company profits through increased sales. The New York Times reported:
Prescriptions for two antimalarial drugs jumped by 46 times the average when the president promoted them on TV
His repeated declarations of support for the malaria drugs have resulted in shortages for people who need them.
U.S. hospital orders for chloroquine jumped by 3,000% from March 1 to 17, according to Premier Inc., a group-purchasing organization for hospital supplies. Hydroxychloroquine orders were up 260%.
Optimism must be everywhere – especially if it helps the corporate sector.
Positivity leads to suppression, or smearing, of dissent, as we have seen. Trump’s optimism about the medicines meant that people who insisted on better evidence for those medicines were clearly sabotaging his efforts to cheerlead and guide America.
The following report may possibly be based on false information, but it fits in with what we have observed so far:
Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed last week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He said that he had been pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit… I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
It sometimes appears that the President positively assumes he knows more than specialists, can easily pick things up and is massively intelligent. Talking about medical knowledge, he said.
I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
By the way, it’s a disease without question, has more names than any disease in history. I can name, “Kung flu.” I can name, 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu, what difference?
There are plenty of YouTube videos showing Trump declaring he knows more about a particular subject than anybody…. This is not unique to the President, and can be seen in many positive thinkers. It is a way of positively discounting problems and empirical disruptions, while ignoring advice from people who have studied the problems.
However, this kind of behaviour means that it is less likely that people will report bad news to the President or his Cabinet, because it will, at best be ignored, most likely not be welcome, and possibly be greeted with punishment. This increases the likelihood that the leaders wander in a cloud of positive misinformation, and actually do not know how bad things are, and thus are likely to consider people who report bad things as being misleading. After all nobody they trust told them any other than that the situation was good.
A recent Cornel University Study has suggested “that President Trump was quite likely the largest driver of misinformation during the COVID pandemic to date.”
Positivity and Shadow Politics
As we have seen, positivity demands negativity towards others, who disagree or are more cautious – which easily turns into shadow politics, as it involves trying to shift all mistakes and evil onto others.
The Case of Travel Bans: Denunciation of select opposition
President Trump has continually insisted that people resisted his action to prevent travel from China.
I could say I’m fully responsible. But, you know, one day, we had a virus When I took early action in January to ban the travel and all travel to and from China, the Democrats and Biden, in particular, called it “xenophobic.” You remember that? Joe was willing to sacrifice American lives to placate the radical-left open-border extremists. And we saved tens of thousands of lives, probably hundreds of thousands of lives. And we saved millions of lives by doing the closing and now the opening the way we did it.
According to Paul Offit, chair of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, those kinds of [anti-restriction] opinions were in the minority at the time the president made his decision.
“I don’t know anyone who thought the travel restrictions were a bad idea early on,” Offit told us in a phone interview.
When a virus like that is restricted to one location, as it appeared to be early on, travel restrictions can lessen the odds of it spreading to this country, Offit said. Over time, however, and as cases began to be identified in the U.S., travel restrictions make much less of a difference, he said.
Epidemiologists and former U.S. health officials told Time that the initial travel restrictions were valid and “likely helped to slow the spread of the virus. The problem, they say, is that once it was clear that the virus was within our borders officials did not pivot quickly enough to changing circumstances.”
Although Democratic leaders and Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
In a Feb. 4 letter to Trump, Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, chair of the Appropriations Committee, and Rose DeLauro, chair of one of the subcommittees, wrote that they “strongly support” the president’s decision to declare a public health emergency in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and they specifically cited the administration’s actions to impose “significant travel restrictions.”
For what it is worth, the New York Times reported:
From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth…. [health experts] faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and inciting panic…
By Thursday, Jan. 30, public health officials had come around. Mr. Azar, Dr. Redfield and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed that a ban on travel from the epidemic’s center could buy some time to put into place prevention and testing measures….
The debate moved that afternoon to the Oval Office, where Mr. Azar and others urged the president to approve the ban. “The situation has changed radically,” Mr. Azar told Mr. Trump.
Others in the room urged being more cautious, arguing that a ban could have unforeseen consequences. “This is unprecedented,” warned Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor. Mr. Trump was skeptical, though he would later claim that everyone around him had been against the idea.
Let us be clear, we will probably never know the full story of these events, and the accounts are ambiguous, but it seems unlikely that the President initiated the stand for banning travel from China, against the advice of everyone, and with ‘everyone’ objecting to that that stand.
However, if people did oppose the travel restrictions it was not just the “radical left”, as the President asserts. For example, the Cato Institute has argued.
U.S. airports recorded nearly 10.7 million entries (mostly by travelers without U.S. citizenship) directly from countries with confirmed COVID-19 cases as of April 7….
Even if they [the bans] were much stricter toward other noncitizens and much earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered. Too much travel had already occurred, and too many U.S. citizens travel. … the evidence shows he [Trump] should have focused far more on domestic measures.
The problem isn’t that Trump acted too slow. It’s that he fixated on international travel almost exclusively and long after the U.S. became the world’s leader in COVID-19 cases….
America needed a leader who sought out novel tools to stop a novel virus, rather than returning to his favorite tool again and again.
Trump does not point out the opposition from his own side and, in fact, did not initially ban travel from China, he restricted it. Travel from Hong Kong and Macau was still allowed – which may not have seemed unreasonable at the time – and
more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.
Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak …. on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries….
Nineteen flights departed Wuhan in January for New York or San Francisco…[before the ban, but after the disease was known] For about 4,000 [of these] travelers, there was no enhanced screening….
In interviews, multiple travelers who arrived after the screening was expanded said they received only passing scrutiny, with minimal follow-up.
the United States had already accepted more than 436,000 passengers from China (mostly non-U.S. citizens) since the outbreak there was reported on December 31.
Among these Chinese passengers were more than 6,000 from Wuhan — the center of the outbreak. One of these Wuhan travelers entered the U.S. in Chicago on January 13, the first known entrance of a person with a COVID-19 infection. Even after the president restricted travel, another 43,000 passengers entered the country on direct flights from China
about 2.6 million entries (again mostly non-U.S. citizens) had occurred from countries with COVID-19 in Europe and the British Isles [before the ban on flights from Europe]….
Sealing borders is a standard way of trying to deal with pandemics. It is a form of “social distancing” in that the idea is to keep people separate and reduce possible transmission.
One of the reasons that a global pandemic has been feared for so long is the extreme difficulty of confining a highly contagious disease in one country any more. Air traffic and passenger movements are truly enormous, and more or less uncontrollable, in the small amount of time needed to stop disease spread. The World Air Transport Stats for 2019, for example states there were 1,811,324,000 international passengers in 2018 and 2,566,346,000 domestic passengers in the same period (p.17). They remark: “Almost 22,000 city pairs are now connected by airlines through regular services” (p14). These figures should give some idea of the difficulty of stopping disease spread in a highly interconnected world. However, we should not forget that cruise liners can also act as incubation factories as with the Ruby Princess in Sydney.
Cutting air traffic was a good idea, which few medical officials opposed, but it is not enough once the disease has breached those borders, or if tens of thousands of people are let in anyway, especially if they are let in without testing or quarantine. Trump seems to be distorting the reality to get a simple positive message and blacken the names of out-group members.
General Negativity Towards Critics
Likewise, in a rally speech on the 28th February, the President emphasised his negativity towards critics, to help justify himself, and his position, saying:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue…..
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax
We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement….
the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans. Now you see it with the coronavirus, you see it. You see it with the coronavirus. You see that. When you have this virus or any other virus or any other problem coming in, it’s not the only thing that comes in through the border. And we’re setting records now at the border. We’re setting records. And now just using this, so important, right? So important. I’m doing well in the polls despite the worst fake news and worst presidential harassment in the history of the United States. We’ve got phenomenal numbers. No, it’s true. The worst presidential harassment in history.
Anything that [Democrats] can use to try to hurt Trump, they will. Anything he does in a positive sense, like you heard from the reporter that was just suspended from ABC, they will not give him credit for. The playbook is old at this point.
But for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here, and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness. You know, I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump derangement syndrome, but these people are infected badly.
When questioned about this Vice President Mike Pence went along with allocation of blame to one side alone, despite obvious hesitations:
Well, I think what the president said earlier this week and his charge to me is to remind the American people that the risk is low, to assure the American people that we’re ready, but also to say, as the president said, this is no time for politics.
And, frankly, I — I think that was Don Jr.’s point, that there has been some very strong rhetoric directed at the president by some members of Congress and political commentators…
But what the president has charged us to do… is to set the politics aside on this and to work the problem.
that’s exactly what we’re doing. And with — with the exception of some barbs being thrown by some of the predictable voices in the public debate on — on the left, the usual shots the president will — takes, and that I have really heard… what I’m telling you is that this is really a time for us to come together…
Positivity was also present in the popular pro-Trump media. This is Rush Limbaugh showing his priorities:
Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump…. Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks….
The stock market’s down like 900 points right now. The survival rate of this is 98%! You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2% of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks. That is a far lower death statistic than any form of influenza, which is an annual thing that everybody gets shots for. There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus. In fact, coronavirus is not something new. There are all kinds of viruses that have that name. Now, do not misunderstand. I’m not trying to get you to let your guard down…
Nobody wants to get any of this stuff. I mean, you never… I hate getting the common cold. You don’t want to get the flu. It’s miserable. But we’re not talking about something here that’s gonna wipe out your town or your city if it finds its way there.
Trump developed the habit of dismissing or insulting reporters who asked awkward questions or who were not equally positive. To give just one early example:
Q: What do you say to Americans who are scared, though? I guess, nearly 200 dead; 14,000 who are sick; millions, as you witness, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?
THE PRESIDENT: I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.
Go ahead.
Q Mr. President, the units that were just declared —
THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. The American people are looking for answers and they’re looking for hope. And you’re doing sensationalism, and the same with NBC and “Con-cast.” I don’t call it — I don’t call it “Comcast,” I call it “Con-cast.”
Let me just — for who you work — let me just tell you something: That’s really bad reporting, and you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.
Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows. I’ve been right a lot. Let’s see what happens. John?
Q Can I get back to science and the logistics here?
THE PRESIDENT: You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Again, all the President needed to have said to be positive, was something like “200 cases is not too bad, with good management, and people being careful, we can slow this down, and we should be fine”, but positivity demands more shadows than that.
Spreading positivity, with the apparently necessary projecting of shadows onto others, cannot be carried out by one person alone. It requires considerable collaboration and whether a deliberate attack on the American people to protect the neoliberal economy or not, is helped by the possibility that people are operating in a political and conspiratorial environment in which deceiving others “for their own good” is normal – and that is what I am suggesting – that neoliberalism promotes conspiracies and disinformation in order to keep power.
Tucker Carlson of Fox, who at one stage tried to get the President to believe the virus was a serious problem, explained how the politics of this was likely to work:
I understood what our viewers thought… “If [the mainstream media] is telling me Trump must lose because of some virus from China, [then that media] are probably overstating it because they hate Trump”. And I don’t think that it is an irrational thing to conclude.
Supporting the President more or less required people to be positive, or at least dismissive of bad news, because that bad news came from what they reguarded as hostile sources. A Trump voter quoted in the Guardian indirectly backs this take, saying:
I think that a lot of the news media, they don’t tell the whole story. They tell the piece that sounds the most damning and they don’t add the other piece,
The positivity also sets up a false binary – you either play the problem down or panic. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Commission makes the binary as hard as possible:
What would it mean if the president came out and said, “The sky is falling and everybody should be panicked”? He presented calm and a steady hand and a plan. And that is what a president should do. You know, we just commemorated 9/11 this week. And I watched Andy Card walk over to George Bush and say, “The second tower has been hit. America is under attack.” And George Bush didn’t stand up and say, “America’s been attacked by terrorists. Everyone panic.”
Panic or playing down the problem are not the only options. Facing a complex problem realistically, and entertaining some uncertainty, was still possible. We might even wonder if the Bush Administration’s being so positive that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11 and that the conquest of the country would be easy and quick, was a good thing? Perhaps they should have explored the issues further with less determination that there would a positive result from an otherwise unnecessary war?
Positivity as policy and behaviour
Positive from the Beginning. What could they teach us? What could we learn?
It appears that President Trump’s administration was positive before the pandemic, that they did not need to prepare for a pandemic, despite it being a common expectation that a pandemic would affect the world at some time.
In October 2019, the Trump Administration decided to discontinue a Republican program expanded under Obama, called “Predict”, that monitored the transmission of animal-born diseases to humans, the possible origin point of Covid-19. The program had helped discover more than 1,000 viruses. In its 2021 budget, the Trump administration wanted to reduce CDC funding by 16 percent and aimed to reduce contributions to global health programs by $3 billion [paragraph based on Mother Jones, 3 March 2020].
We might add that one explanation for the New Administrations’ refusal to attend briefings by their departments or prepare for transition, as detailed by Michael Lewis in his Fifth Risk, was because they were so positive they could deal with anything; they were smart and governing could not be that difficult – possibly as it was normally done by public servants. All that was needed was for the Departments to be obedient. The other reason was that Trump did not want to spend money on preparing for after the election. He reportedly said…
Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.
He was persuaded that a refusal to pay would be seen as lack of confidence in his victory, but was apparently resentful about the continued loss of money from his campaign.
As Lewis states, the government bureaucracy polices a huge portfolio of catastrophic risks such as nuclear accident, cyber-attack, catastrophic weather events, pandemics etc:
A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen…
On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
ibid.
This account by Lewis implies positivity in the New Administration about how easy everything should be for them. This is not surprising, as the dogma of neoliberalism primarily exists to protect corporations from government or public ‘interference’ and the holders of this dogma believe that the only times that anything ever goes wrong is if the government is involved.
If people in the Trump Administration subscribed to this neoliberal dogma, then it is perfectly believable that the incoming Trump neoliberal administration dismantled important offices and programmes. Given their positive view of the world, they probably had little idea of what was important, and little propensity to listen to advice because they believed everything would turn out for the best, if left to business.
With these attitudes, they might well have a tendency to prefer not use the State to do anything to stop the spread, and trust to the ‘normal’ processes of the corporate market – which seems to be largely what they have done.
Targets and Predictions
Returning to the period after the pandemic had begun. Just over a week after he agreed to recommend social restrictions, the President declared his simple priority:
we have to put the country to work.
Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu, but you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability. You can’t just come in and say, “Let’s close up the United States of America.” The biggest — the most successful country in the world by far…..
I would to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter (Easter Sunday 12 April).
This is an overly positive target, but can be forgotten as soon as it has passed. Around April 23 the Vice President was saying:
If you look at the trends today, I think by Memorial Day Weekend [23-25 May] we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us… State and local officials will begin to reopen activities, you’re going to see states ahead here begin to do that
There was no reason to believe the epidemic would have passed by then, this was pure positivity alone. Perhaps the neoliberal panic about ‘the economy’ overruled everything else? This is not to say economic collapse is not a problem, but it is not the only, or even the primary, problem. This problem and the other problems magnify each other in complicated ways – disease in itself can undermine economies.
Even now in October with a resurgence of Covid cases and the prospect of winter ahead, the President is still claiming the virus is on the way out, and praising an as yet undeveloped vaccine:
The vaccine will end the pandemic but it’s ending anyway. I mean, they go crazy when I say it. It’s going to peter out and it’s going to end, but we’re going to help the end and we’re going to make it a lot faster with the vaccine and with the therapeutics and frankly, with the cures.
…you know what, without the vaccine it’s ending too. We’re rounding the turn, it’s ending without the vaccine. But the vaccine is going to make it go quicker. Let’s get rid of it. We want to get it the hell out of here.
Although this may not be the the President’s fault on 27th October the White House issued a Press Release which claimed one of the Trump Administration’s achievements was
ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.
The White House later admitted this was badly phrased and that the actual report did not claim the disease was over, but it is in keeping with their positive philosophy.
Rushing a Vaccine; Trusting pharmaceutical companies
The President’s main strategy to save the economy has been to rush a vaccine, lessen safety checks, and to say how good American vaccine manufacturers are. He said:
Then, my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus, this very vicious virus. And I want to thank all of the doctors and scientists and researchers involved because they’ve never moved like this, or never even close.
The Food and Drug Administration has swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials; that’s what we have right now, 130. And another 450 are in the planning stages. And tremendous potential awaits. I think we’re going to have some very interesting things to report in the not-too-distant future. And thank you very much to Dr. Hahn.
It’s called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody has seen anything like we’re doing, whether it’s ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything like we’re doing now, within our country, since the Second World War. Incredible.
Its objective is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we’d love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year. We think we’re going to have some very good results coming out very quickly….
Typically, pharmaceutical companies wait to manufacture a vaccine — a vaccine until it has received all of the regulatory approvals necessary, and this can delay vaccines’ availability to the public as much as a year and even more than that. However, our task is so urgent that, under Operation Warp Speed, the federal government will invest in manufacturing all of the top vaccine candidates before they’re approved…
Everything is going faster and better than ever – at Warp Speed! However, even without the vaccine everything would be ok, because there was no real problem.
And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important: Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process. And in many cases, they don’t have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven’t seen anything like this in 100-and-some-odd years — 1917….
you know, it’s not solely vaccine-based. Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. So I don’t want people to think that this is all dependent on vaccine, but a vaccine would be a tremendous thing.
ibid.
Similar optimism was present in September:
We’re on track to deliver and distribute the vaccine in a very, very safe and effective manner. We think we can start sometime in October. So as soon as it is announced, we’ll be able to start. That’ll be from mid-October on. It may be a little bit later than that, but we’ll be all set.
This was probably never going to happen. At about the same time
CDC Director Robert Redfield said any vaccine is unlikely to be widely available to most Americans before the summer or early fall of 2021, given initial constraints on supplies if and when a vaccine wins approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). [Even if a] vaccine… will initially be available some time between November and December
Likewise, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the FDA and a member of Pfizer’s board of directors said:
for most people, they will not have access to a vaccine until 2021. I think maybe the first quarter of 2021, probably the first half of 2021. And that’s assuming that these vaccines are demonstrated to be safe and effective in these large trials.
ibid.
But the boosting continued.
Under Operation Warp Speed, my administration is on track to deliver a safe and effective vaccine in record time. We’re doing very well with the vaccines, as most of you know.
Four vaccines are now in the final stage of trials. The day the vaccine is approved by the FDA, we’ll begin distributing it within 24 hours, with hundreds of millions of doses to follow very quickly. We’re all set to go. We’re all ready….
Tremendous progress is being made. And I say, and I’ll say it all the time: We’re rounding the corner. And, very importantly, vaccines are coming, but we’re rounding the corner regardless. But vaccines are coming, and they’re coming fast. We have four great companies already, and it’s going to be added to very rapidly. They’re in final stages of testing. And from what we’re hearing, the results are going to be very extraordinary.
While it may be a good idea to speed and encourage vaccine production, it usually takes a long time for safe testing, and not all viruses can be successfully vaccinated against (AIDS for example), or they require continual innovation due to virus mutation, or revaccination because the antibodies do not last for a long time.
Only in neoliberal positive thinking, is having a fully tested and implemented working vaccine, which is widely accepted by the population, the same as having plans for one, so everyone can stop worrying and get on with socialising and work. Other strategies need to be pursued as well.
Dr Fauci also pointed out that the President has not seen the data on the testing.
These are blind placebo-controlled trials. The only ones who see the data intermittently is the safety data monitoring board…. a single unblinded statistician…. Those data are not public data, no one can know what those data show. That person looks at the data and says, ‘OK, let’s keep the trial going, we don’t have enough data to make a decision.’ Or that person can look at the data and say, ‘You know, there really is a very strong signal of efficacy, let’s make it known.’ We bring in the company, we tell the company, then the company can make up their mind, whether they want to use that data to go to the [Federal Drug Administration for approval].
So we can conclude the President is likely repeating, or creating, optimistic business hype:
In the First Presidential Debate, the President implied that he trusted Pharmaceutical companies more than scientists, saying….
I’ve spoken to the companies and we can have it a lot sooner. It’s a very political thing because people like this [Dr. Redfield and Dr. Slaoui, the head of ‘Operation Warp Speed’] would rather make it political than save lives….
It is a very political thing. I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others. They can go faster than that by a lot. It’s become very political because the left… Or I don’t know if I call them left, I don’t know what I call them.
His own CDC Director says we could lose as many as another 200,000 people between now and the end of the year. And he said, if we just wear a mask, we can save half those numbers. Just a mask. And by the way, in terms of the whole notion of a vaccine, we’re for a vaccine, but I don’t trust him at all. Nor do you. I know you don’t. What we trust is a scientist.
President Donald J. Trump: (24:25): You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?
ibid.
Against Caution about Vaccines
Positive thinking also promotes shadow politics. The president’s optimism requires him to condemn those who wonder if vaccination is enough or if the results will be in quickly enough, as being “anti-vaccine”.
I’m calling on Biden to stop promoting his anti-vaccine theories because all they’re doing is hurting the importance of what we’re doing. And I know that if they were in this position, they’d be saying how wonderful it is. They’re recklessly endangering lives. You can’t do that.
And again, this is really a case that they’re only talking — just started talking a little bit negatively, and that’s only because they know we have it, or we will soon have it. And the answer to that is very soon.
…we may very well have the vaccine prior to a certain very important date, namely November 3rd. Once they heard that, the Democrats started — just to show you how bad the intention is, they started knocking the vaccine. Had nothing to do with a vaccine, it was totally made up. It’s all disinformation….
[Democrats] started knocking the vaccine as soon as they heard that this actually may come out prior to election. Now, it may or may not, but it’ll be within a matter of weeks. It will be within a matter of weeks from November. It’s ready to go and it’s ready to — for massive distribution to everybody — with a focus, again, on seniors.
ibid
Joe Biden’s anti-vaccine theories are putting a lot of lives at risk. And they’re only doing it for political reasons; it’s very foolish. It’s part of their war to try and discredit the vaccine, now that they know that we essentially have it. We’ll be announcing it fairly soon.
If people are interested, Biden’s official policies can be found here.
A Possible Future Solution Justifies Spreading the Problem?
Even after the disease had killed over 200,000 Americans – which is far more than any flu seems to have killed per year in the last 50 or so years – members of the Party seemed to be convinced that they could not get the virus, would not get it seriously, or were afraid of being seen as weak or negative. Pictures of Republican Party parties and events, show people crowded together without masking.
copyright Washington Post/Getty Images
Apparently knowing he had been in contact with Corona Virus, Trump attended a Republican fund raiser inside his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where no one was warned, masks were not worn, and buffet food was served in contravention of New Jersey anti-covid health regulations. This is another way of positively asserting that Coronavirus is never a problem – and which demonstrates the President’s victory over the disease.
Current leaked figures suggest that “34 White House staffers and other contacts” where infected from the one event.
After Trump was recognised as having Coronavirus, his main effort seemed to be to persuade people that he was healthy, possibly immune, and that the virus was nothing to worry about, tweeting positively:
Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
He also suggests that Joe Biden, who is much more cautious, would be hiding in a cellar, apparently using doctored images to make his point – again falsehood is true if it shows how heroic and virtuous the neoliberal President is.
It may be that the President is immune, but that does not mean everyone is immune, or able to get free medical care and experimental drugs, and there would still be no reason to emphasise that mask wearing is unnecessary to protect the health of others, particularly those white house staff who cannot afford the kind of medicines given to Trump, which may not work for everyone anyway.
The point seems to be that in neoliberal individualism and positive thinking, the successful isolated wealthy individual overwhelms fears of death or prolonged illness in many unknown others. Trump is continuing to cheerlead the country, rather than face the complexities of the situation.
Positivity falters
There seems to have been a moment in mid to late March in which the President’s public positivity faltered. Tucker Carlson had warned him the virus was bad and Trump had had a reaction to what he had seen in New York
I grew up in Queens, New York, and right next to a place called Elmhurst, Queens. And they have a hospital that’s a very good hospital — Elmhurst Hospital. Right? I’ve known it. I’ve known where it is. I can tell you the color on the outside, the size of the windows. I mean, I know it very well, right? That was near my community where I lived.
And I’ve been watching that for the last week on television. Body bags all over in hallways. I’ve been watching them bring in trailer trucks — freezer trucks; they’re freezer trucks — because they can’t handle the bodies there’s so many of them. This is in my — essentially, in my community in Queens — Queens, New York.
I’ve seen things that I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands. I’ve never seen them in our country. Elmhurst Hospital — unbelievable people. I mean, I — when I see the trucks pull up to take out bodies — and these are trucks that are as long as the Rose Garden. And they’re pulling up to take out bodies, and you look inside and you see the black body bags. You say, “What’s in there?” It’s Elmhurst Hospital; must be supplies. It’s not supplies. It’s people. I’ve never seen anything like it.
But while mentioning the same scene he swiftly moved into positivity.
And you also see where you have friends that go into the hospital and you say, “How is he doing?” two days later. And they say, “Sir, he is unconscious” or “He’s in a coma.” So things are happening that we’ve never seen before in this country.
And with all of that being said, the country has come together like I’ve never seen it before. And we will prevail. We will win. And hopefully, it will be in a relatively short period of time.
Within two weeks he was critcising Democrat governors for following the regulations he had issued, and stating that he would open the economy irrespective of what they wanted. He also started to tweet that people should Liberate Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia The inference, is that positive thinking requires shadow politics for it to seem valid, and that it acts as a way of defusing distress.
Conclusion
Early on the President knew the Coronavirus was bad, but he says he decided to play it down, and say it was going to clear up, to avoid panic. He seems to have acted together, with others in the news media and his political party, to mislead people as to the seriousness of the disease, to reduce any Federal co-ordination of the Response and to blame, or scapegoat, Democrat politicians for the problem, including the past administration and State governors where possible. The President delayed, and undermined, recommendations of distancing and hoped that an imagined rapid and unproperly tested vaccine would solve the Country’s problems. This may have later led the President to play the disease down to hide how badly the administration had done – partly because they were so positive that things would go well.
Another possible reason for the positive thinking, is that it is often asserted that consumer and business confidence is the root of economic activity. It could be assumed that if people fear the disease they will both spend and produce less. For example:
Because consumer sentiments are what really drive economies, a return to any kind of “normal” will only happen when and not before confidence returns.
Schwab, K. & Malleret, T. COVID-19: The Great Reset (pp. 43-44). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Severe slowdown is likely to lead to companies sacking staff (especially without taxpayer support particularly geared at keeping staff employed or paid), and that will lead to a further fall in demand (as people lose income, and increase saving – where possible), and hence to more unemployment.
This realisation could easily slip into a position in which optimism and downplaying the seriousness of the disease, together with attacks on those who thought otherwise could become almost compulsory, if the authorities wanted to keep profit turning and avoid an otherwise inevitable collapse in an election year.
Whatever the case, it seems it was more important to win the election, keep the neoliberal economy going and get people back to work, than it was to protect the American people from the disease. Indeed, it seems likely that the positivity made the situation far worse than it could have been.
The main policies the President seemed to have, were to downplay the disease, keep the share market high by positive spin, attack his political opponents, blame China and hope for a vaccine to be developed quickly – and apparently hope that it did not have bad effects because it was being rushed, as Pharmaceutical companies are trustworthy. Everything else went up and down. He does not even seem to consider the possibility that the disease effects could become worse as the country moves into winter.
A Realist and positive approach does not avoid problems
A real positive approach would have recognised there was a problem, and a problem which was barbed. If people did not self-isolate or practice physical distancing then many people would die or, as it turned out, suffer prolonged illness. However, it is difficult to run a modern country if everyone had to self isolate. It is also possible that if hospitals are shut down, or people are scared to attend them, then people will die unnecessarily from other diseases. There are also likely to be significant mental problems, because humans are not the isolated independent individuals of neoliberal fantasy. These are problems which all have to be recognised, and no doubt there are still more problems needing to be dealt with.
The President could have admitted these problems, could have discussed it with many people, could have encouraged people to be cautious and not to spread the disease, but to keep up socialising, rather than insist on them working in harmful conditions. However, work seems to be the only legitimate social activity for strict neoliberals. He could have helped cities in difficulty rather than try to attack Democrat States and praise Republican States. He could have accepted there might be many approaches which would need to be tried out. He could have accepted hard work and constantly corrected science was necessary. But he didn’t, he floundered in positivity that refused to recognise a set of serious and complex problems, and which continually engaged in shadow politics to try and boost the positive vision that there was no problem.
Positivity creates an unconscious
It is based on panic for the really important thing – the economy, and fear of learning the true extent of the problem. It allows the magnification of fear of lesser problems – such as riots. Positivity creates a negativity towards possible reality, obscures and punishes attempts at understanding, and proposes false dichotomies in order to make the behaviour seem reasonable. It also leads to behaviour which may intensify the problem – particularly as no attention is given to unintended consequences, or unpleasant results.
Neoliberal thinking on Climate change
There is a fair chance this kind of positivity explains some of the neoliberal approach to climate change. If they look after and protect the important things – ie corporate wealth, power and liberty, then (by not focusing on the problems this generates), those problems of climate will disappear in boundless wealth and opportunity. The only real problem comes from those who refuse to be positive, and who do focus on the problems of the world’s slowly disintegrating ecology. These negative people affect the positivity of everyone else, and by pointing to the problems, actually create those problems. Therefore negative people have to be silenced, as they are destroying the capitalist paradise which would otherwise be present.
This hypothesis is a slight refinement of the hypothesis that neoliberals would prefer that large numbers of people should die, rather than that the people are enabled have any liberty to constrain corporate action, or any independence from the corporate system, but it adds force to the idea that this position may often come from a positive cultivation of ignorance rather than malevolence.
The point of this particular series is to argue that the English speaking world is subject to an attempted ‘team up’, organised activity, or conspiracy to maintain the power of the already wealthy and powerful. This conspiracy seems quite capable of preferring the deaths of millions to the loss of established corporate profit. It primarily works through deliberately corrupting information flows, buying politicians and political parties, and by identifying scapegoats, and pursing a ‘shadow politics.’ This movement has the potential to lead towards a fascism, or authoritarianism, that is meant to protect the current social hierarchies of power and wealth, during the planetary ecological crisis.
The wealthy and powerful are here considered to be largely located within the upper echelons of the corporate or shareholding sector. We might call these people the neoliberal plutocracy – while recognising the possible over-simplification in that label.
For example, we can recognise, that people in the upper echelons of the corporate sector do not have to be united in everything.
Firstly, for example, they may not be totally united in support of Donald Trump, even though he appears to aims in common with many of them, such as tax cuts for the already wealthy, demolition of the vaguely helpful participatory State, militarisation of the police, intensification of culture wars, destruction of representative democracy, attacking or misdirecting anti-capitalist, anti-establishment protestors and helping to remove any restraints on the corporate destruction of ecologies.
Secondly, some of this corporate wealth elite may have remnants of a sense of obligation to ordinary people, or feel that wealth should be used charitably, while others may think this is a betrayal of the status quo. There can be all kinds of complexities that may need to be recognised as people are complicated and rarely harmonious as a class. These differences are where cross class support might happen, and a potential for some kind of helpful action might take root.
The purpose of this post is to investigate the propaganda use of what I will call ‘Shadow Politics’. This is not only shady politics, but deliberately stirs up what Carl Jung called “The Shadow”; that is the projection of our own disliked ‘evil’ onto others and then using them as scapegoats for the failure of one’s own politics and social actions.
Shadow politics is rooted in a real cause – the fact that neoliberalism disempowers, isolates, and takes hope away from large sections of the population through its support of corporately controlled “free markets”, reduction of virtue to both wealth and support of neoliberalism, privatisation of previously public goods and services, shoveling wealth to a limited group of people, destruction of general social mobility (other than downwards), and pretending that conservatism is equivalent to destruction. Most people can probably sense that their lives are being stripped away, and they know, even if only subliminally, that the world around them is being destroyed, as is their personal identity and sense of purpose. People are rightly resentful.
In the previous post in this series, on neoliberal individualism, I argued that our self-identity emerges within our interaction with others and with the world. It necessarily is situated within collective traditions, interactions and politics. Our identity is a process, which involves participation in collective systems and of building ourselves from those collective systems.
This individuation process is particularly difficult when there is a collective individualism which suggests that we are already individualised, and just have to do more of the same, or lessen our responsibilities further.
We may even be highly resistant to the idea that our individuality is social in the first place, and think we can proceed by strengthening our both socialised ego and the collective idea of individualism without tackling what we, as a collective, are unconscious of, or refrain from being conscious of. This kind of individualism helps reinforce a collective “shadow process” which lumps other other people together in (usually despised) categories, and overrides the possibility of collaboration between people on different sides, or with different views, and which distracts us from the way we are being manipulated against our better interests.
Shadow
The shadow is what we deny in ourselves, or attempt to discipline in ourselves, but can see in an exaggerated form in others, especially in others that we have defined as outsiders or as ‘bad’. As Jung says:
The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself [or herself], and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly
Jung CW9-1: #513
It is:
those qualities and impulses [a person] denies in himself but can plainly see in others—such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions…
Marie Louise Von Franz – Meeting the Shadow in Dreams in Man and his Symbols
This set of identifications with particular others usually depends upon social ideologies, conditioning, and information availability and acceptance. It stems from denial, or lack of acceptance, of the complex nature of the world, and is the consequence of multiple repressions, which can include repressions of that part of the psyche that we call ‘the body’. Shadow can involve suppression of what our more individuated self might see as good or useful, not just things which are socially defined as bad.
As Jung says:
The shadow [can be] merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but – convention forbids!
Jung CW 11: #134
Jung’s point is that the shadow content is within us, it is cast by us (or ‘projected‘) onto others, in a mistaken attempt to make ourselves feel whole, moral, or pleasing to a God.
As it is an attempt to distract ourselves from perceiving or dealing with our own failings, where and when they occur, it is necessarily a process which makes ‘darkness’ and obscurity.
The consequences of the shadow can be socially magnified. If, for example, society worships a dangerous God, who condemns people to hell for eternity, then being truly viscous towards those socially defined as evil, becomes a way of fiercely indicating to God, and the rest of society, that we are on God’s side. Obviously, the greater the penalties for deviance, then the greater the temptation to attack others first to indicate you are one of the righteous.
We most clearly see our own shadow active in our interpretation of the behaviour of others. Shadow processes lead us to denounce criminality and weakness in others but accept it, hide it, or ignore it, in ourselves. Again, recognising this projected ‘deviance’ and engaging with it, might be where our true individuation can begin.
Individuation often involves a moral struggle – often because in our current socialised state of understanding we are caught in an apparently unsolvable moral dilemma which we refuse to acknowledge, or suppress by declaring one side of the dilemma a full solution.
For example, with Covid, we can decide that getting the economy going is worth any number of deaths, or that the deaths will be solved by an as yet unavailable piece of technology (such as a vaccine), or we can decide to wall people up – allowing them no social contact or possibly no income, and let them face death from other causes. To support our one-sided decision, we then project all our shadow evil onto those who make the other choice.
The important thing is that as well as giving us a sense of righteousness, the shadow projection can shut down further exploration of possible paths, and intensify our problems.
Shadow as process and social process
To be clearer, the shadow is not a ‘thing’ but a ‘process’. It often involves socially organised activity and culture which leads us to seek out the evil in others (usually a socially defined out-group), or seek out information about the evil in these others, and blame them for personal and social wrongs or mishaps, while making ourselves (and our ‘identity group’ or ingroup) innocent or largely innocent – and fighting evil which is located elsewhere. There is, by this process, nothing we need to change in ourselves or our group.
In shadow politics, it is always other people, other groups and othered ‘things’, and not ourselves, who are to blame, and they must be named and blamed publicly, and perhaps expelled or even killed. This process is what we call ‘scapegoating’. The most likely areas of blame depend on the information, or propaganda, you are most likely to chose to receive favourably – which is almost certainly influenced by what kind of social category you give to yourself or, perhaps, have been given by others.
Another way of putting this, is that some, if not most, parts of the shadow process are socially defined, enabled and encouraged. They arise because we attempt to fit in with our social expectations and social categories, by showing we are different from socially hated others. This blame and refusal to alter our behaviour, or consider what we are doing, helps keep the established system going (even if it is destructive), and appears to make it easier for us to survive. For example we don’t have to deal with the problems generated by the system which produces the ruling wealth elites, and their behaviours, we can just blame Bill Gates or Donald Trump.
These social expectations can come from dead authors as much as from live others.
As a brief example, in a shadow process, if we feel sexual attraction or affection to others of our own gender, and we (and our wider society) classify this as bad or weak, we might say to ourselves, that we feel those desires because of the machinations of gay people; the media which puts the idea before us; or because of some devil – not because those desires could be a humanly normal part of us. This blaming others is a way of denying the socially defined ‘evil’ in us, so that we can fit in with our group, by ‘projecting’ it on to another person or social category, usually one we condemn anyway. We may then begin to persecute those others, or guard against imaginary devils, rather than the real ones of our own (perhaps manipulated) prejudices and hatreds. The denial may also make the forbidden feelings more intense and insistent, making denial and the shadow process, even more rigid, violent or eventually hypocritical.
Ruling groups can use this process to distract the people from their failings as a ruling group. If you are encouraged, for example, to blame ‘the Jews’ then you are less likely to blame the Christian lords or the Christian capitalists, or the Christian Church for what is going wrong, and you are showing how Christian and non-Jewish you are.
It may not just be other people that we make evil. If we consider that human perfection consists of being constantly ‘rational’ or ‘spiritual’ and society has defined these virtues in opposition to, or separate from, ‘the body’ or ‘the world’ then, ‘materiality,’ our own physical forms, or even nature itself, may become subject to shadow processes and seem evil or repugnant. The body or the world may be held responsible for dragging down our over-zealous aspirations, and need to be treated harshly or suppressed.
This latter kind of shadow projection and hostility to the body and world has the potential to undermine our ability to live in this world, and we may even not care whether we destroy it or not. We certainly will not listen to it, or individuate with it.
In the shadow process, we break both the interactive connection between ourselves and the shadowy others, and obscure our role in participating in, possessing, or benefitting from, the ‘evil’ we denounce. We propose that we, and our group, are pure, and our discomfort comes from badness of others. We can then ignore our own faults by comparison with those evil others. For example we may claim that black people are more racist than white, or protesting women are more sexist than men. We can denounce the violence of rioters without seeing the violent activities of police or the actions of people ‘on our side.’ We are then free to engage in even more victimisation of those we blame for the problem, and make the situation worse.
There can also be an opposite movement which may be part of shadow process as it helps reinforce the legitimacy of our projections, in that we may also think that people we identify with, and see as good, are enthusiastically opposed to those things we see as evil, when there is no evidence that those supposedly ‘good people’ are even interested, and some evidence may even suggest they are more likely to be causing evil. As an example, we can see Trump supporters passionately believing that the President is opposed to the horrors of child rape, when there is no evidence from his twitter feed or rallies, that the President worries about it at all, and he was friends with a notorious rapist of young teens, and never bothered to denounce or help prevent that from happening, even after they broke up.
Another way of putting this process, is that we are aware of things going wrong, of the situation being bad, and of our inability to do much about it. We may not know what to do, because all of our social theories and allies do not have a real solution either. We are plagued with unease, discomfort and, probably, fear at the situation we are in. Certain groups of people become, or are made to be, ‘symbolic’ of this unease and discomfort and we project all our moral discomfort fear and unease on this group. They become symbolic of a problem which we cannot solve within our worldview and current collective psychology. But by making them the cause of all the problems, we can feel better about ourselves and the people we identify with , and feel that by attacking them we are solving the problems we face. We do not really need to change ourselves or examine our views of the world, or investigate the behaviour of the groups we like.
We can continue life as normal by attacking or getting rid of the groups that we have collectively made to symbolise the problem.
Shadow and Scapegoating
Collective shadow processes are often connected to what we can call collective ‘scapegoating processes’, as should become clear.
In the scapegoating process, all evils are placed upon, or seen as active in, a generally relatively weak creature, person, or group of people. As a result, this ‘entity’ becomes seen as the bearer and cause of most of the evils we face. By expelling, or killing this being, we expel the evil from both ourselves and society, and build unity, and hope for the future, between all those who participate in driving the expulsion or murder.
In the Bible it is said:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
In medieval times people identified as Jews, heretics or witches were made easy scapegoats for social and ecological failures. Disease occurred because of such people. Cows died because of these people. Children became deformed, sick or disappeared because of these people. The travails of the community were laid on their heads, but not consciously as in the ritual. The scapegoaging process involves the idea that life would move smoothly without certain evil people, and all that need be done is blame them and ‘remove’ them.
It is usual for relatively powerless people to be the one’s that the shadow is projected on to and who are blamed for disruption, as they are easier to expel or kill, and they have little political importance or influence. If a starving person steals food, it is they who are bad, not the system which deprives them of food, or allows others (such as myself) to eat too much for their own health or virtue. Attacks by force of law, justifies the attack by the presence of attack: “if we attacked them, they must deserve it.”
Working together to denounce, locate and purge the scapegoat builds group loyalties and satisfactions, so it appears to make people feel good and feel they have solved the problem. They can relax for a moment.
If you are interested in this theory of scapegoating, I suggest reading books by Rene Girard and his followers.
Denunciatory politics.
Shadow politics are denunciatory. A major clue to the probability that shadow politics are involved is the presence of denunciation without constructive policies. It is assumed that just following ‘our way,’ or ‘our leader’, and removing opposition, will solve all problems.
In shadow politics the main aim is not even self-interest, it is tearing down others that you are directed to hate, or feel normal to hate. This does us no real good, but it gets us a great deal of unity, and pleasure in the discomfiture of the others. That the hated-others can appear to suffer is enough. Eventually this can become self-destructive – if, for example, you decide garbage disposers are to be punished for being dirty, you may end up knee deep in garbage.
While it is perhaps dangerous to accuse others of shadow politics (as this could easily become shadow politics itself), it is probable people are engaged in Shadow politics if they blame others, and make victims of people (especially less powerful people), in order to explain away these unintended consequences.
Let us look at some examples. People of a more leftish political persuasion may be very upset by people like Donald Trump. He becomes a symbol for everything that is wrong with the system. This makes Trump way too important, and may even feed his ego (I don’t know of course).
However, it is likely that there is some shadow projection going on. Very few people who are concerned with climate change, probably feel they are doing enough to combat it. They are still working within the system, they possibly engage in consumerism, buy goods from overseas, drive cars, have jobs with companies or governments which are not doing much to reduce their ecological impact, or may even have to make destructive ecological impact themselves. They may also be unhelpful to the working class, increase pollution, be rude to opponents, suppress their awareness of counter-information, refuse to listen to opponents and so on. All things it is easy to see in Trump.
No matter how much they wish to act, the system they are attempting to live in requires them to be destructive, or interdependent with destruction, to survive. Trump, by his apparent indifference, cultivated ignorance, and encouragement of violence, provides a good symbolic focus for this discomfort and encourages shadow projection rather than a productive engagement with consciousness, moral dilemmas, the destructiveness of the social system as a whole, and so on. Without Trump things might be much better, although most people would know that things would still be bad, even if not quite as bad. Trump provides a symbolic resolution for recognition of the problems, but not a practical or constructive one. The reality is that Trump is not responsible for everything that is going wrong. He cannot work alone. That does not mean he should not be removed from office, but that alone will not be enough – there is more work to be done.
I recently read an article on Facebook, which I can no longer find (so please excuse the lack of acknowledgement) which alleged that Trump supporters did not care what Trump actually did, all they wanted was to upset and attack “liberals.” Seeing liberals upset, the idea of “liberal tears,” and plotting vengeance was enough for them. Now there may be some truth here – I would suspect most people on the left have encountered something like this on the Internet. However, I would doubt it was true of all Republicans or even all people who might support or vote for Trump. It creates a shadow projection by saying that a whole class of people are all the same as the supposed ‘worst’ of them. It therefore participates in the shadow dynamics by creating an enemy and effectively refusing to engage with them, other than hostilely – such people are apparently not worth engaging with, or even living with. This kind of reaction then justifies the Trump supporters’ hostility to “liberals”. These liberals really are stuck up jerks, who are out to get us, and deserve our mutual hostility.
If the statement was true in many (but not all) cases, then it would be more useful to ask “how did this arise?” This might lead away from the shadow politics. As a hypothesis, it would seem likely that people in many parts of the US and the English speaking ‘West’, do feel abandoned by the establishment, and have been abandoned by the establishment. They see themselves as ignored. They see themselves as subject to contempt. They see that their work is insecure, that their children are going to have even less chance of improvement than they do. They feel they have failed, and society has failed. Their hard work has not delivered as it is supposed to have done. They are marginalised in their own country, and in politics in general.
They likely feel this, irrespective of whether they can be categorised as working class or middle class. If these people can be categorised as middle class, they no doubt feel the threat that they could easily face poverty again, and lose all they have achieved. They have nothing to rely on other than their own strength and hard work. They have little social vocabulary to analyse their own problems other than what is provided by people like those on Fox. They blame the establishment, but not the neoliberal Republican establishment, which seems to share some of their views about hard work and independence. So they blame the “liberal establishment”; the not-always Republican media, those liberals who would apparently support and give money to people other than them – why are they missing out? Why are they the people who apparently have to pay for tackling climate change by losing the only good jobs that there are? Liberals often appear to take money from the government for doing nothing that has any resonance with them, why the hell should they listen to those people?
It should be noted that nearly all of these factors are the case for most people in the US, whatever politics they agree with.
These are real and common problems which do need to be faced, but shadow politics makes sure they are not faced, or the facing can be ignored, or displaced into hatred of a particular group (‘liberals’ or ‘Trumpites’). The resulting discontent, and possibly neurosis, serves to maintain the established system which causes the problem. It is less painful to denounce already disliked outsiders than to face up to the real problems, or the problems on one’s own side.
Neoliberal Shadows
In neoliberalism, the praise of individualism is joined with a denunciation of not only those who are ‘weak’ or ‘unfortunate’, but of those who recognise interdependence and a sense of responsibility towards others. However, we are all necessarily interdependent and part of the system that may depend on, and repress others. This is the guilt, the moral dilemma, that we are largely avoiding socially through shadow politics.
Neoliberalism encourages us to denounce, outgroups (such as the poor, the sick, the unfortunate, especially those of the wrong religion or race), as evil, dependent or criminal, whatever they do – unless, perhaps, they manage to become wealthy and neoliberal. The parasitism of the poor is condemned, the parasitism of the wealthy is ignored as it seems entirely natural. Neoliberal dependence on the government for subsidy, support, implementation of their policies, or protection is normal, any support directed at shadowy others is evil.
But “They are harmful”, you may assert, “I do not do X or desire to do X.” Or as Jung puts it “the cause of [your] emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person” (CW 9, 2: # 16).
The people that you accuse may also not do X or desire to do X, even if you find socially acceptable evidence that they do, or your projection tells you they do. Evidence can be faked, and in this world often is. We can easily accept evidence that confirms our projections. The despised others could possibly be harmful, but so may you or those you agree with. The fact that we live in a maladaptive system, this is the case. It also implies that we are likely to be harmful to ourselves in some ways as well as being likely to participate in harm to others, directly or indirectly.
The supposedly evil ones, may not be evil. They may simply misunderstand the nature of the world, be mistaken, be being deceived by psycho-socially knowledgably people, and their policies may make matters worse.
It is as likely, given we live in complex systems, that the other side and ourselves are simply behaving in ways which make sense for them, are well-intended but mistaken, have ways of obscuring or dismissing information which disturbs them and are being mislead by their shadows, than that they are evil as such. In a way this is a far more disturbing view as it suggests that, without extreme care, the same kinds of problem is likely to affect everyone.
Shadow politics and information
In shadow politics, information is about loyalty and denunciation, not about evidence or accuracy. If information denounces the right people then it is taken as likely to be correct.
Knowledge is rarely a lone event gained through your own independent research. It involves sources who you trust and sources you do not trust as much. It also can involve giving comfort to both your ego and shadow. Yes, your research demonstrates that people like yourself (your ingroup) are good and virtuous, and the shadowy others (your outgroups) are really evil and even perhaps worse than you thought.
Without much difficulty, given the huge mass of information available, somewhere you will be able to find knowledge to support your shadow, because you already think that is the case, or because you identify with or have sympathies with those who are telling you. The suppression of awareness of the shadow, can also make these projections compulsive. Those we put the shadow upon, may also be unconscious, and be reacting against your accusations, and so the accusations just both sides together in a self-reinforcing shadow and scapegoating process, and make relationships and change harder.
One further aspect of this is the common allegation that those people who disagree with us are ‘sheeple’ who blindly follow mainstream programming. This form of shadow abuse, allows us to believe anything. The less acceptance an idea has, the more absurd it is, the more we can see ourselves as individual, independent thinkers, and the more that those who disagree with us are sheeple and the less we need to even think about the objections they may put forward. The idea can help shut down discourse, and make our thought even more “black and white”. We don’t have to think about whether we are being deliberately mislead, selecting the information we accept to make ourselves virtuous, or going along with our own social programming.
Overcoming shadow politics
Recognising this process makes normal politics difficult. How much of what we see as bad, or troubling, in the world reflects something within ourselves that we are projecting on to others, and trying to avoid in ourselves? How do we argue about the uncomfortable or bad things in a group in which we participate, without blaming others for our own guilt? This realisation is not easy, but we need to bear it in mind for any politics aiming to be real, and if we wish to do more than purge society of those shadow people who we have chosen to blame.
This is particularly difficult, if we ourselves feel challenged by others. “We know we are virtuous and do our best – how dare they? They must be full of rage themselves, to make these acusations. It is their fault there is a problem, not mine. I have never hurt a member of their group, how can they challenge me, or say I benefit from their pain?”
To carry out a constructive politics, it seems necessary to integrate one’s own shadow, rather than pursue the individualistic and collective assertion that the evil is elsewhere in a collectively approved target. This involves recognising that “we have met the enemy and he is us”…
Then we might need to observe and deal with the social shadow of the group’s we identify with (and if we don’t think we identify with some groups against others, then we probably need to look at ourselves and our behaviour more closely).
Without this moral effort, then there is no political morality at all – there is just a process of finding suitable enemies to blame and scapegoat.
For many, recognising their shadow process in their politics may be denied, because disorientation, chaos, inaction, and moral uncertainty seem inevitable results of such an action, not to mention the potential pain of recognising that the darkness one sees in others is one’s own, or getting a sense that one’s own identity and allegiances are ‘fake’, or a way of avoiding the pain of dealing with real problems.
Conclusion
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.
Jung CW 9-2: #14
What this suggests is that, for society to be functional, we should somehow try and normalise integration of the shadow together with an engagement with individuation as opposed to accepting neoliberal individualism.
We need to somehow get ourselves first, and others later, to recognise that the main dangers do not always lie with people we already don’t like or suspect. We need to recognise systemic interdependence, the ways we distort information to back our existing cultural biases, and we need to institutionalise recognition that, in complex systems, our understanding of any specific event is likely to be a simplification at best, and probably wrong.
If we have policies, we should try them out, but not be afraid to ‘backflip’ if subsequent events show that these policies do not work, or are likely to be generating unintended and unexpected harmful consequences, that maybe almost the exact opposite to what we claimed would happen.
If we are primarily dedicated to being thought correct, righteous, or individually smart, then this stops correction of mistakes, and helps us to blame consequences on those shadowy, dark or stupid others.
The more we want to be right, the more we want to be moral, the more we want to be ‘individual’, or the more we are threatened by expulsion from our group if we are seen as bad, then the more easily we may be deceived by our shadow, and produce destruction or participate in social shadow events.
The next post considers ‘positive thinking’ as a generator of mistakes and shadow politics.
This is a quick quiz to help you determine whether the politicians you support are ardent neoliberals, interested in defending corporate plutocracy and probably in crushing your rights.
Rather than answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately it might be better to do a little research, preferably in sources which do not generally support the person you are answering the questions about – this way you may get information you are not aware of. Remember that the neoliberal conspiracy means that you are likely to have false, favourable, or excusing information, for any really prominent neoliberal figures.
The more ‘yes’s a person scores in answer to these questions, the more they are probably a neoliberal.
It is unlikely that any politician nowadays will score zero, such is the power of neoliberal ideology, but it is best to know how much you are being conspired against.
However the great thing about neoliberalism, is that strong neoliberals will probably be consistent on most of these points, so it may be worth checking up on reality again, if they have an area in which they appear to score low.
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Do they talk a lot about the free market?
Are they in favour of tax cuts which primarily favour the already wealthy?
Are they in favour of tax cuts which benefit big business?
Are they in favour of, or quietly vote for, taxpayer bailouts for favoured corporations?
Are they in favour of cutting back government services and help for ordinary people?
Do they seem to continue government services for wealthy people and corporations, even if they try to hide this?
Do they generally prefer to ignore business corruption? A usual excuse is that doing something would be harmful for business confidence in a tough time.
Do they seem to care if their party, or corporate elite supporters, are corrupt in their business or fund raising?
Does their own fund raising break regulations, or does the money raised go into the pockets of the organisational elite?
Are they involved with fraudulent charities, whose funds support them? Are they convicted of running a fraudulent charity, or did they solve the issue out of court?
Do politicians on this side, use their contacts to increase the profitability of their personal business, or do favourable departmental deals with their friends and supporters?
Is this systematic, or a few corrupt people?
Do they fail to support independent anti-governmental corruption organisations?
Do they support unlimited corporate political donations and lobbying? This is usually supported as free speech, but its really the right of the wealthy to buy being heard, and ordinary people to be ignored.
Do they try to reinforce the idea that corporations are persons with the rights of persons?
Do they oppose minimum wages?
Are they happy for ordinary people to suffer, die or be injured to help ‘the economy’ or ‘the market’?
Do they repeal health and safety rules, lessen the responsibilities of employers towards workers, or lower payouts for worker injury?
Do they avoid providing easily accessible statistics and accounts of workplace injury and death?
Do they support cutbacks in funding for public education (of all, or any, types)?
Do they support increased funding for private education, but not with any demand for lower fees, or accountability?
Does most of the funding for private schools go to already wealthy private schools, or to the schools of those religions who support them?
Do they oppose any science that goes against their apparent interests or which warns against activities conducted by favoured corporations?
Do they allege that the scientists who disagree with them are organised and politically hostile to them, or to democracy in general?
Do they prefer to get their information from corporately supported private think tanks, than from publically funded and reviewed scientists?
Do they deny climate change, or say climate change is not urgent, or suggest it will cool again sometime in the future if we do nothing?
Do they pretend that wildfires have nothing to do with increased heating or drying out of forests or grasslands?
Do they pretend that the breakdown of land ice is irrelevant or something which will happen in the distant future?
Do they support fossil fuel companies, give taxpayer money to fossil fuel companies, or regulate energy in favour of fossil fuel companies?
Do they encourage the mining of fossil fuels in food production areas?
Do they attempt to over-regulate renewable energy, while claiming they hate business regulation?
Do they support the repeal, or relaxation, of environmental and anti-pollution regulations, so that business can ‘productively’ damage the ecology for profit?
Are they more likely to ignore pollution dumping when it affects poor areas and people?
Do they allow genetic modification of crops, and approve or encourage insecticides that are possibly harmful to humans?
Do they support the large corporation when it claims its genetically modified crops are sterile and that organic farmers whose crops contain such gene modifications have stolen their property?
Do they oppose restraints on corporate fishing?
Do they give taxpayer funding to corporate environmental organisations which end up doing very little, or which encourage pollution?
Do they support increased military spending?
Does most of that increased military spending go to the corporate sector, such as armaments manufacturers?
Do they support massive arms deals with repressive States in the rest of the world?
Do they get involved in wars, or use troops, to support corporate interests?
Do they side with authoritarian religions, who support business?
Do they side with, or claim to like, authoritarian leaders and States?
Do they encourage fracturing of the population, claiming that everyone who opposes them is evil? Especially do they do this on days of national unity?
Do they engage in culture wars, especially while destroying the basis of the culture they claim to defend?
Do they make minorities evil?
Do they seem happy to use the armed might of the State to repress protests?
Do they increase penalties for protesting against them, or their favoured activities?
Do they support people who shoot into crowds they don’t like, whether with live or other ammunition?
Do they ignore the violent arrest of people they disagree with, while getting annoyed at the violent arrest of people they agree with?
Do they demonise Media which does not always support them?
Are their media supporters, people who shout a lot and try and get people angry with those who disagree with them?
Do they listen to people who disagree with them, or disparage them completely?
Are they routinely supported by people in the Murdoch Empire?
Is their main policy area describable by saying ‘if wealthy people get wealthier, everyone will benefit’?
As a Bonus Extra:
Do they pretend that they did not support George W. Bush’s Iraq war, and that their opponents were the main people in favour of it?
No. Nothing can defeat Trump. Well I will talk about a few strategies towards the end of this piece, which might make a difference, but I doubt Democrats will use them.
Trump followers absolutely know that any information which contradicts Trump’s greatness is fake. The only true news is news that tells people how wonderful the President is, and how he is the only person that can save America. If the information does not say that, it is simply wrong and malicious and to be ignored.
Indeed if their opinion that Trump is wonderful is contradicted, it simply proves to themselves that they are people who think for themselves. They don’t believe the ‘mainstream lies’ that ‘sheeple’ believe. So the more evidence against Trump, the more strongly they believe they are correct about how good he is, and the more they can praise themselves for independent thinking and agreement with other Trump supporters.
For example:
Covid is either not real, or it is a “summer flu”, boosted by a communist conspiracy of disinformation and fear headed by the mainstream media (who are all corporately owned) and the Pharmaceutical companies, who want to genetically engineer obedience through vaccines. People who are scared of Covid are sissies. [This is not to deny there are problems with complete lock-downs – especially if other medical services are made to shut down as well, which is unnecessary. The problem is, however, that Trump supporters tend to deny covid is a serious problem at all.]
Climate change is not real. It really is a plot plugged by the Chinese and communist scientists all working together to cripple the US. Fake ideas of climate change are being bravely opposed by networks of fossil fuel businesses, their think tanks and Fox News. These think tanks, which are not heavily promoted (unlike climate change lies), give you the real information you need.
If Climate change was real then capitalism and technology could handle it and we don’t need to do anything else.
Climate change, just like Covid, is a lie whose purpose is to produce global poverty, and set up a dictatorship over demoralised people. But we will stand firm – being confident scientists and doctors are lying.
People like Greta Thunberg are automatised zombies, following the elites mind programming instructions, or they are hysterical screaming teenagers who need to go and get a job.
The President is a paragon of virtue, sent into the Whitehouse by God to protect America, and those who vote against him are ungodly and doomed to hell for all eternity.
The Republicans do not need a policy document, because their policy is to follow the greatest President ever and the Bible. Without doubt, these two pillars will lead them to wisdom.
The President is fighting the satanic deep state who want to enslave all Americans. The deep state is naturally Democrat and is best fought by introducing hyper-competent and wealthy people from big-business who support Donald Trump. Again you can tell a person’s competence by their loyalty to the President, but a lot of people get corrupted and leave.
Donald Trump is a martyr for the Truth. He has been persecuted more than any other American in History, because of his virtues and his strong and dedicated fight against evil.
The President has built a wall which keeps out Mexican criminals, rapists and human traffickers. We are now all safe!
The President LOVES minorities and Black Lives Matter is another ungrateful communist conspiracy fostered by the Democrats and the lamestream media who are encouraging riots in order to ferment civil war and take away our guns. However, the President’s strong reaction has defeated this plot for the moment.
Likewise the President LOVES and supports women, especially good looking, young and well-bodied blondes, and no President has done more for non-feminist women than he has.
Antifa are the absolute evil; a truly horrendous and immoral group who will stop at nothing to destroy democracy, loot our property, rape our women and create anarchy. Antifa are lighting forest fires in Oregon and California, to try and use climate change against the President and loot peoples’ property. And they like Joe Biden!!!
White supremacists are really just patriots, and so they naturally like Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the first American President to have nothing to do with organised pedophilia. It is because of him that Epstein was arrested, and hordes of Democrats are being secretly tried for their roles in human trafficking, and the results will be out soon – probably after the election as the President would not want to take unfair advantage of the anti-democrat publicity. By not reporting all this, the mainstream media is supporting the pedophiles, and this shows they really cannot be trusted.
Joe Biden is totally evil. He is a pedophile, he is a fascist, he is a communist, he is neoliberal, he is a devil worshipper, he is a rapist, he is senile, he is a weak war-monger, he is a drug user, he is totally incompetent and bound to take the US from the productive order we now have into total chaos. He must be resisted even at the cost of our lives.
Donald Trump has single handedly ended America’s participation in wars all over the globe. He is the first American Peace President. Even though troops still seem to be in the countries they have been in for 20 years, and there are no welcome home parades.
Donald Trump has invested more in the military than any other President, carried out more bombing raids than anyone else, and vetoed a bill passed by both houses of Congress asking for the US to withdraw from the war in Yeman, so he is protecting the US and its interests unlike the Democrats.
Donald Trump has single handedly (again) defused the tension between the US deep state and Russia and North Korea. We now face peace. A vote for Biden risks that peace.
Donald Trump has solved the Middle East Peace Problem through the treaty between Israel and UAE, even if neither of them were at war and the Palestinians have to face losing more of their land.
Donald Trump is a man of the people, who understands the pressures of life that ordinary Americans face. He is an exemplar of purity and self-help. He made his fortune by his own brilliance. He is truly an extraordinary President and deserves our loyalty, and that means ignoring anyone who says otherwise as they are clearly an envious fool.
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From my experience with Trump supporters, I am not exaggerating. It was similar last time.
Democrats just were not aware of how weird or strong the opposition to Clinton was. After four yeas of Trump, it is even stronger than it was then. If Democrats are not aware of what many Trump followers seem to believe then they will not win, because their arguments will not make sense to, or be heard by, the people they are trying to win over.
If the Democrats do not realise what they are fighting, then Trump will win. And if he does not win, his supporters will rise in defense of him.
This is the Republican dream.
So what can Democrats do?
First off, the most recurrent theme is the idea that Donald Trump is a peace President and the Democrats are war-mongers. Talk about Trump’s wars, however hidden they have been. Talk about his bombings etc. Talk about how he does not remove troops. Give people facts. Point out the problems with the Israle UAE treaty, and how it sacrifices the Palestinians.
Second, Republicans are not scared of Covid, but they are scared of Vaccines. Point out that rushing a vaccine is the only strategy the President has for dealing with the problem. Explain that an untested vaccine is dangerous. Emphasise that Trump is putting them in danger. Promise that any vaccine developed under the Democrats will be safe and not compulsory.
Trump was completely unaware of him supposedly being against pedophilia, so he is unprepared. He has recently decided he can gain kudos by accusing Biden of pedophilia. Take the gloves off. Point out he was about to face trial for child rape, and the case was stopped when he became President, and the woman received death threats she took seriously. Point out the events were witnessed. Point out Trump has never tweeted about human trafficking. Point out how he is failing in this. Point out his friendship with Epstein and Maxwell. Point to the others in his admin….
People don’t like corporations getting richer at their expense. Point out how Trump has helped this, that his only economic policy is taxcuts for the wealthy, Truly abandon neoliberalism, and make it clear Trump is one of the wealth elite and is governing for the wealth elites and is getting rich on taxpayers’s money. Celebrate his excess consumption, his pride and contempt for ordinary people.
Will this work? It may not. But the kind of approach the Democrats are taking now will lead to them coming second again. You can’t fight irrationality with reason, but you can fight it with drama and facts…
This blog post continues the series on the conspiracies of the powerful, by suggesting that the form of ‘individualism’ encouraged by neoliberalism functions to support corporate dominance, helps to create eco-catastrophy and hinders real and creative ‘individuation’.
The ideal neoliberal individual identifies with their ego. They are lone and autonomous. They have no responsibility towards others, or dependence on others. If they recognise such connection then they work to sever it.
This is clearly difficult for normal humans, so the individual is often allowed to be responsible for their family or towards those who please them, and obey them.
However the individual is still opposed to those who do not please them; ‘sheeple’ who disagree with them, or people of other ‘races’, other political parties, or other genders. These people are seen as non-virtuous in the neoliberal sense; they are protesting the natural hierarchical order, not hard working, not true and independent individuals.
The dependence of neoliberal individuals on being different from these displeasing others, leads to what in the next blog I will call “shadow politics,” in which neoliberal individuals project their denied dependencies and faults on others, and work to expel or obliterate those others. ,
Neoliberal individualism encourages this “shadow politics” by hindering the development of real individuation, and promoting an unreal view of life. It encourages a socialised and homogenous individuality that, directly and indirectly, functions to support neoliberal policy and power by giving the neoliberal class an angry political base. It further helps reinforce the politicisation of knowledge, and hence promotes ignorance. This ignorance can lead to catastrophic social failure.
The reality is that we are mutually interactive and dependent individuals, needing other people and supportive ecologies to exist and flourish. This recognition is the basis of real individuation.
Neoliberal individualism as ideology
The promotion of a particular form of anti, or asocial capitalist “individualism” is part of the information and power structures neoliberalism spreads, even if it is not deliberately engineered.
This should not be too surprising as individualism, of some form or other, has been the ideology of protestant captalism for at least 500 years.
Neoliberal individuality is often said to be under attack from mysterious displeasing others. This is partly because it depends on a contrast between the person expounding it, with those displeasing others. It is a relatively common propaganda strategy to claim something that is largely dominant and popular is under attack. That way the propaganda gets reinforced, and remains unthought about, as people seek to defend it.
Capitalist individualism may have been briefly under threat between 120 to 50 years ago with the rise of communism, but it has come back to dominance with the triumph of the neoliberal elite, functioning as both one of its core persuasive propositions, and as a disciplinary motif which keeps neoliberal power functioning – before eco-collapse.
The political functions of capitalist individualism
Individualism, as it has developed in capitalism, has several political functions. It allows the breaking of community responsibilities and obligations which, in turn, enables:
the accumulation of capital – rather than having to give capital back to the community in gifts or funeral rituals;
finding meaning in possessions;
the breaking of community charity;
the seeing of salvation in purely individual or egoic terms; and
the reduction of all relationship to cash and contract.
More recently it argues that anything that is not individualistic is communist and dangerous, when society essentially depends on willing collaborations and interdependencies of various types: human to human, group to group, creature to ecology etc.
Promotion of individualism helps to break up collective collaboration against the dominant regime, and allows such collaboration to be dismissed as juvenile. It makes liberty and advancement an individual, rather than collective, or collaborative, issue. It encourages workers to be individually submissive and dependent upon heroic employers, rather than to take a collective stand which could benefit everyone. It drives consumerism and the idea of reward coming from the accumulation of personal, or individual, property which is not to be shared outside the family. It may even help define the individual by their ownership and consumption. It allows those who are unemployed, unfortunate, sick, or damaged by the neoliberal State, or neoliberal economic policy, to be blamed for individual fault, and dismissed as worthy of any consideration. It allows the removal of the individual person from the context on which they depend, and thus works to encourage, and legitimate, the destruction of land and ecology for personal profit. Land or ecologies held in common are worthless, and should be handed over to those who can afford them, or they are easy to destroy without qualm.
Recognition of necessary and functional, systemic interdependence is severed, unless seen in purely competitive terms (“nature red in tooth and claw”), or in terms of competitive markets regulated in ways neoliberals like, which are then magically supposed to deliver the best possible results irrespective of any player’s intention.
Individualism, as it has arisen and is encouraged in neoliberalism, cultivates no responsibility towards other beings in general, and breaks the sense of working with others and the world. Victory and autonomy are what count.
Neoliberal individualism encourages weakness and ineffectiveness, when people act outside of, or challenge, the neoliberal system.
Neoliberal individualism is collective
The irony of this individualism is that it gains this power as an ideology because it is collective, enforced, felt to be obviously good because it fits in with capitalist lives and power relations, and is shared by many people. It takes as normal the idea that everyone is alone (perhaps apart from a neoliberal God, who rewards capitalist virtues and punishes capitalist sins), and that everything that people suffer depends on completely on themselves. The poor or unfortunate brought their suffering on themselves, and so need to be condemned or told to get on with making themselves better and stop troubling others. On the opposite side, every approved wealthy person, no matter how much they inherited, how much support they received from others of their group, or from government subsidy or from social organisation, gained their wealth through individual talent and effort, and they owe nobody else, or anything else, anything.
Complexity and interconnection
Reality, as usual, is complicated. As suggested earlier, the reality is that we are embedded in systems upon which we depend, and which we help maintain or destroy.
We cannot self-create, or gain independence, to the extent that individualist thinkers often appear to assume. We did not invent the world, and the societies, we live in – although we can shape them. We did not invent the languages with which we think, interpret and explain our experience, although our language use has personal idiosyncracies and sometimes we shape the language of others. We think with sensory images of the world we experience and move around in; we did not create this. We did not originate all our ideas; we borrowed them from our culture, from other people (sometimes without thinking) and from books, just as we gained the language we borrowed and learnt without thinking. We took on, transformed and reacted against the ideas of others. Those borrowed and shifted ideas shape who we are, how we think, and how we live and relate to others – and many of those ideas may be unconscious, unexamined, or promoted by established forces.
Similarly, we depend upon the work, and sacrifice, of many people for our life and existence; farmers, truckers, sewage workers, electricity workers, street cleaners, shop assistants and so on – the list is huge. We all would have died as children without interconnection with others, no matter how cruel or incompetent those others turned out to be. We likewise depend upon the vast interacting webs of nature to survive; from plants and trees, to ants and bees, to the bacteria that help break down our food, to the relative stability of climate, and to the Sun and stars, however indifferent these beings may be to our fate.
Even our bodies seem to be colonies rather than whole individuals. Most of our mass is held in non-genetically related bacteria. Our cells themselves seem to be colonies of small creatures. If this inter-cellular and infra-cellular collaboration stopped, then our ‘I’ (whatever that is) could not function. There is likewise the possibility that our minds are not single factors but organisations which shift in and out of use, and consciousness, depending on the context.
With different formations and patterns around us, and interacting with us and in response to us, we would almost certainly be different, or not exist.
We are not individuals in the neoliberal sense at all. We are dependent upon systems, constituted by systems and have the possibility of influencing systems. Our ‘individual’ psyche spills out into the social and world systems, and the world and social systems spill into us. Boundaries are not clear. We live with, and sometimes against, other beings – but even those beings who appear to threaten us are indelibly part of the same systems to which we belong.
Our sense of our self as an individual is born in and with a collective tradition which it inherits. The individual is born in interaction with others and with the world; we are a process.
In that very real sense, non of us (who can speak) have never been totally lone individuals, separate from others and independent of others. We cannot survive as lone individuals. In the vast empty realms of space we could not live. If we did have a chance of surviving then it would be because of the work and knowledge of others, or the work of nature, as well as ourselves. Our ‘I’ is a ‘we’ as well as an ‘I’. Autonomy is always limited by contexts. Its expression requires us to work with, and alongside, the dynamics of interdependent reality.
Variation is real
Yet, despite all the collectivity that is part of real life no person is completely shaped by the collective. No person is the same as any other. Everyone has their own unique variations of body, history, and context that makes them different. Natural variation is the basis of evolution, and adaptation. There is probably no assumed path, however supposedly superior, that will fit everyone.
Trying to forget, or suppress, these variations, can be a basis of oppression and delusion; as with insisting everyone should be a lone individual, or that everyone is part of an identical collective (if the latter has ever happened outside of individualist fantasy).
Addendum: Solnit on neoliberal individualism and preserving hierarchy
Since the initial version of this blog. Rebecca Solnit has written a short article on the Right’s response to Covid, which makes similar points, much better than I did. So I will quote some of it, before moving on to the topic of “individuation”. My slight modifications are in square brackets.
She writes:
The pandemic [and the ecological crisis, have] focused and intensified the need to recognize the interconnectedness of all things—in this case the way that viruses spread and the responsibility of those in power and each of us to do what we can to limit that spread, and to recognize the consequences that could break our educational system, our economy, and our daily lives… if we did not take care, of ourselves, each other, and the whole…. [I]nseparability is a basis for making decisions on behalf of the common good. But Republicans have long denied this reality.
The contemporary right has one central principle: nothing is really connected to anything else, so no one has any responsibility for anything else, and any attempt to, say, prevent a factory from poisoning a river is an infringement on freedom… Freedom as they uphold it is the right [for the already privileged] to do anything [they] want with utter disregard for others…
Despite the rhetoric of freedom and equality of opportunity, [neoliberal individualism has] always been about preserving… a hierarchy
This problem of immersion and variation, and the reality that it represents, is what, it seems to me, Jung points to through the term ‘individuation.’
As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation (CW 6: #758).
Individuation is a:
separation and differentiation from the general and a building up of the particular – not a particular that is sought out, but one that is already ingrained in the psychic constitution (CW 6: #761).
It involves a transcendence of capitalist ideas of individualism and of overcoming the real but denied attachment to, or identification with, a group and group ideology. Becoming a real individual is not a pre-existent state, it is difficult and built.
If the individuality is unconscious, there is no psychological individual, but merely a collective psychology of consciousness (CW 6: #755).
Individuation is a relational movement, a paradoxical movement aimed both towards what seems most internal and what seems most external. It involves becoming aware of unconscious dynamics and attachments, both creative and destructive.
In Jungian work becoming aware of personal and collective unconscious forces, and coming to a relationship with them, can involve: suspending certainty of knowledge, dialogue, listening, attention to dreams, active imagination, art work, spiritual experience, and even free association.
This path of coming to oneself, within the collective, has patterns. It is not uniquely individual, but it depends upon being human, the person and the context they live within.
The relations between person and context is not always a relationship of harmony. In becoming a person, we may have to break with families and with social ideologies – but the paradox is always that we often break with our social ideologies, myths and symbols, through other ideologies, myths and symbols, hoping that our internal creativity can use the devices and people around us, to further that process of coming into our variant being, and adapting to, and with, reality – perhaps partly changing that reality if necessary.
One danger is that these ‘new’ collective ideologies we can use to attempt to break free, may simply be social tools for pathology or mere restatements of ‘individualism’, rather than wisdom welling up from unconscious processes.
Individuation is not simply a breaking of ties to everything but our ego, or our conscious self, as with neoliberal individuality.
Indeed the ego is found not to be the central part of the self around which everything orbits. The individuated person, learns to consult with the unconscious world of which they are a part, to gain wisdom from the hidden, and from the perception of useful pattern – some of which may be preserved in neglected traditions. (This is why Jungians like fairy tales). Certainly the ego has the function of evaluating the patterns, but if the ego is not humble, or does not recognise its limits, it can be captured by the perceived patterns – such as shadow projection. Individuation is a reassertion of our real ties to the world, while taking our individual and creative place within that world.
Individuation also involves a cultivation of ethical responsibility. Almost the first step in individuation is becoming aware that most of what we call the evil we see in the world is present in ourselves and largely projected onto the world in an attempt to avoid or suppress recognition of that ‘evil’ in our selves and become ‘virtuous’.
Recognition of our own ‘evil’ is difficult. Our un-individuated ‘collective ego’ is largely built upon suppressing and denying our evil and projecting it on to others, in an attempt to become a good socially, or personally, approved individual.
The socialised individual casts a shadow, and some of what it can perceive as bad are actually:
good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses etc.
For example religions have, in some forms, denied our bodies and natural desires completely.
If the role of the shadow is not recognised in our personal and social lives then the individual is not only impoverished in the potentials of their true self, and their connections with others, but they become more easily manipulated by proponents of their form of individuality, into hatred of those on whom they are encouraged to project their shadow. Individuality becomes simply a compliant social role, or an attempt to dominate others and keep up shadow projection on ‘the inferior’. Overcoming this shadow projection, not only requires self-knowledge, but some level of ethical refinement and experimentation.
Consequently, individuation should not be taken to mean that we become ‘supermen’ or that we should embrace ego inflation – that is becoming what the ego already thinks it should be, or is, or coming to think that we are somehow above the rest of humanity. These are dangers on the path of individuation leading to delusion and possibly psychosis. This is why a guide who has started on the process, and dialogue with them , can be useful on the path.
Figuratively we can think of individuation as involving a descent into ‘the unconscious’, or ‘the depths’ and a surfacing with new wisdoms. However, there is always the risk that we can ascend with new pathologies, hence the need for ethical growth at the same time, to evaluate the actions we now engage with.
The main message is that, wherever we should be on the path of individuation, we are still humans and still interdependent with others and still working with the world. Hopefully we can reach some level of freedom and satisfaction amongst those others, perceive ourselves more accurately and contribute to to the lives of others. Even if we end up residing in a mountain cave by ourselves we got there through living with others, and this may need to be acknowledged.
If the individuation is constructive, and the context of that individuation is right for development, then individual persons can change the world – even if they do not wish to. Some of those people are visible, like Confucius, Laotzu, Plato, Aristotle, Paul of Tarsus, Mohammed, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Newton etc. Sometimes it is just ordinary people whose names are lost to history, who by a simple action encouraged something momentous to happen, that may not have happened without them.
Sometimes the change that the context allows seems clearly for the worse, as when the person does not emerge cleanly from the depths and encourages attacks on their shadow, as with Hitler and Stalin, or Pol Pot etc.
A different politics?
We all face a number of problems which probably cannot be solved by neoliberal individualism.
Immediately there is the issue of Covid. At the moment we have two solutions, the Trump solution and Lock Down.
The Trump solution seems to be: Get back to work, be positive and pretend there is no problem and hope that a vaccine arrives quickly. The secondary parts of this seem to be – do not encourage the vaccine manufacturers to do the proper testing to make sure the vaccine has no dangers, and indemnify the manufacturers should it prove to have dangers.
Apart from ignoring the problems of a vaccine, the Trump solution seems to have no thought that we could work together on solving, or diminishing, this problem, and indeed Trump attacks people for wearing masks, and encourages people to be neoliberal individuals with no care about their effects on others -running meetings without distancing and so on. He also cheers armed protests against lock-downs and against people protesting in the Streets. The Trump Solution also downplays any information that suggests Covid is more harmful than we might think, with long term effects on people who have caught it, frequent need for massive medical care, high levels of contagion, and low levels of anti-body preservation. This form of individualism only seems to seek the information which confirms it.
The Lock-down solution similarly does not really see the possibilities of people collaborating, or the problems that lock-downs only work for a short while. People have to know that other actions are people taken. Neoliberal individualists are also likely to resist lock downs as them see them as an imposition on their individual right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and so Lockdowns are inherently vulnerable to neoliberal attacks, from those who don’t ‘want’ to support others in times of danger, or only see the issue in terms of competition.
Neoliberal individualism, does not encourage the idea that sometimes we have to suffer some loss in order for the system to survive or prosper. Given we are not connected, other than in competition, why should we risk any loss for an uncertain advantage for others? Without empathy there is no connection to others. They are just things that attack us.
Likewise with climate change. We cannot solve this individually. Neoliberal individualism separates us from nature, it makes nature an object to be exploited, and ultimately leads to social death.
Individuation on the other hand can lead to an awareness of connection, because you don’t have to engage in separation in order to find yourself. You do have to find your connection to the greater you, the fields of unconscious process, the place you occupy in the system that sustains you.
An individuated person can also realise that solutions may be as complex as the problems, and pay attention to material that others ignore. Even if it is only by withdrawing their shadow projections.
Conclusion
That the ideology of individualism is unreal and possibly destructive, does not mean individuals are not important, or that the collective is necessarily good. The process of emerging from the collective, and listening to the wider self and the wider world is a process we can call individuation.
Individuation is difficult. There is almost never a resting place of certainty, or of perfect autonomy.
Any vision which sees the future in terms of individuals alone, or families alone in secure buildings, or people as an always harmonious single willed collective, is doomed to failure in the long term as it does not recognise reality.
Individuation is particularly difficult when there is a collective individualism which suggests that we are already there, and can proceed by strengthening the ego and accepting the collective idea of individualism without tackling what we, as a collective, are unconscious of, or refrain from being conscious of.
In neoliberalism, individualism tends to enable what we might call shadow politics, and this is the subject of the next post in this series….
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 