The Neoliberal Ideology
These days, it’s fashionable to use the term ‘ideology’ as a pejorative; to be ideological is to be unreasonable, rigid, caught in thrall to a belief system and untethered from rationality. Political opponents are ideological, we’re not. But that’s a sloppy use of language; ideology, within normal parameters, has no moral standing in itself; it is merely a term for the system of ideas and ideals we all must hold to operate in the world.
To suggest that being ideological undermines an otherwise inherent objectivity is to overplay the human ability to be objective in the first place. Slavoj Zizek1 is right when he says, ‘In everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility’. It is always a background condition whether we recognise it in ourselves or not. So I have nothing against ideology.
What I do have something against, however, is the uniform dominance of one ideology over all others, and that is what we are now living under. The ideology in question has variously been called neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, corporate capitalism, and ‘free market’ fundamentalism.
These terms all mean slightly different things but at heart they share three deep beliefs:
1 That survival of the fittest through eternal competition between self-interested parties is, practically speaking, the only law upon which human society can realistically be ordered;
2 That, in the moral hierarchy, financial wealth equates with life success which equates with virtue; and
3 That man [sic] is, if not an island, then, at most, a part of an archipelago of islands of shared interests, answerable only to himself, his peers and, possibly, his God, in that order.
This is not the usual way neoliberalism (the term I will use as the umbrella) is described. Like its progenies, Thatcherism and Reaganism, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
http://therules.org/neoliberalism-ideology-morality/
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