monbiot | To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim.
It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be
at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is
an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with
life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.
I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in
English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe(1).
What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is
one of those books that, by making connections between apparently
distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening
to us and why.
We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped
by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society
defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality –
according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply
or to exclude them if they don’t.
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely
known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market
can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The
less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public
services should be privatised, public spending should be cut and
business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the
UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35
years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power(2). It’s rapidly
colonising the rest of the world.
Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek
idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it
calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently
selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these
characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that
unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation
and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled
competition rewards people who have talent, who work hard and who
innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity
and mobility. The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of
the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with
equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before
the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to
acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the
whole, the most talented, hard-working or innovative people, but those
with the fewest scruples, the most thugs and the best contacts, often in
the KGB.
Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay
that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs
has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite,
which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the
best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most
fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has
greatly declined(3).
If neoliberalism were anything other than a self-serving con, whose
gurus and think tanks were financed from the beginning by some of the
richest people on earth (the American tycoons Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew
and others)(4), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a
society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair
advantage of inherited wealth or economically-determined education. But
they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result,
quickly gave way to rent.
All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are
ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new
righteous, the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both
economically and morally, and are now classified as social parasites.
