The basic idea of neoliberalism, as summarised by David Harvey, was that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. In practice this meant privatisation, deregulation, and austerity.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

This is what is generally meant by neoliberalism: pushing free-market capitalism, deregulation, competition, and individualism for the purpose of enriching the 1 percent. The Democratic Party has been married to a neoliberal agenda since at least the 1980s, an agenda that prioritizes the interests of multinational corporations over the interests of working-class and poor people.

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

Michael’s big moral surveillance apparatus is a correction, or perhaps update, of Sartre: hell isn’t other people, it’s neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the practice of transforming everything, even traditionally non-economic phenomena like friendship or learning, into deregulated, financialized markets. Financialized markets are ones built on investment rather than commodity exchange; deregulated markets nominally allow for any and all behavior, but tightly control background conditions so that only a limited range of behavior is possible. Privatizing formerly public things such as infrastructure or schools or prisons is a common method of transforming things into markets. Setting up the season 1 neighborhood so that the quartet of dead people torture each other, Michael is a technocrat who effectively privatizes hell by contracting the work of abuse out to independent, uncompensated laborers. (After all, his whole approach is to disrupt eternal damnation by superficially flipping the good/bad script…It’s Uber, but for hell.)

The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place – Los Angeles Review of Books Via: 📓 Neo-Liberalism | Read Write Collect

The particular form of capitalism that characterizes the United States—known to many as liberal or neoliberal capitalism and standing in contrast to the social democratic capitalist systems which characterize many European nations (
Esping-Andersen, 1990)—has a deeply problematic history. In recent years, critical scholars have focused specifically on how the U.S.’s interlocking systems of racialized labor exploitation and profit-driven free enterprise—shorthanded by some as 
racial capitalism—are responsible for its enduring legacy of institutional racism and white supremacy (Love, 2023; Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019; Robinson, 2019). Racial capitalism is premised on a recognition that “slavery and capitalism are not independent or hierarchical to each other but rather co-articulating systems of power integral to the economic and political development of the United States” (Pierce, 2017, p. 27S). In this view, the logic of capitalism is inevitably racialized, preserving the racial caste system that forms the DNA of American society (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Issar, 2021; Wilkerson, 2020). American capitalism is thus implicated when it comes to contemporary issues such as income inequality, police brutality, and the climate crisis. Those who write about the ills of American capitalism often also extend their critiques to neoliberalism, an ideology which takes a race-blind view of society and embraces deregulation and market-based-solutions to social issues, including issues related to schooling (Harvey, 2007; Issar, 2021; Magill & Rodriguez, 2017). Over the past forty years, in particular, neoliberal approaches to school reform have been employed as a strategy to resist desegregation pressures and, more generally, to maintain longstanding patterns of White opportunity hoarding and anti-Blackness in education (Love, 2023).

“But Money Makes It Real!”: Problematizing Capitalist Logic in Project-Based Learning – Sarah M. Fine, 2025

Capitalist logic, on full display in the BizTown vignette above, centers the importance of competition, individualism, profit maximization, the commodification of human labor, and exploitation of the natural world (Heilbroner, 1985)—qualities which critical scholars, including this author, view as being linked to an oppressive status quo rather than to a vision of collective liberation and environmental sustainability (Biewan & McGirt, 2024; Freire & Ramos, 1970; hooks, 1994; Love, 2019).

“But Money Makes It Real!”: Problematizing Capitalist Logic in Project-Based Learning – Sarah M. Fine, 2025

Neoliberalism and the Shift From Keynesian Economics to Hayekian Economics

In the summer of 1975, a speaker at the Conservative Research Department in Great Britain was giving a talk on how the British Conservative Party should avoid the extremes of left and right. Instead, he was arguing, they should forge a new ‘middle way’. Suddenly, he was interrupted by a woman who stood up and pulled a book from her briefcase. Brandishing the book so all could see it, she stated ‘This is what we believe’, before banging the book down on the table. The woman who had interrupted the speech was none other than the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher. And the book she had declared her allegiance to was titled The Constitution of Liberty, written by Thomas Szasz’s idol, the economist Friedrich Hayek.

Four years later, in 1979, Thatcher was elected to be Prime Minister, and began ushering in Hayekian policies to the United Kingdom. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan in the United States also began implementing Hayekian policies. It is to this shift that we now turn. For the shift from Keynesian economics to Hayekian economics is vital for understanding the rising tide of mental health problems and the inability of biological psychiatry to effectively fight it.

The basic idea of neoliberalism, as summarised by David Harvey, was that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.1 In practice this meant privatisation, deregulation, and austerity. Following the culture wars and economic recession of the 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan essentially sought to reverse the welfare capitalism of the earlier twentieth century. While Chile, guided by US pressure, had experimented with neoliberal policies several years earlier, it was during the early 1980s that Britain and the United States each began massively rolling back the state and diminishing the welfare system.

In the wake of changes made by Thatcher and Reagan, neoliberalism was quickly enforced across much of the rest of the world. It was globalised through international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, and through US imperial pressure. As state communism fell, even Russia and China increasingly liberalised their economies to fit in – to at least some extent, and with mixed success – with the new global system. From around the same time, traditionally left-leaning political parties in liberal democracies, such as the British Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the United States, also shifted to the right. This was largely as organised labour was crushed by neoliberal governments and neoliberal ideology was propagated by the press. In this context, aspirational voters were choosing the ideal of individual freedom offered by neoliberalism over the progressive ideals, and higher taxes, of more collectivist politics.

This was to have profound effects on pretty much every aspect of human life. Indeed, as Harvey writes, neoliberal ideology had since ‘become hegemonic as a mode of discourse’. It has, he goes on, ‘pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’.2 As we will see below, our experiences and understandings of mental health were far from immune to this more general shift.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

Neoliberalism and the Rot Economy

The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter. 

This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation. 

In The Shareholder Supremacy, I drew a line from an early 20th-century court ruling, to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, to the current tech industry, but there’s one figure I didn’t pay as much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so.

Famed Chicago School economist (and dweller of Hell) Milton Friedman once argued in his 1970 doctrine that those who didn’t focus on shareholder value were “unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” and that any social responsibility — say, treating workers well, doing anything other than focus on shareholder value — is tantamount to an executive taxing his shareholders by “spending their money” on their own personal beliefs.

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern-day feudalism, dividing society based on whether someone is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedence and the latter seen as irrelevant at best, or disposable at worst. It’s curious that Friedman saw economic freedom — a state that is non-interventionist in economic matters — as essential for political freedom, while also failing to see equality as the same. 

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Neoliberalism and Education

Accordingly, as progressive educators, we believe that challenging neoliberal hegemony with students is fundamental in creating fairer, more democratic education systems and societies.

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Not to be confused with 20th-century social progressivism, neoliberalism is a political and economic model that “intends to remove the buffer of social welfare as a governmental function in the belief that the market operates most efficiently and effectively without regulation” (Lakes & Carter, 2011, p. 107). On the surface, laissez-faire economic structures have little to do with education. However, its associated values, discourses, and policies have had such an effect on education, especially the humanities, some deem it a full-blown crisis. These effects are summarized in Lakes’s and Carter’s (2011) “Neoliberalism and Education: An Introduction”.

In the neoliberal risk society, young people have to “chase credentials” (Jackson and Bisset 2005), 196) to gain security in future education or workplaces. Failure to achieve is deemed one’s own fault, and “human beings are made accountable for their predicaments” (Wilson, 2007 p. 97). Anxieties are heightened by the rapid changes in neoliberal policies such as job outsourcing, corporate downsizing, and international trade agreements that benefit only a few. Faced with choices about educating their children in a political environment, parents are often uninformed, misinformed, and fearful–fueled by media speculation about failing schools, incompetent teachers, and school violence. Under pressure, parents are easily attracted to schemes that appear to satisfy multiple objectives, such as discipline, protection, and greater academic achievement.

Some critics go even farther, claiming “Neoliberalism encourages… suppressing teaching of critical thought that would challenge the rule of capital and keeping learners compliant while at the same time warranting that educational spaces maintain the ideological and economic reproduction that benefits the ruling class” (Oladi, 2013). The Nation’s interview with Noam Chomsky explores the roots of neoliberalism and details why he believes it to be a dehumanizing and anti-democratic form of social and political control—essentially, the antithesis of humanities education.

The Silent Crisis: Humanities, Pedagogy, and Neoliberalism | Human Restoration Project | Trevor Aleo

Education is seen more as an access route… not so much toward the enhancement of… learning and thinking as towards obtaining through education the best possible credentials for individual socioeconomic advancement. Education is seen not so much as a means of helping society but of helping one obtain the best that society has to offer socially, economically, and culturally. (p. 62) 

The goals of neoliberal models of education are reflective of and built for the market rationality that created them. It is about competition. It is about ownership. It is about the individual above all else. YouTuber Sophie Dodge’s (2016) video “Neoliberalism & Education” provides a general overview of neoliberalism’s effects on education explaining how, in addition to reflecting its values, it also played a role in normalizing and promulgating market-driven attitudes.

Neoliberalism & Education – YouTube

Neoliberalism, which Harvey (2007) defines as a series of economic practices that promote the idea that well-being is best attained within a society that promotes free markets, free trade and private property, has become central to many of the challenges facing the UK education system. This realignment of education with economic goals (Giroux, 2014) has widened the gap between the rich and poor (Reay, 2017), promoted a Eurocentric curriculum that disadvantages and excludes BAGM (Black, Asian and Global Majority) and LGBTQ+ (Peterson and Ramsey, 2020; Johnson, 2023) and ignores meaningful responses to the climate emergency (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2019). Neoliberal ideology has become so all-pervasive that the logic of education for economic prosperity has usurped other conceptualisations of education as a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself and its potential to transform society towards a greater good (Smyth, 2011). Furthermore, neoliberalism renders education an investment to be consumed rather than as a wider social good and consequently students (as consumers) are obliged to take on increasing levels of debt to be educated (Davies et al, 2018). The all-pervasiveBen Johnson, Steve Dixon & Andrew Edgar 3 P a g e nature of neoliberal ideology means it can be difficult to challenge (Visano, 2016) as it has become such a dominant discourse that it is now part of the social imaginary (Taylor, 2004).

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Davies et al (2018) argue that neoliberal accountability measures, such as the NSS (National Student Survey) and TEF (Teacher Excellence Framework), are letting down students by reinforcing individualism and constraining possibilities to meaningfully challenge inequalities that impact their own lives and communities. They argue that critical pedagogy still has the potential to move non-traditional students into spaces of collective and empathetic modes of learning that disrupt neoliberal narratives and redress inequalities in higher education.

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Furthermore, there were frustrations levelled against neoliberal accountability systems that ask for constant student feedback but result in nothing changing.

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Neoliberalism and Knowledge

In addition to the systemic and social issues caused by neoliberalism, it has come to affect our actual relationship with knowledge. Instead of advocating for knowledge for its own sake (Arnold, 2006) or as a means to gain access to the forms of discourse that grow and maintain power (Foucault, 1977), it leads to blunt instrumentalism—or “the belief that makes knowledge merely a means to a practical end, or the satisfaction of practical needs” (Dewey et al, 2007 p. 170). 

Considering “neoliberalism rejects the very idea of not-for-profit and insists that all values must be measured by the market, the humanities appear valueless” (Shumway, 2017, p. 10) this orientation towards knowledge has been especially damaging to the enrollment in Humanities programs, its social standing within academia, and general societal attitudes towards its pursuits.

The Silent Crisis: Humanities, Pedagogy, and Neoliberalism | Human Restoration Project | Trevor Aleo

Neoliberalism and Normalization

Cultural practices of normalisation, where the divergent are changed to become more normal, also shifted following the Spitzerian revolution and the rise of neoliberalism. One place we see this regards the prison complex. During this period the numbers of people with psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities incarcerated in the prison system continued to grow. By the beginning of the twenty-first century over 50% of prison inmates in the United States and the United Kingdom had dyslexia, while around a quarter have ADHD. Moreover ‘Some of the largest mental health centres in the United States currently operate behind bars, and 40 percent of people diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders face arrest over their lifetimes’.32 Today, people with mental disorder diagnoses, especially Black people, are among the most likely to be arrested, be harassed by the police, or die in police custody.

At the same time, a massively increased use of prison pharmaceuticals has been used alongside electronic tagging and biomedical risk assessment for prison inmates. Sociologist Ryan Hatch describes these as forms of ‘technocorrections’, which aim to reduce costs and subdue prison populations to make them more pliable. Thus by the year 2000 in the United States, for instance, ‘95 percent of maximum/high-security state prisons distributed psychotropics, compared to 88 percent of medium-security prisons and 62 percent of minimum/low-security prisons’.33 Liat Ben-Moshe has also emphasised how conditions in prison tend to make mental health worse and that even talking therapy often serves oppressive functions in prisons.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

Thus, as capitalism further developed and the population grew, its norms hardened, with the abnormal becoming ever-more salient as more of the population fell beyond its new standards of functioning. It was this that necessitated the mass development of these new carceral systems, which, all in their own ways, imprisoned those deemed abnormal.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

Indeed, as recent research by the historian Anne Parsons has shown, following the asylum closures, the prison industrial complex began to grow massively. But now it mainly incarcerated not just the (often) white former inmates of asylums. Rather, it grew to incarcerate, in much greater numbers, mad or disabled Black people alongside mad or disabled white people.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

Neoliberalism and Care

Sally Weintrobe writes deeply about what she calls the ‘culture of uncare’. She argues it is a design feature of neoliberalism, where economic growth is privileged above all else, yet is dependent on disconnected thinking & the deliberate unseeing of hidden interconnections & relationships. The culture of uncare, Weintrobe writes, relies on a failure of imagination to envisage any other way to be.

A world that is on the precipice is going to need people who have learned to pay attention to the complex, nuanced relationships around them; people who know & care for place, allowing them to think deeply about it. We are going to need people with the imagination to see ways of being in the world beyond economic gain. In many ways, this is a form of literacy & we need to get as worked up about it as we do about how well kids perform on reading tests.

This is the year we must put care at the heart of education – Bevan Holloway

As Hölscher (2018) argues, in a neoliberal, individualised world, to care becomes a subversive practice. Central to critical and relational pedagogy is an ethics of care (Noddings, 2013) that centres relationships at the heart of education (hooks, 1994; Bovill, 2020). Evidently, this approach is fractured by a neoliberal system that students perceived as considering them as numbers rather than human beings, and with lecturers experiencing increased workloads and more temporary zero-hours staff hired to teach the potential for meaningful connection, care and support is reduced.

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Freire described how the gap between students and teachers is the key barrier to education (2017) and Rogers (2004) argued that unconditional positive regard is central to human self-actualisation and flourishing. Crucially, building caring spaces is integral to challenging some of the dehumanization students experience in a neoliberal education system.

The transformative potential of critical pedagogy for Education Studies students in interrogating neoliberalism

Neoliberalism and Mindfulness

mindfulness has become the perfect coping mechanism for neoliberal capitalism: it privatises stress and encourages people to locate the root of mental ailments in their own work ethic. As a psychological strategy it promotes a particular form of revolution, one that takes place within the heads of individuals fixated on self-transformation, rather than as a struggle to overcome collective suffering.

How mindfulness privatised a social problem via HEWN, No. 314

The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health. One doesn’t have to subscribe to a belief in ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘individualism’ in order to understand the source of much that makes schoolchildren unhappy-one simply has to look at the relentless exam and inspection schedule they have to follow.

Happiness and children | openDemocracy

McMindfulness aims to reduce the stress of the private individual and does not admit to any interest in the social causes of stress.

How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry | Life and style | The Guardian

McMindfulness practices psychologize and medicalize social problems. Rather than a way to attain awakening toward universal love, it becomes a means of self-regulation and personal control over emotions. McMindfulness is blind to the present moral, political and cultural context of neoliberalism. As a result, it does not grasp that an individualistic therapized and commodified society is itself a major generator of social suffering and distress. Instead, the best it can then do, ironically, is to offer to sell us back an individualistic, commodified “cure” – mindfulness – to reduce that distress.

How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry | Life and style | The Guardian

By negating and downplaying actual social and political contexts and focusing on the individual, or more so, the individual’s brain, McMindfulness interventions ignore seeing our inseparability from all others. They ignore seeing our inseparability from inequitable cultural patterns and social structures that affect and constitute our relations, and thereby ourselves. McMindfulness thus forfeits the moral demand that follows this insight: to challenge social inequities and enact universal compassion, service and social justice in all forms of human endeavor.

Without a critical account of the social context of neoliberal individualism, mindfulness as a practice and discourse focused on the self minimizes social critique and change and contributes to keeping existing social injustices and inequitable power structures intact.

How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry | Life and style | The Guardian

Neoliberalism and Time

Simultaneously, neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism have also brought a pace in the tempo of life that has increasingly disabled those whose cognitive processing fits a less hurried pace.

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

Respiratory failure, and other forms of progressive respiratory impairment, bring about a strange relationship to time. They are quite often clocks that cannot be stopped and which clash with neoliberal-able timelines (see Goodley and Lawthom 2019).

Rethinking Crip time and Embodiment in Research – the polyphony

Neoliberalism and Solutionism

Neoliberalism aspires to reshape the world according to blueprints dating from the cold war: more competition and less solidarity, more creative destruction and less government planning, more market dependence and less welfare. The demise of communism made this task easier – but the rise of digital technology has actually presented a new obstacle.

How so? While big data and artificial intelligence don’t naturally favour non-market activities, they do make it easier to imagine a post-neoliberal world – where production is automated and technology underpins universal healthcare and education for all: a world where abundance is shared, not appropriated.

This is precisely where solutionism steps in. If neoliberalism is a proactive ideology, solutionism is a reactive one: it disarms, disables and discards any political alternatives. Neoliberalism shrinks public budgets; solutionism shrinks public imagination. The solutionist mandate is to convince the public that the only legitimate use of digital technologies is to disrupt and revolutionise everything but the central institution of modern life – the market.

The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level | Evgeny Morozov | The Guardian

Neoliberalism and Racism

By the way, this is also why it’s a mistake to blindly extol the virtue of “diversity”; the neoliberal critique shows us that superficial diversity and tokenism can perfectly coexist with white supremacy.

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

To put it simply: neoliberals elevate the economic interests of corporations and billionaires over marginalized people. The main difference between neoliberals in the Republican and Democratic Parties is that the former capitulate to private interests proudly, whereas the latter pretend to care about working-class families while supporting laws and macroeconomic policies that favor the super-rich. Another difference is that Republicans typically mislead working-class whites into supporting a neoliberal agenda that undermines their economic security by using overt and covert racism to draw attention away from the enrichment of the capitalist class. Republicans accomplish this by using racial stereotypes and appeals to white racial resentment to blame brown and black people—instead of white elites—for their plight. Commenting on the predicament of the white working class, Kirk Noden observed in the Nation: “Corporate Democrats have never advanced their interests—and at least Republicans offer a basic, if misleading, story about why they are getting screwed.”

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

Learning about and critiquing the bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism is, quite simply, one of the most important things we can do to become less stupid about racial politics.

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

Neoliberalism and Algorithms

This book is about the power of algorithms in the age of neoliberalism and the ways those digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling, which I have termed technological redlining. By making visible the ways that capital, race, and gender are factors in creating unequal conditions, I am bringing light to various forms of technological redlining that are on the rise. The near-ubiquitous use of algorithmically driven software, both visible and invisible to everyday people, demands a closer inspection of what values are prioritized in such automated decision-making systems. Typically, the practice of redlining has been most often used in real estate and banking circles, creating and deepening inequalities by race, such that, for example, people of color are more likely to pay higher interest rates or premiums just because they are Black or Latino, especially if they live in low-income neighborhoods. On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is also embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not. I believe that artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century. We are only beginning to understand the long-term consequences of these decision-making tools in both masking and deepening social inequality. This book is just the start of trying to make these consequences visible. There will be many more, by myself and others, who will try to make sense of the consequences of automated decision making through algorithms in society.

Part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that mathematical formulations to drive automated decisions are made by human beings. While we often think of terms such as “big data” and “algorithms” as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but. The people who make these decisions hold all types of values, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (Kindle Locations 162-177). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.

Neoliberalism and Debt Forgiveness

The idea of debt forgiveness has been eliminated from many branches of our culture, especially Christianity (a long term effort). Consider the Lord’s Prayer. The specific variants I address are those which say “and forgive us our debts” versus those who say “and forgive us our trespasses.” In the ancient world debt jubilees were quite common, a period at the end of which all debts had to be settled or forgiven. It was hard-wired into Judaism but struggles to find any footing in Christianity or the modern world. Debt forgiveness was eliminated along the way in favor of debtor’s prisons and “pounds of flesh” and the IMF.

Neoliberals prefer the version of the Lord’s Prayer that uses the word “trespasses” (surprise, surprise), but I remember my mother saying the prayer in church, using the word “debts.” A 2000 year old argument that neoliberals have come down on one side of.

The Insidiousness of Neoliberalism | Class Warfare Blog

Neoliberalism and Evolution

The notion of life as a competitive game found its way into the science of biology by interpreting Darwin’s theory of evolution through the cultural lens of capitalism. The complementary perspective of life and evolution as a cooperative game as described by Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) was largely ignored in “developed” capitalist societies throughout most of the 20th century.

In the capitalist narrative the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic success of China following Mao’s death are interpreted as evidence for the superiority of capitalism and market based competition over other forms of organising economic activity. In the Western “developed” world, capitalist ideology developed a symbiotic relationship with the science of evolutionary biology, culminating in books such as ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins in 1975 and in the hyper-competitive interpretations of human nature that are baked into neoliberal ideology.

For many years evolutionary biologists such as E.O Wilson (sometimes referred to as the father of sociobiology and the father of biodiversity), Elisabet Sahtouris, and David Sloan Wilson (2018 and 2019), who where exploring alternative framings and complementary aspects of biological evolution, such as cooperation in the evolution of social species, multi-level selection theory, and gene-culture co-evolution, did not receive much attention.

Only in the last 20 years have the cooperative aspect of evolution and multi-level selection theory been more widely recognised as a valid theoretical framework for evolution in general, including in the context of gene-culture co-evolution.

In parallel with the growing awareness of the role of cooperation in evolution, critical views of capitalism have become part of the allowable sphere of academic and political discourse in Western “developed” societies, whilst in the “real” world of corporate busyness the competitive view of economic life still dominates.

Even though Western science likes to think of itself as ideology neutral, it is not immune to ideological influence. The Western scientific worldview continues to be plagued by artificial discipline boundaries that slow down the process of transdisciplinary knowledge transfer and the discovery of new insights that remain hidden in the deep chasms between established disciplines.

The ideological influence in Western science is visible in metrics of academic success such as the number of publications in journals and various journal ranking schemes. Academics have to conform to predetermined criteria of success and productivity if they want to climb the career ladder in universities and research institutions that are run as profit generating busynesses, especially in countries that have fully embraced the neoliberal ideology.

Elisabet Sahtouris (2011; Sahtouris and Wahl 2020) provides us with a good introduction to a broader and more inclusive framing of evolutionary theory, which also acknowledges the value of insights that are part of alternative non-Western frameworks of knowledge and reasoning.

There is a lot to be learned from traditions outside the Western monoculture of busyness. In New Zealand for example, Māori researchers are working towards an Economy of Mana (Dell et al. 2018) that aims to better provide for Māori aspirations in all realms of life.

I relate gene-culture co-evolution to the role of neurodiversity in human societies from an anthropological perspective. Over the last 20 years Western societies have increasingly pathologised neurodiversity and in particular autistic people who do not readily and subconsciously absorb cultural norms from their social environment. I have severe concerns about the pathologisation of people that don’t fit a standardised – and hence fictional – human template. The notion of disability in Western societies is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.

It is time to consider the possibility of a social disease that manifests in sick cultural norms and sick institutions rather than in individual “inmates”. Pretending that there is nothing wrong with our cultural norms and institutions only generates disastrous mental health statistics (Keogh 2020) that deflect from the deeper problems that need to be addressed.

Bettin, Jorn. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations (pp. 256-258). S23M Limited.

The Neoliberal Experiment Must End

Bethany Black: “Not just that voters want Neoliberalism to end; that it has run its course achieved its stated aims and can no longer sustain its contradictions.” — Bluesky

Dr. Genevieve Guenther: “To be clear: a coalition of the Left — the socialists — and the Greens were able to block the far Right in France. And there is a lesson here for the US: voters across the West want the neoliberal experiment to end. We CAN and we MUST end it to save the future & improve people’s wellbeing to boot!” — Bluesky

Bethany Black: “Neoliberalism’s biggest downfall is also its main goal: to disconnect GDP growth from Quality of Life. Whatever the pros and (many) cons of using GDP to measure the health of an economy, the disconnect from QoL leaves the majority of the population hopeless for the future.” — Bluesky

Name The Systems of Power

• Neoliberalism
  • Respectability Politics
  • W.E.I.R.D.
  • Meritocracy Myth
  • Lowering the Bar
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
  • Policing
  • Predatory Inclusion
  • Burnout
  • STEM
  • Ableism
  • Eugenics
  • Harm Reduction Theater
  • Administrative Burden
  • Empire of Normality
• Conservatism
  • Resentment
  • Southern Strategy
  • Lost Cause
  • Segregationist Discourse
  • Meritocracy Myth
  • Moral Panic
  • Lowering the Bar
  • Minority Stress
  • Racial Weathering
  • Policing
  • Toxic Masculinity
  • Bodily Autonomy
  • Biological Essentialism
  • Stigma
  • Shame
  • Ableism
  • Eugenics
  • Administrative Burden
  • R-Word
  • Empire of Normality
  • Autism Grievance Parent
• Power
• Privilege
• Precarity
  • Extractive Abandonment
  • Artificial Scarcity
  • Collective Risk Shift
  • Burnout
  • ”Better get used to it.”
• Oligarchy
• Sadopopulism
• Systems Generated Trauma
  • Moral Injury
• Rot Economy
  • It’s not DEI’s Fault; It’s the Rot Economy
  • Enshittification
  • Metric Fixation
• Fantasy Economy
  • STEM
  • Metric Fixation
• Metric Fixation
  • Efficiency
  • McNamara Fallacy
  • Enshittification
• Objectivity
  • When you measure include the measurer.
  • Scientism
  • Epistemic Injustice
  • Scientific Essentialism
  • Fundamental Attribution Error
  • Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
  • Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
• Tech Ethics
  • Techno-solutionism
  • Techno-Legal Solutionism
  • Technoableism
  • Algorithm
  • Roaming Autodidact
  • Enshittification
  • Disability Dongle
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Luddite Sensibilities
  • Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
• Ableism
  • Neuronormativity
  • Empire of Normality
  • Pathology Paradigm
  • Behaviorism
  • Eugenics
  • Deficit Ideology
  • Sameness-Based Fairness
  • ”Better get used to it.”
  • Inspiration Exploitation
  • School-Induced Anxiety
  • Toxic Positivity
  • Resilience
  • Burnout
  • The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
  • Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
  • We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
  • 14 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
  • Double Empathy Problem
  • Double Empathy Extreme Problem
  • Triple Empathy Problem
  • Disability Double-bind
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
  • Pathology Lite
  • Empire of Normality
• Harm Reduction Theater
  • Bikeshedding
  • Wellness
  • Mindset Marketing
  • Resilience
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
  • Pathology Lite

Further Reading