THE CALL OF NEOLIBERALISM: A BRIEF HISTORY
“Neoliberal” is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days without much concern for context or accuracy, much less the hurt it causes. Kids are coming home from school confused and frightened because they were called “neolibs” on the playground. Too many parents are being forced to have “the talk” about what it means to be market-friendly with their Codys and Jennaphers at too young an age.
On its face, it sounds like something good. “Neo,” meaning the hero of the Matrix films, and “liberal,” meaning someone who wishes things were good instead of bad. Surely the advent of some kind of new and powerful liberal like this would be a cause for celebration, right?
You’d think so, but in today’s parlance, it’s a term of abuse hurled at respected opinion columnists that the vulgar Marxist “Left” regards as too damn reasonable.
Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is a political and ideological project that gained traction in the 1970s across the Western world that sought to return to the laissez-faire roots of “classical” or “economic” liberalism; it aimed to curtail the gains made by labor in the twentieth century and to restore upper-class power through “free” markets and unregulated capital.
But it went even further than the classical gas: traditional, classical liberals might say that one must not interfere with the economy—one could do it, but one shouldn’t, because it’s bad. The neo half of the neoliberal idea insists that one can’t interfere with the economy. As in, it’s not possible; science has proven it. It’s a thing outside of human control, beyond time and the wall of sleep. All we can do is sacrifice in the market’s name.
We can trace the origins of this ideology to a meeting of economists, philosophers, and business leaders organized by Friedrich Hayek at Colorado’s historic Overlook Hotel in 1947. Seeing a Western world devastated by the horrors of World War II, the labor movement, robust welfare states, and a population with too much free time, Hayek knew he had to do something.
That something became known simply as the Overlook Society. This group sought to promote a frank and productive exchange of views on how best to preserve market competition and private property in a world full of increasingly willful children in need of harsh correction. This fairly raucous affair was marked by vigorous debate and even more vigorous partying, such as when Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman entertained guests by dressing in an assless bear costume and performing a raunchy version of his famous “Pencil” lecture by making several no. 2’s “disappear.”
Through their conferences and writings, the Overlook Society laid the groundwork for a reinvigorated philosophy of economic liberalism, as well as a renewed spiritual interest in certain long-forgotten Babylonian deities among American and European elites.
Later in the 1970s, future Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. laid another cornerstone of the neoliberal revolution with his Powell Memo. One of the all-time great memos, Powell urged politicians and business leaders to become more involved in fighting back against a new “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Powell was responding to a nascent consumer rights movement represented by Ralph Nader and his seminal exposé of General Motors, Murder Mobile: Your Car Will Fucking Decapitate You.
A former corporate lawyer who sat on the board of Philip Morris, Powell knew better than most the threat to freedom posed by increasing public awareness that people’s lives were incidental to the bottom line. The Powell Memo forcefully argued that capital needed its own collective project to fight back against haters like Ralph Nader and the working class. In a war of ideas, Powell understood that his side needed to tool up, and that think tanks would be the trenches of the front lines.
Through a huge influx of corporate money, organizations like the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation were set up to promote this ideology as well as the esoteric rites and rituals of the Overlook Society, and to craft policies designed to nourish the vast and ancient elder gods they worshipped.
The essential question the neoliberal revolution sought to address was: What are human beings for? And what is the best way to serve man? Are individuals each creative and self-determined beings best served by acting in concert to exercise democratic control over the economic and political systems they live under? Or are they best served by acting as faceless nodes competing against one another in a massive orgone-harvesting project designed to fulfill the Redeemer prophecy as foretold in the works of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, given new and abominable life by the Overlook Society?
If you’re reading this book in one of the few “free” moments you have, on your way to a job that’s slowly sapping your will to live, you already know that the good side won.
In other words, neoliberalism is the guiding ideology of economic thought, political management, and occult magik of our times, and as such it is impossible to define. Though it accurately describes the policies pursued by every American president since Jimmy Carter, it’s essentially unnameable and indescribable. No one really knows what it means, and it is precisely because the term is so hard to define that it’s such an effective and poisonous epithet.
When one uses a term like neoliberal to describe people who support free markets, foreign intervention, and the dismantling of the traditional welfare state, one removes humanity and agency from a diverse group of individuals and the ancient and secret religion they belong to. Think about that the next time you decide to drop the n-bomb.
Perhaps the single greatest feature of neoliberalism is that it’s entirely compatible with contemporary values of racial and sexual equality, provided they don’t stray too far into income equality. The children of the Overlook Society are overwhelmingly pro–gay rights, pro–women’s rights, pro–civil rights, etc. And why wouldn’t they be? Being tolerant, outwardly friendly, and socially liberal makes waging outright class warfare and pursuing the secret worship of vast and ancient alien races that much easier.
What’s more, how could a term that applies equally to Democrats and Republicans mean anything? If it accurately describes the horizon of possibility offered by both options available in American politics, then why do the two parties oppose each other so much? Why even have elections?
Since they’re more efficient and rational than the thin sliver of consciousness that sits atop the abyssal depths of the individual human mind, why not just let markets determine our individual worth? If all our lives are in fact governed by forces that are so essentially inscrutable and beyond our control that they cannot even be named, what hope do we have but a blissful retreat into madness?
Furthermore, if a word doesn’t really have a meaning, then how can one oppose the concept it represents? The answer is one can’t, and one shouldn’t try! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
