Episode #202 ... Why we can't think beyond capitalism. - Neoliberalism (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism)
37:52 Share

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This. So I want to begin today with a question the late Mark Fisher had been asking people for decades by the end of his life. Do you ever look at the world around you, see the problems that are going on, hear people like Zizek we've been talking about lately who bring an anti-capitalist sort of energy to this whole conversation, and do you ever feel like, okay, yeah, there's certainly problems with capitalism, I can agree with that.

But I'm going to be honest with you. I don't see the obvious, amazing, revolutionary way out of this situation that seems to be required for any of this stuff to work. In fact, sometimes the way I think about it, and this is a quote attributed to Zizek and Frederick Jameson, but something that describes the way I feel sometimes is that it's easier for me to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I mean, that's just a true statement for a lot of people. I can think of 10 different ways the world may end tomorrow. It's not even hard to.

But you asked me for one single way that we can go from capitalism to anything, whatever it is on the other side of it. It just seems much more likely to me that what's going to end up ending global capitalism are the flaws in setting things up this way that are already producing bad results that are just going to get so out of hand one day that we run civilization off a cliff. I mean, is that the fate that all this is headed for because things will just never change?

Because from where I sit, this person may say, where my life has always seemed to be as an adult is in this constant place where I'm choosing between the lesser of two evils. So many things already feel that way to me. Why wouldn't it be the case that most of the issues we talk about politically are fundamentally grounded in this value judgment that capitalism may not be great, but at least it isn't the Marxism of the 20th century. At least it isn't total anarchy with people killing each other all the time. At least I'm not living under the rule of a ruthless dictator.

In other words, it's not that this system is so amazing. It's that at least it's not any of this other stuff. That's the mantra we live by that we're all supposed to be very proud of in our world.

And I know, this person could say, you know, that may sound like I lack some kind of revolutionary spirit that other people have had at other points in human history. But quite frankly, you guys on the left haven't really laid out a good, easily accessible plan for people here. And when I stop to think about my position in all this and everything that's going on right now, I honestly just feel depressed sometimes.

I mean, we live in a world where nobody can agree on what the truth is. Even when I'm watching the news, how is anybody supposed to tell the difference between what's real and what's propaganda? Or if there's even a difference between what's real to us and propaganda? Anybody that says that that's an easy thing to do is already captured by an ideology.

And on top of this joy of complete information overload from sources I don't even trust in the first place that I'm supposed to pretend every day like, yeah, I clearly understand what's going on in the world for sure. You know, in between that whole Academy Award winning performance I'm putting on, I'm in a place sometimes where I practically don't even know what year it is anymore. Every year just sort of blends into the next.

You know, time doesn't even seem to exist in the same way that it used to. Everything culturally is just nostalgia. Everything's a reboot or a remake of something old. Not only am I, in general, just skeptical towards grand narratives that are going to supposedly lead us out of all this, but it feels like I don't even know how to imagine what the future even looks like, let alone start a revolution to bring it about. Again, I feel depressed sometimes.

And then I'm told by people around me that it's your fault you're feeling depressed. You're not working hard enough on your own mental health. Now, if any of this stuff resonates with how you feel about the world sometimes, some philosophers would say that it's not you that's crazy. Many thinkers today would acknowledge a lot of these realities, and they spend a good portion of their work interrogating the way that things are, doing their best to diagnose the causes of these problems.

Good news about a show like this is that we can look at a lot of different takes on why things might be this way. And I know we've been talking for the last several episodes from a place of anti-capitalism or post-capitalism. And for the record, very soon we're going to be getting into some solutions other philosophers see for moving forward from within capitalism as it exists now. You know, there's certainly plenty of thinkers out there that believe there's a lot of hope moving forward from within capitalism. And I think that's an interesting direction to go from here. But the goal today is to look at the reality we're living in through the lens of the work of Mark Fisher.

which for what it's worth is going to be more on this post-capitalism side of things. But anyway, labels aside, what Mark Fisher calls the state of affairs we're living in today, this whole thing I just described where we quite literally cannot imagine an alternative future to the capitalist system we're living in, this is a situation that's unique to history, that's what he's famously referred to for decades as capitalist realism. And it's a complex thing, this capitalist realism.

But once we get through explaining what it is and the effects it has on people all around us, not only is this going to give a potential explanation for some of the common frustrations that people have and the character I just did my best to embody there in the example, but what this will also do is give an explanation for what Mark Fisher thinks is the ultimate goal of this way that things are structurally set up, which is to prevent solidarity among people, to make it so that people cannot come together and change things about this economic and political setup that ultimately he thinks is hurting the world.

Now, at first glance, that sounds very conspiratorial. Like, how can anybody say the system's set up in a way that prevents people from changing it without them also saying that there's some concerted effort by a bunch of bad people out there in positions of power that are doing this? This certainly may sound like a conspiracy, but by the end of these two episodes on Mark Fisher, we'll understand at least one well-respected theory as to why it's not.

And man, the unique way that all this gets pieced together by Mark Fisher, it's truly fascinating, as is his idea and his late work for how we might get ourselves out of it. So to get started on that, first thing I got to do is just to reiterate that capitalist realism is not a specific set of positions that people hold, like some other ism you may run into in the world, like saying someone's into feminism or Buddhism or something.

capitalist realism is a state of affairs. It's a cultural logic that's accepted among people. Mark Fisher calls it at one point a, quote, psychic infrastructure. It's a set of common attitudes that people have that clouds their ability to see the world accurately. And then beyond that, it clouds their ability, it weakens their ability to imagine different social futures than the one they're currently living in.

Put another way, we're living during a time in history where there's a very unique blend of highly popular ways that people make sense of the world, that when they're combined together, specifically in the way they are right now, it's this blend, this confluence of ideological structures that makes this attitude in people so possible to have and so difficult to get out of. It's a perfect storm in many ways.

Now, two big pieces of this blend are going to be neoliberalism and postmodernism, both of which we've talked about on this show extensively in the past. But to understand where Mark Fisher's coming from specifically with his capitalist realism, we're going to need to add some historical context to them and broadly connect some of the dots across history for how these ideas came to be what they are today. I'm first going to be doing this with neoliberalism. And I guess one more disclaimer before I begin, at the risk of hammering this into the ground,

Please bear with me. There is no way I can cover the entire history of liberal thought here. We've done many episodes on the individual thinkers that are involved in this movement. I highly recommend listening to all those episodes outside of this. The point of this broad historical outline, though, is to show how these ideas have come to define so much about the way we look at things today in the West, with some people not even realizing that this is a movement of thought that they're even a part of.

So with all that said, one of the most common things that philosophers these days think is a big change that's gone on recently that you really need to understand if you want to know about the world you're living in is the emergence of neoliberalism as a political and economic strategy that gained popularity in the 70s and 80s all throughout the Western world.

And again, for a lot of philosophers, neoliberalism explains a ton about why the average person you run into on the street is going to be looking at the world in the way that they do. And that's because neoliberalism has been the main principle of social organization in the environment they've lived in from the day they were born. So what is it exactly?

Well, it's been well documented how neoliberalism emerged out of classical liberalism near the beginning of the 20th century. Classical liberalism being the ideology that came into popularity during the Enlightenment that emphasized the primacy of the individual. The individual is what we build our societies around in liberalism.

And this focus on the individual, as you can imagine, leads to certain political outcomes: people valuing individual liberty, valuing equality before the law, having skepticism towards monarchy and tyranny. And this tendency can be seen all throughout the works of thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke, David Hume, and many others we've covered on this show. Again, check out any of those thinkers for more information, but the point here

is that classical liberalism was a central component of the founding of these societies that we now often call Western liberal democracy. And you can imagine living back during the time of classical liberalism, just trying to make the world the best place you can, when you take these classical liberal ideas and you apply their logic to the realm of economics,

You know, it was said at the time that the natural parallel, if you just wanted an economic system that mirrored this focus on the individual, that was going to be free market capitalism. And in practice, in many cases, it was laissez-faire capitalism, meaning almost zero regulations that would interfere with market forces or economic activities. That was the classical liberal way of doing things at first. The thinking at the time was that markets are naturally occurring phenomena,

In other words, what we're talking about and calling a market in the economic space, you know, that's a word we use, but it's really just a bunch of human beings coming together, doing what they do naturally, making voluntary exchanges with each other for the sake of mutual benefit. And what came along with this is the idea that, like a lot of other naturally occurring phenomena, there's a self-correcting nature to these markets.

Something gets a little too out of whack. You know, resources aren't allocated properly. Things aren't diversified enough. Well, that's okay because the market's going to correct itself. Just like the human body has processes that turn on to heal things that are going wrong with it, or just like an ecosystem finds ways to adapt, so too will the market. This was the thinking at the time.

But you fast forward to the beginning of the 20th century, and all of a sudden we're in the Great Depression era. And most of the thinkers at that time are blaming the economic problems of the Great Depression on what they say is the mistaken way of viewing markets that came out of classical liberalism. Now people are thinking that markets are not naturally occurring phenomena that are self-correcting. Markets are human constructions.

And because of that, we need another kind of human construction called the government to step in and regulate these markets so they're better designed to ensure certain results that we want out of them.

In other words, there's a rethinking of what it means to be a liberal at this time when it comes to how these ideas map out onto economic policy. And by the way, this is why people in the United States who are conservative will often call Democrats liberals, much to the confusion of the rest of the world, despite most of the time themselves being neoliberals. It's because of this historical shift. This is the birth of what would eventually be called social liberalism on the left in the United States.

Because if you think about it, at this time, we can all agree now that we need at least some level of government intervening and setting things up to ensure certain outcomes. Then the disagreement between people becomes about, well, how much government and what specific economic outcomes are we going to use this government to try to guarantee? And there's a lot of people thinking at the time, look, we see what's possible when the market goes as south as it did during the Great Depression.

Maybe what the government should be guaranteeing are certain quality of life metrics that give people a base standard of living that they can rely on.

I mean, do we really want a society where people are unsure whether the market's going to turn south next month and then they're not going to have housing, food, medical care, anything basic like that? Is that what we want to live in? And with this in mind, along with a lot of other goals to help stabilize the economy and prevent future crises, highly inspired by the work of the economist John Maynard Keynes, this new type of liberalism with government intervention to ensure social outcomes is often credited as being the economic policy that fueled the deals that helped lift the Western world out of the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Now, almost instantly, people disagreed with this take on things. Thinkers like Walter Lippmann, Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian School of Economics, Frederick Hayek. There's this feeling among an entirely different group of thinkers that thought these policies of the New Deal were making a mistake, that what they're going to lead to in people's thinking is reliance on the government, a welfare state, an expectation in people's heads that it's the government's job to take care of them, which would then lead to a more collectivist mentality overall.

But look, these people said, what defines liberalism is this primacy of the individual. This is all backwards. Not to mention the fact that there's an obvious problem you run into whenever you try to bring central planning into the mix and have a handful of government officials make decisions for you. The problem is you're always putting someone out there in charge. But which person or group of people is ever qualified to do that? See,

See, that's the mistake here, is you thinking you're going to stick your grubby little government fingers into the economy and you're going to do a better job at managing resources than the aggregate of everyone on the ground level making free consumer choices. You know, real businesses that know their market competing in an open market.

This whole thing, some of them thought, is a slippery slope that runs the risk of taking us to the type of big government situations they're seeing elsewhere in the world at the time with the experiments in communism. And aside from any slippery slope arguments, they thought this was just plain bad economic policy as well.

What the government should be doing, if anything they said, is sticking to our focus on the individual. And this is going to be key for understanding neoliberalism. The government should just let individuals compete against each other in a free and open market with as few of these arbitrary government barriers in their way as possible.

In fact, if we can just use the government as minimally as we can, have it step in only to secure markets, facilitate competition, and enforce the limited rules of those markets, if we can do that, then from that setup of things, everyone is going to benefit from this as long as they find a way to participate.

People and businesses are going to feel more comfortable taking risks knowing that the government's not going to get in their way, which will then create more value, which will then create new jobs for people to work at, which then increases the rate of technological innovation and economic growth, which then improves the lives of everyone.

In other words, when the GDP grows in size, that is going to be a rising tide that raises all ships. Or at the very least, there's going to be an obvious trickle-down effect you start to see from businesses innovating at the top to all the consumers that have jobs and then use the technology that's being developed.

As the great and powerful wizard of Ronald Reagan once said, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. This is a quote neoliberalism would have in the About Me section of its dating profile if it had one. It's classic. Get the government out of the way and have competition and free markets be the main principle of social organization.

To put it in the form of a definition, the way it's often presented to people as a strategy, neoliberalism is an economic and political ideology that believes in free market capitalism, minimal state intervention into the economy, and individual entrepreneurial freedoms. That's what it supports. And when it's sold to people that way, what an empowering set of ideas to get excited about. It's wonderful. Now to Mark Fisher, this neoliberal sales pitch about let's all compete and individually prosper together, yeah,

This really appealed to people living in the 70s and 80s.

Reason being, there's already a revolutionary spirit in the West. People are tired of the way things are set up, and there's already changes going on socially. So those economic policies of the Great Depression era that are now a few decades old, these are going to be blamed for the bad situation people are in economically in the 70s and 80s. People say this is what happens when the government gets their grubby little fingers involved in everything. It stifles economic growth. It mismanages things. The government is just inefficient.

And this revolutionary spirit, combined with student protests, the second wave of feminism, the ongoing civil rights movement, this creates an overall desire among people for more autonomy and freedom. And then you combine that with this disillusion about the economy, and all this gets met with what Mark Fisher thinks is a spectacular failure by the political left during this era. It was a failure, he says, to be able to metabolize this desire for more freedom and autonomy among people into a real leftist political project.

Should be said, there were a ton of rational arguments people were given at the time for why economically, you know, these market fluctuations are just a part of capitalism, or how rationally a more classless organization of society is just better morally. But none of these arguments took into account enough that revolution oftentimes isn't totally based on rational arguments.

It's so interesting. Oftentimes, just in practice, big political changes come about in the world because there's some sort of spiritual component to them, or a libidinal component, it's also called. There's something about a revolution sometimes that creates a feeling in people that's so strong that it isn't about rational arguments at a certain point. They may have rational arguments to back them up, but sometimes the spirit of a revolution becomes the most important thing that brings about that change, if that's what you want.

And the point to realize here is that this vision of neoliberalism to Mark Fisher metabolized this revolutionary spirit among the people in the West far better than communism was doing back in the 1980s. It was incredibly effective at demonstrating to people how Stalinist and Maoist projects were outdated. And naturally, this is part of how neoliberalism won the battle as the dominant political ideology of the time.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, this show is made possible by the people that contribute to it. And there's two sponsors today that signed a contract to make this show possible for a period of time. First up is NordVPN. So NordVPN is a virtual private network. It's something that runs in the background that masks your real IP address and location so that it's more private when you're online.

It basically creates an encrypted tunnel, I'm told, between your device and a VPN server, so it makes sensitive information like passwords, credit cards, anything else, just much harder to access for hackers that may be watching. It just allows you to relax a bit more if you're on public Wi-Fi or traveling. That's the security side of it.

Now, there are other sides of it. Some people use it to access deals from other countries. Some people use it to watch sports games or TV shows they can't access. I used to do that. Honestly, these days, though, I usually just use it for the sake of security. It's something that's becoming more and more crucial the more the years go on. Now, that said, NordVPN is the fastest VPN out there. It's the price of a cup of coffee per month, and you can protect up to six different devices on one membership. It's also a fantastic way to support the show if that's something that you wanted to do. To

To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash phylothis. Our link will also give you four extra months plus a bonus gift. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee, and you'll help support our podcast. The link is in the podcast episode description box. nordvpn.com slash phylothis. Lastly, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

So today I want to talk about something we don't always bring up, but definitely should be. Dealing with stress. We've all been there, right? Sometimes life just throws a little too much at us. It really just helps to have a place where you can let it all out and sort through whatever's bugging you. Sometimes you need to be able to just get something off your chest. Well, that's the cool thing about therapy. It's not just a place to vent, but it's a place you can learn techniques or skills for dealing with whatever life throws your way.

It teaches you how to manage stress, to communicate. Sometimes it even helps you get to know yourself better. Therapy has been massively helpful to me personally over the years and I continue to be someone that wants to sing its praises. So if you're thinking about giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a pretty solid choice. It's totally online so you can reach out from wherever you feel comfortable. You start by answering a few questions, then they match you up with a licensed therapist that suits your needs and you can switch therapists at any time, no questions asked. Get it off your chest with BetterHelp.

Visit betterhelp.com slash fill this to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash fill this. And now, back to the podcast.

And naturally, this is part of how neoliberalism won the battle as the dominant political ideology of the time. And you can understand it. Think of how exciting this message is to people already upset about the way the world is. It says, hooray, it's neoliberalism. You are an individual now. You're not part of some collectivist society like those people in the Soviet Union. You're not wearing a uniform. You're not paying for other people to blaze about on the couch watching Jerry Springer all day. That's not you. No, you're an individual now.

And finally, this thing that's been holding you back all these years, the government's going to finally be out of your way once and for all. So go out there. Stop complaining about how your life is. And now the only thing that's left for you to do, my friend, is to achieve everything you've ever wanted to achieve. Become a millionaire. Buy a yacht if that's something you want to do because you are currently living in the greatest economic period of opportunity for the entrepreneur that has ever existed in the history of the world.

The key thing to remember is, and please don't forget this, if there's ever anything that's missing in your life, well, that's on you, right? You have to work harder. You have to change your life if you want to make that happen. And the way to do that is that you have to become more valuable as a commodity in the marketplaces.

Which then leads people to look at other people around them in terms of them being a commodity as well. The dating world becomes about assessing someone's value. Are you high value? Are you low value? When it comes to making friends, don't be hanging around these low value people. Only people that complement this narcissistic, highly individualized project you're embarking on in life.

Otherwise, these losers around you, they're just going to be keeping you a loser. Do you really want to be driving a 1998 Geo Metro the rest of your life? Is that what your grandma would have wanted for you when she came over from the old country? You know, to hear the serpentine belt screeching from four miles away when you take off at a red light? Is that what she would have wanted?

And this becomes a main category in the game show of, you know, things a person will think when they're born into a neoliberal society. You are in competition with every single person around you. And that competition becomes the glue that holds our society together and allows for this constant innovation. And of course, you see parallels here to the critique of Byung-Chul Han. This is the neoliberal ethos that he's talking about all throughout his work.

But the social effects of neoliberalism turn out to be more than just an influx of narcissistic people that spend very little time considering the lives of others. Just how there were critics of Keynesian economics during the Great Depression era, there were people who were critics of neoliberal ideas from about the very first moments they were talked about. And for the critics of neoliberalism, these policies are going to lead to some pretty severe negative outcomes in the old socioeconomic department. So what were they?

Well, one thing a critic of neoliberalism would want to put on a billboard right at the start here is that neoliberal ideas often present themselves to people in the sales pitch form as classical liberal ideas. But they'd say that if you pay attention, they are not, in fact, classical liberal ideas. Classical liberalism did have a focus on the individual, free markets, limited government, for sure, all of that.

But during classical liberalism, as it was going on, there was always a goal built into these free markets that they were ultimately for the sake of mutual benefit. That's why the markets existed. It was to allow for transactions to take place where the result of engaging in a transaction made someone's life better. In other words, there was a social responsibility connected to this focus on keeping markets free.

But what neoliberalism critics would say, the goal isn't about social welfare. The goal is competition. The goal is for the government to get out of the way of growth and innovation. Now it's assumed or hoped by neoliberals that every single person out there is going to come along for that ride and then benefit from this whole setup. But that doesn't do anything to ensure the well-being of people that can't compete in the market or just don't end up benefiting as much as other people because of their position socially.

It's been said by many that what this whole neoliberalism setup actually starts to resemble is something more along the lines of a social Darwinism or survival of the fittest rather than anything that looks like an economic policy for the rest of society that doesn't happen to be young, smart, and full of energy or old, powerful, and well-connected.

But even all this is assuming a bit too much if you're a critic of neoliberalism. Even this so far assumes that competition and free markets are the goal of neoliberalism. But what if that's not what effectively ends up happening? What happens when you minimize the amount of government intervention into the economy as much as you can? What happens when you deregulate things, you remove all the red tape that stops these companies from really being able to get out there and gallop around and innovate the heck out of stuff? What happens then?

Well, to some early critics of neoliberalism, people like Noam Chomsky would say that what you gotta realize is that whenever you minimize something, like the government, you're always maximizing something else. And effectively, what happens when you minimize government intervention is you don't get rid of the government completely, the government just becomes a tool, leveraged by the most powerful people, usually corporations, to maximize their interests, usually corporate profit.

Seems so obvious to us living in the world that's been created out of these policies. But yeah, just think of what you're saying when you make the declaration that we need to get the government out of the way of the economy as much as possible. You know, some people would say that a synonym to the word government in an open society, a democratic society, a synonym to the word government is just the people and the only option they have if they ever wanted to stop something going on in the economy that was bad for them.

This is part of the reason why it's not conspiratorial to say that the goal of neoliberalism is to prevent solidarity between people to change the current state of things. Because if you remove the government, you remove the ability to intervene and apply regulations to things that are hurting people. And this is what the critics of neoliberalism were saying all the way back in the 90s. That what you can expect if this neoliberal organization to society is left to play out

is for the GDP of a society to go up while the quality of life of the people goes down.

The reason for that is because again, this isn't classical liberalism. The actual goal isn't social welfare or mutual benefit. It's for the GDP to go up. So you can imagine there's tons of different ways in that kind of system that a company could do stuff that makes the bottom line look better on their quarterly profit and loss sheet. But it's stuff that makes the lives of their employees just a little bit worse or the product or service they're providing a little less good.

You have enough of these slight degradations that happen over the course of a couple decades when it's not about providing a good service but about the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. And yeah, GDP is going to go up, quality of life is going to go down. What you'd also see, if that were the case, Mark Fisher thinks, is the expansion of what he calls the audit culture. That's a plague that's been spreading across the globe recently. An everyday example of what he means by the audit culture is just think of the person that's working at a company who's part of a team of some sort.

And they have these meetings that they go to three times a week. And at these meetings, they got to have something to show for themselves and what they've been working on all that week to the rest of the team. Now, for the sake of this example, let's also say that this is not someone who works with 100% of their time every week when they're at work. Let's say they're coming up on 10 years at the company, and they're kind of proud of this, actually. But when it comes down to it, they really spend 60 to 70% of their time scrolling through Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is.

And let's say this person has not lost their job at this company as a member of this team because the skill they've gotten really good at over the years is being able to show up to these meetings and demonstrate to the group all that they've been working on this week. You know, the spreadsheet that I've created, all the obstacles I've run into. God, they were really bad this week. And don't worry, don't worry. I got a great plan for how I'm going to be moving forward the second this meeting ends. I swear I'm a good member of the team.

Again, the service they're providing isn't even that good, and they know this. But in a sense, it doesn't even really matter in this society. Because in a neoliberal situation, within capitalist realism, where the goal is not to provide good services to people, but is instead the expansion of capital for the sake of capital...

It doesn't matter if you're actually providing a good service. What matters is that there's a quantifiable metric that can demonstrate to the auditors that work is being done even when it's not actually really being done that much. So in a sense, the person who's doing this isn't even really a bad employee. They're just smart. They've just locked in on what's actually important to their employers. Performance metrics, not actually getting real work done.

And to Mark Fisher, this audit culture is something you'll see pop up in a lot of unexpected ways all across people's lives, not just in the workplace. But nonetheless, it originates in this overall ethos we have in the Western world of neoliberalism. The smoking gun for a lot of critics of neoliberalism is the 2008 financial collapse around subprime mortgages. See, what they say is that if the role of government under neoliberalism was really just to ensure competition and free markets, then the best goods or services would have to rise to the top.

If a company provided a bad service and got themselves into a place where they were failing because of bad business practices, then they'd have to be left to fail in a truly free market. But what happened in 2008 is that companies that sold bad loans were bailed out by taxpayer dollars and the government. In other words, to the critics of neoliberalism, this was a very public, visible example of what had been going on since the beginning of neoliberalism. This is not the government ensuring competition in free markets.

This is the government meddling in certain markets and rigging them for certain companies that have the resources to manipulate the government in their favor. This is essentially social welfare for the rich in a system that generally doesn't even believe in social welfare for the poor. Or as a critic like Domchomsky said it all the way back in the 90s, over a decade before any of this happened, that what we can expect under neoliberalism is, quote, socialized losses and privatized gains, end quote.

Again, to Mark Fisher though, none of this makes sense if the goal of neoliberalism is to ensure competition and free markets. But all of this makes sense if the goal is not providing quality services to people, but instead the expansion of capital for the sake of capital, and then rigging market conditions and using the government as a tool to make that happen for those with the resources to be able to control it. Now I want to pause here and just do some accounting of what's been said so far. Neoliberalism obviously has a lot of different components to it. But with all this talk of economics,

One of the ones that can be pretty easy to overlook is just how much thinking in this way causes people to focus on the individual as the main building block that we're going to be constructing our societies around. We all know what it feels like to do that in the Western world. You know, born into a neoliberal society, especially if you're not very close with your family, you can just live your life purely as an individual, only having to think about yourself. You know, what life is to you is the goals that you have, the things you want.

And then you can find yourself getting older, starting a family and feeling like, oh, wow, the family is also an important social unit that we build our societies around. Look at how much meaning I can find in my life where instead of being 100% of an individual, I'm 20% of a family. Point is, this is a different scale of life that people often find meaning in. But anyway, it's just a unique challenge we have as people in Western culture just because of how our world is set up to not fall into this place where you're too indexed on the individual side of things.

And this is why the interpretive version of dialectics can be such a powerful tool when critiquing Western society in particular. You know, it's definitely important to look at something individually for what it is, for sure. But it's also undeniably important, if you want to understand things at a deeper level, to pay attention to what a thing is in relation to all the other things around it. In a sense, within dialectics, these are often the things that define what something actually is in a particular context.

You know, it's not uncommon in modern Western capitalist society. We'll walk into a store, we'll see a pair of shoes we want. And it's possible to see that pair of shoes just as a pair of shoes and think nothing else about it.

Now, there's another way of viewing what that pair of shoes is that considers the materials it's made out of, how they were harvested, transported, the design process that went into the shoes, the people that put them together, shipped them across the world, the people that stocked and sold the shoes to you, as well as this complex network of social relations that make the value and meaning of those shoes, whatever they are and the culture you're wearing them in. You can look at it this way, too.

But again, in the Western world, it's very possible, almost intuitive to our way of thinking, to see them as just a pair of shoes. Well, to Mark Fisher, we run the risk of doing this exact same thing with individuals in Western culture too. We see people as just an individual, a collection of choices that they're making, values that they hold. But just like with the shoes, it becomes easier for us in the West to ignore the social relationships or the structural setup to the world that have huge impacts on who a person is.

And there's a balance, right? We want to be able to hold people accountable for their actions. And we certainly don't want to give people a blanket pass that society is to blame for everything that's messed up in their life. But being self-aware that we exist in this neoliberal ethos that tells people if anything's messed up in your life, it's your job to work harder and fix it. Can this tendency ever go too far?

Mark Fisher thinks one of the ways that it does is when it comes to the way we often look at and treat mental illness, more specifically depression as an example he had a lot to say about in particular. To Mark Fisher, we privatize depression in our society in a way that's honestly ridiculous from any other perspective. Because what's often the experience of somebody who's struggling with depression in a neoliberal society? They're told in so many words, look, that sucks and all, I get it.

But this is a you problem you're dealing with. You have a chemical imbalance. You have a family history with this. You need to pull yourself together, get off the couch, force yourself to go for a run, drag yourself into one of these professionals that'll prescribe you these pills you can take to bring your brain chemistry back to normal. You owe it to the people around you to work harder on your depression.

But as Mark Fisher says, hey, even if we can say this person right here has a chemical imbalance, what does that have anything to do with what's causing that chemical imbalance? I mean, isn't it possible that the society you live in has something to do with the fact you feel horrible every day? Does it have nothing to do with it? Is the assumption that, you know, you were just born and no matter what society you were born into, you were always going to have a chemical imbalance like this.

We know there's different mental illness rates in different countries. We know they've taken depressed people out of one environment, moved them into a different environment, and their depression gets better. But no, no, we treat this in our society like a private malfunction that's going on inside your brain with nothing more to think about. Now, be a good citizen and just take the pills that Big Pharma's made for you.

No, we're idiots, Mark Fisher thinks, if we're not considering that the society people are living in has an effect on this. Mental health is at crisis levels in the Western world. Why is that? And to return this back to the beginning of the episode where we said, look, I get that there's problems in the world, as it is, but at least this isn't any of the other ways of setting things up where things get really bad. If this is the best option we got, why, Mark Fisher would ask, are there so many young people who are sick then?

Why is one of the main conversations we're having that we need to figure out what to do with these tens of thousands of people that are struggling mentally, that are queuing up all around our society? Is this just a private issue? Do we just got to go out and motivate these people more to get them off the couch? Or is there something fundamentally wrong?

When it comes to neoliberalism as one piece of this blend that's going to produce a way of thinking about the world that leads to capitalist realism, neoliberalism is the piece of this that's going to encourage a surface-level, individualistic, overly competitive, overly moralizing account of everything and everyone around you.

I say overly moralizing there because there's a narrative of good versus evil that people start projecting onto things in the world when they're not thinking about the world at a structural level. What I mean is when you're hyper-focused on the individual and you're not thinking about the social relationships that produce the bad results you see in the world, it becomes incredibly easy for someone to assume that this bad outcome I see in the world must be being caused by bad people, when in fact it could just be an unintended consequence of a system we need to pay more attention to.

I mean, it's worth asking: how many conspiracy theories out there that claim there's a handful of people maliciously orchestrating events all around the world, you know, pulling the puppet strings just trying to hurt people, how many of those are actually just unintended byproducts of bad incentive structures in a political and economic system?

Anyway, this is a larger conversation obviously, but the point is, when you privatize this stuff, when you turn what is actually a matter of economic and political incentives into some battle between good versus evil that's going on, or that it's just a handful of bad politicians that drink the blood of children,

When people ignore the structural components that work here, then they run the risk of spending their entire lives chasing a ghost, trying to chase down a fake group of people at the top they need to prosecute to be able to stop all this, trying to correct for a cause to the problem that doesn't actually exist, which then makes the problem effectively unsolvable if we live in an open society that relies on an informed and educated population.

Now again, what we've talked about here today has only been about half of the way we orient ourselves towards reality that leads to what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. And if the problems of neoliberalism seem like they narrow people's focus, just wait until you hear about how he thinks postmodernism collides into all this and makes imagining the future seem impossible.

At that point, we'll also be able to go deeper into what exactly is meant by capitalist realism as a state of affairs he thinks has moved beyond postmodernism, as well as talk deeper about at least one way out of this that Mark Fisher was considering towards the end of his life. That episode will be out next Monday. It's already written. I'll probably release it early on Patreon. Hope you enjoyed this one. And as always, I could never do this without the support of people on Patreon. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.