There is a clue to neoliberalism's ideal human being in Pinochet's policy aim:

" ... to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of proprietors."    [AP]

It's difficult to imagine a nation of proprietors - though I suppose everyone could be re-classified as self-employed - but I recall an interview with the-then-Mr Norman Tebbitt in his role as a Tory minister in the 1980s.

Tebbitt had put together a package to encourage people to start their own business, and was asked "Are you governing the right people?".

The interviewer clearly believed that most people did not want to start their own business; Tebbitt clearly thought, or hoped, this was wrong.

In this he alluded towards the idea that it's government's role to create Pinochet's autonomous human being.

Presumably Pinochet's 'proprietors' have no need of the social state, and see other people through the simple dichotomy of customers and non-customers.

And the state's function is to keep it that way.

Democracy? That's for non-proprietors, to create the illusion of power.

Archbishop laments the 'abuse of trust'

Analysis

Robert Pigott

BBC News religious affairs correspondent
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Williams has courted controversy before by focusing attention on the conditions which prompted the August riots at a time when anger was concentrated on the looting and violence which marked them.

He's been accused - wrongly - of condoning the violence, or at least of being soft on the rioters.

Some people will not like the way Dr Williams equates rioters and financial speculators, but he did so in order to point to what he claims is an even deeper problem.

That is - he argues - that as Britons cease to feel any sense of obligation to each other as people, they are steadily creating a society based on selfishness and fear.

Rioters and people who gamble with finance are, the archbishop insists, each a symptom of that deeper malaise.

BBC NEWS  25 Dec 2011    A 'caring and compassionate party'    Third Meltdown Log

Cartesian Dualism    No such thing as society    The 'Fuck you buddy' Dystopia

Archbishop urges rich to share pain

Inquiry call over Mark and Helen Mullins deaths

A charity worker has called for a full investigation into the deaths of a vulnerable couple whose bodies were found in their Warwickshire home.

The deaths of Mark and Helen Mullins, from Bedworth, last Thursday, are being treated as "unexplained" by police.

Kervin Julien, from the Christian charity Anesis, knew the couple and said they struggled to get benefits.

He has called on the authorities to find out what happened so it does not happen to others in need.

He said the couple walked every Sunday to a soup kitchen in Coventry almost 12 miles away in order to have something to eat and pick up food bags ...

BBC NEWS  09 November 2011
A 'modern and compassionate party'    Coalition Log    Marginalising the disabled
Third Meltdown Log    Welfare 'Reform'    Whither Britain? Log

Autonomous Individualism    'Communitarian Citizenship'    Marginalised    'Unsustainable Burdens'

RIP Helen and Mark

Elderly patients condemned to early death by secret use of do not resuscitate orders

'Life unworthy of life'

Action on Elder Abuse ... uncover(d) widespread evidence that patients are being left to die, without families knowing that such decisions have been taken.

Documented cases include:

* Inspectors who visited Queen Elizabeth Hospital, run by University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation trust, found no evidence that any of the patients whose files were marked DNR had been informed about the decision, nor their relatives told. The hospital's own audit showed that in one ward, 30 per cent of cases did not involve any such conversations.

* At University Hospitals Bristol Foundation trust, there was no evidence that a DNR order placed on a patient had been discussed with the person or next of kin. A junior doctor told inspectors that they did "not tend to discuss" such decisions with families.

* At Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, run by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital trust, a patient was labelled as DNR based on old medical notes from a previous admission – despite the fact their health had improved.

* Asked how decisions to make such orders were made, staff at Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation trust gave an example of an elderly person on the ward with health problems judged to make "resuscitation less appropriate". The doctor involved did not know if the patient or an advocate had been asked for an opinion, or told that the notice had been imposed.

* At Conquest Hospital, run by East Sussex Healthcare trust, incomplete DNR forms were placed on patients' files – without their involvement, or the two doctors' signatures required to validate them. The hospital was the only one of the five to fail CQC's basic standards on dignity and respect of patients.

Tel  15 Oct 2011    Caring for the Elderly ...    Third Meltdown Log

Marginalised    'Unsustainable Burdens'

Action on Elder Abuse

Markets meltdown leads to surge in City addictions

Drug and alcohol problems are rising at an alarming rate in London's financial district, according to the founder of what claims to be the only specialist addiction counselling service based in the Square Mile.

Richard Kingdon ... says the climate of markets going into meltdown and banks implementing mass job cuts has prompted record numbers of City workers to seek treatment for addiction ... his service, City Beacon, has worked with nearly 100 clients over the past two years ...

One of Kingdon's recovering clients ... claims there are bars in the City where regular customers order bottles of wine that are not advertised.

In fact, these vintages aren't on sale, but are a code for ordering cocaine from bar staff ...

[He] believes the City's macho, risk-taking culture plays a part in addiction.

His supervisors weren't interested in him as a person, he says, only the profit he was generating – and quickly the power and the money proved too much.

He even stole money from his parents to buy drugs, despite his huge earnings ...

Gdn  09 Sept 2011    Bankocracy Log    Third Meltdown Log

Cartesian Dualism and the Dystopia of Individualism     Martin Buber

Testosterone     The economics of turning people into things

Drugs & Alcohol

Precarity

Transform

A Society on the Verge of a Meltdown

"There is no such thing as society," former conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said.

"There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

But when society is broken, people break too. Thatcher and all the other neoliberal ideologues after her didn't want to believe this.

But the market has no moral qualities, and without morals we all become animals ...

Der Spiegel  18 Aug 2011    FYB Log    Third Meltdown Log

Fury about more than tuition fees

Many blogs in support of the changes to HE funding argue that 'society' should not have to fund students, implying that the 'autonomous' cannot see beyond the benefit of HE to the individual student.

Whether or not the violence yesterday was, as the National Union of Students insisted, fomented by a tiny minority, the fury on display also seemed to contain other strands, such as a sense of "them and us", and the conviction that direct action was the only way to convey the desired message to those in power.

If such sentiments come to be shared more widely, this may turn out to be no unseasonal squall, but the first storm in a new winter of discontent.

Independent  11 Nov 2010

Student protests: Demonstration effect

... the public is capable of making a distinction between a well-supported good cause and a small number of provocateurs.

Intelligently conducted, the protests retain lots of potential to command the wider support in the political centre that they need to succeed and thus to cause headaches, and perhaps even second thoughts, for anxious ministers.

Guardian  11 Nov 2010    Higher education

University fees reforms 'will not save money'

Cameron criticises police for not protecting Tory HQ

Afghanistan and African nations at greatest risk from world food shortages

Good of you to confirm that the "F*** You Buddy" dystopia is in rude health, Jed

Soaring commodity prices and natural disasters in Russia and Pakistan have combined to put African nations and conflict-ridden countries such as Afghanistan most at risk from food shortages, according to a report released today ...

JedFanshaw
19 Aug 2010, 7:44AM

The report highlights climate change as having a "profound effect on global food security", with a heatwave in Russia coinciding with devastating floods in Pakistan

It's called weather, something we've had to live with for millions of years.

Most of the "ten extreme risk countries" are either war zones or places where there is total corruption

People have always gone hungry somewhere around the world. It's thanks to the global media that outsiders know about famines.

There is, however, no automatic right to famine relief.

Guardian  19 Aug 2010    Climate Chaos    Haber Bosch Food Crunch

Commodity prices soar as spectre of food inflation is back

Superheroes of today are 'bad role models'

Neoliberalism = Fascism = Nazism

Leading child psychologist claims characters such as Iron Man are selling adolescent boys 'a narrow version of masculinity' ...

Professor Sharon Lamb, from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, accuses the new generation of superheroes, exemplified by Robert Downey Junior's playboy millionnaire Iron Man, of being bad role models for young boys.

Unlike conventional superheroes such as Superman, who stood for justice, fairness and decency, the modern macho superheroes portray a negative masculinity, characterised by mindless aggression and rampant sexism. Lamb, who surveyed 674 boys aged four to 18, claimed these hardnosed heroes may be damaging the social skills of teenagers and even affecting their performance at school.

"There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday," she said.

"Today's superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he's aggressive, sarcastic, and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity," she said.

"These men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns." ...

Guardian  16 May 2010    A violent aggressive culture

Out of the abyss of individualism

If you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost, or the pain of others.

The result may be a world where people are articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about those of others. An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, fed by a distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified box room for paranoiacs ...

Davai
21 Feb 2010, 10:44AM

Materialism is a cult which demands that firstly we don't co-operate with our neighbours - we compete with them.

Secondly, it demands that we never be happy with our lot - we always have to be 'aspiring'.

Thirdly, it demands that we constantly spend beyond our means and live our lives permanently dealing with the stress of self-induced debt slavery.

Our real human needs have been subordinated to the needs of 'the markets'.

How do we rectify that? I'm afraid we don't.

The forces that coerce our children and form them into 'consumers' before they have the facility for rational thought are all-pervading.

Lack of impulse control and absence of restraint is something we see in a lot of our young, and those traits I'm convinced are a result of the marketing man's influence. 'Don't think - just consume' easily morphs into 'don't think - just lash out'.

I'd like to think we could wake up from our consumerist torpor and collectively say "I've got enough stuff, thanks" but I'm afraid the future is just more of the same - leading to future booms and busts, greater polarisation of wealth and greater social fracture.

FalseConsciousness
21 Feb 2010, 10:51AM

Individualism is the ideal of the ruling class. We all have much more in common that many would like to admit. We all have all the same basic needs and these basic human needs outweigh any differences in nationality, or race which is simply a social construct.

While most religions share core values, religion ultimately serves the State and the ruling classes, not the faithful. We should move beyond the poison of individualism and realize that the vast majority of us are working people with common interests whether we live in Britain or Saudi Arabia.

The fate of working people in Europe and the US is intimately bound up with the fate of working people in China and Pakistan, Egypt and Israel, and every other country.The international working class should not let the ruling elites of the world keep us divided through their perpetuation of bigotry,fear, and communal violence.

Guardian  21 Feb 2010    Autonomous Individualism    Mechanistic Modelling

Employers need to pay more attention to the levels of stress and anxiety in the workplace, key NHS advisers say.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said the cost of work related mental illness was £28bn - a quarter of the UK's total sick bill.

Bad managers were the single biggest cause of problems, the group claimed.

But it said simple steps such as giving positive feedback, allowing flexible working and giving extra days off as a reward could cut the impact by a third.

As well as taking measures like these, NICE urged employers to invest in training for managers and mentoring for staff to help career development.

THE TOLL OF STRESS
Yasmin, 37, from Wokingham in Berkshire, used to be employed by a large financial company as a tax accountant.
Despite having had no previous problems, stress led to her taking nearly four years off work.
Yasmin was prescribed around 30 different anti-depressants before a combination was found that worked for her.
She said: "I lost all sense of self-worth and self-confidence. I felt useless, hopeless and a waste of space."
More than 13 million working days a year are lost because of work related stress, anxiety and depression.

Once the pay of staff, lost productivity and replacing ill employees are taken into account, the cost to employers hits £28.3bn a year.

To convince employers to act, NICE has designed a calculator to show the potential savings of supporting staff more.

It suggests that for the average firm of 1,000 staff, £250,000 a year could be saved.

Professor Cary Cooper, an expert in workplace psychology from Lancaster University who helped draw up the recommendations, said:

"You cannot overestimate the importance of saying 'Well done' to staff, but so often it does not happen.

"Managers will tell you when you are doing something wrong, but not when you are doing it right."

But he said the problem was not just to do with staff taking time off.

"Presenteeism, where people come to work but add no value, is if anything more of a problem, especially during a recession.

"People are so scared that they go to work when they are not fit to," said Prof Cooper.

His remarks are supported by a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development which revealed a quarter of UK workers describe their mental health as moderate or poor, yet nearly all continued to work regularly ...

BBC NEWS  05 November 2009

Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent.

The deepening recession offers a fresh challenge to the program, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 amid bitter protest and became one of the most closely watched social experiments in modern memory.

The program, which mostly serves single mothers, ended a 60-year-old entitlement to cash aid, replacing it with time limits and work requirements, and giving states latitude to discourage people from joining the welfare rolls. While it was widely praised in the boom years that followed, skeptics warned it would fail the needy when times turned tough ...

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

The program’s structure — fixed federal financing, despite caseload size — may discourage states from helping more people because the states bear all of the increased costs. By contrast, the federal government pays virtually all food-stamp costs, and last year every state expanded its food-stamp rolls; nationally, the food program grew 12 percent.

The clashing trends in some states — more food stamps, but less cash aid — suggest a safety net at odds with itself. Georgia shrank the cash welfare rolls by nearly 11 percent and expanded food stamps by 17 percent.

New York Times 01 February 2009

Slumping Economy Tests Aid System

Mentality of rule

A mentality of rule is any relatively systematic way of thinking about government.

It delineates a discursive field in which the exercise of power is ‘rationalised’ [Lemke, 2001:191].

Thus Neo-liberalism is a mentality of rule because it represents a method of rationalising the exercise of government, a rationalisation that obeys the internal rule of maximum economy [Foucault, 1997:74].

Fukuyama [in Rose, 1999: 63] writes “a liberal State is ultimately a limited State, with governmental activity strictly bounded by the sphere of individual liberty”.

However, only a certain type of liberty, a certain way of understanding and exercising freedom is compatible with Neo-liberalism.

If Neo-liberalist government is to fully realize its goals, individuals must come to recognize and act upon themselves as both free and responsible [Rose, 1999:68].

Thus Neo-liberalism must work to create the social reality that it proposes already exists. For as Lemke states, a mentality of government “is not pure, neutral knowledge that simply re-presents the governing reality” [Lemke, 2001:191] instead, Neo-liberalism constitutes an attempt to link a reduction in state welfare services and security systems to the increasing call for subjects to become free, enterprising, autonomous individuals.

It can then begin to govern its subjects, not through intrusive state bureaucracies backed with legal powers, the imposition of moral standards under a religious mandate, but through structuring the possible field of action in which they govern themselves, to govern them through their freedom.

Through the transformation of subjects with duties and obligations, into individuals, with rights and freedoms, modern individuals are not merely ‘free to choose’ but obliged to be free, “to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice” [Rose, 1999:87].

This freedom is a different freedom to that offered in the past. It is a freedom to realize our potential and our dreams through reshaping the way in which we conduct our lives.

Wikipedia

"Rational Self-Interest"

Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" offers greater understanding of the nature of the "autonomous individual":

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

... Rand identified morality as principles needed in all contexts, whether one is alone or with others, reserving the term "ethics" for relationships with others. She summarized ... that man properly lives "with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life."

According to Objectivist epistemology, states of mind, such as happiness, are not primary; they are the consequence of specific facts of existence.

Therefore man needs an objective standard, grounded in the facts of reality, to achieve happiness.

The human faculty of happiness is a biologically evolved measuring instrument (a "barometer") that measures how well one is doing in the pursuit of life.

Therefore the standard by which one can judge whether or not some action will lead to greater or lesser happiness is whether or not it promotes one's life. But, as Rand writes,

"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem."

The morality of Objectivism is based on the observation that one's own choices and actions are instrumental in maintaining and enhancing one's life, and therefore one's happiness. Rand wrote:

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

There is a difference, therefore, between rational self-interest as pursuit of one's own life and happiness in reality, and what Ayn Rand called "selfishness without a self" - a range-of-the-moment pseudo-"selfish" whim-worship or "hedonism."

A whim-worshipper or "hedonist," according to Rand, is not motivated by a desire to live his own human life, but by a wish to live on a sub-human level.

Instead of using "that which promotes my (human) life" as his standard of value, he mistakes "that which I (mindlessly happen to) value" for a standard of value, in contradiction of the fact that, existentially, he is a human and therefore rational organism.

The "I value" in whim-worship or hedonism can be replaced with "we value," "he values," "they value," or "God values," and still it would remain dissociated from reality.

Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshipping "selfishness-without-a-self."

She held that the former is good, and the latter evil, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.

A corollary to Rand's endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism — which she defined in the sense of August Comte's altruism (he coined the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others ...

Objectivism

Gordon Brown's Dichotomy

To compare the theory of neoliberal government as creator of Ayn Rand's "rational selfishness" with New Labour's top-down centralisation perhaps illustrates the failure of the Blair-Brown administrations to think-through the relationship between their acceptance of neoliberal economics, and their day-to-day mode of governance.

For example, Brown told the Scottish CBI:

The government would not let down hard-working families on modest and middle income families: "We will ensure that no one who is prepared to work hard and adapt to change will lose out as a result of global forces."   [Gdn]

Continuing the pretence of administering a social democracy via, for example tax credits, illustrates the dichotomy.

A 'heroic' neoliberal society would have no place for tax credits, no place for policies that continued people's reliance on the state, and intriguingly, no place for the current hedonism.    [SJ]

Just as for the Marxist, the perfect society was to be one without "the bourgoisie" - Pinochet's "proprietors" - so the perfect neoliberal state will need to be without "whim-worshippers", those who show "selfishness without a self".

(Quite how growth-addicted corporations will cope without "whim-worshippers" we are not told.)

Humanity, however, resists being categorized in these simplistic ways, and we return to the same question: in a society of "winners" what happens to the "losers": the people who don't make it to become "autonomous individuals"?

The answers offered by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union do not inspire confidence in utopian solutions.

At What Price Individualism?

Autonomous Individualism

Autonomous Individuality v. Rugged Individualism

Ayn Rand

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

David J. Rothkopf

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Governmentality

John Forbes Nash, Jr

Methodological individualism

Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

Objectivist ethics

Political Neoliberals

The Idea of Society

"The Lonely Robot"