Week 18: The Shortcomings of Neo-liberalism - Part 3 (Visualizing the missing pillars)

Neoliberalism is larger than neoliberal economics. It permeates every fabric of social life. Economics is just but one of the applications that spectacularly reveal the shortcomings of this ideology.

It is in neoliberal thinking that New public management is applied to public service - where the government cuts down on the portfolio of common good (e.g. draws out of affordable housing,water, education and healthcare) and instead sets out incentives for private production of common good. It is in neoliberal thinking that "My dress my choice" thrives - advocating for individual expression, even nudity above social decency.

There are, of course, good outcomes of neo-liberalism that we hold dear. Neo-liberal ideology canonizes individuality. Individual responsibility is upheld in the social system governed by rules and laws. Therefore perpetrators of genocide and other atrocities have been held personally liable and cannot hide behind the systems and conditions in society that postured them. It is in a neoliberal prism that the hegemony of limited achievement for women can be challenged, because the individual is free to shatter all socially constructed ceilings.

Neo-liberalism also rewards the individual. It therefore incentivizes innovation. The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Nikhil Kamath and Aliko Dangote may not have been in another regime. They were incentivized to keep at the "What if" question and create solutions because they could reap a reward in the liberal market.

At an everyday level in Africa, it is sobering to think of this in the "black tax" context - where the 'communal mindset' of the big happy African family feel entitled to the salary of the one child who made it out of the village. A friend once told me of how South Sudanese professionals in Juba are one stressed lot during pay day - scores of pilgrimage relatives make their way to Juba for the week of payday to seek their "black tax". Truth is this story replicates itself across many disenfranchised societies with weak social security nets such that the successful black man is pretty much the village social insurance. At that nascent level even the "successful man" wants to borrow from neo - liberalism and demand individual effort and individual responsibility (taking a break from this communal entitlements).

The structural weakness in Neoliberalism (in my perception in the African Global South context) comes in two missing pillars:Human dignity and Social context.

The Anthropocentrism conceptualization of man as being the center of the universe - the supreme element in dominion over everything else in nature at his disposal for his benefit is unnatural. For proof, natural world has always eliminated any element that endangered the balance. Neoliberalism is Anthropocentrism applied in the social world. An individual is at the center of the social world - in essence the individual can dominate all other social elements for his benefit. It is therefore justifiable that the individual gained benefit at the expense of social order, at the expense of common good, at the expense of the "lesser other", at the expense of human dignity profiting out of human suffering..... and it all goes downhill even to the profiting from taking away life. It is in its very essence unbalanced inevitably leading Karl Polanyi's 1944 damning prediction:

Then, the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence, and authoritarianism. 

This could help situate the reality, not just in the global south but increasingly in the global north as well.

A second missing pillar that weakens the whole neoliberal structure is social context. Neoliberalism conceptualizes the free man devoid of influences in his social environment. While this could hold true in the natural world (where water is always composed of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom no matter the geographical location), the same does not hold true for man and society.

The human person is beyond physical matter and individual unbiased consciousness. The social world is teeming with influences and interests. The social world is context specific. The neoliberal notion that what works for the free man anywhere can work everywhere is an oxymoron. In Neoliberal thinking the value of a cow for a young masai for whom alot of meaning of social order is embedded is the same as that of a British teenage Londoner who may likely color the cow purple with human teeth. Its laughable when we contextualize what this liberal man is when applied to the social world that includes the economic world. The whole orientation where a solution created in one place can be applied wholesome in another is deficient of reality.

Visually when you take away the two pillars the whole structure inevitably, comes crushing down.