The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s…

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short thread. /1 https://t.co/cEm8JzTsdi

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how the pandemic is itself a creation of neoliberal/libertarian ideas. Every attempt to suppress Covid is met with the same libertarian ‘freedom’ beliefs and narratives, about the supposed impossibility of preventing spread, because that will…/2

…in turn suppress social activity. Which then suppresses ‘economic’ activity, though the neoliberals don’t see that the ‘Economy’ is really just society, and thus economic activity is just social activity. We’d also already been through years of this battle, with climate…/3

…change action consistently thwarted for ‘economic’ reasons, economies supposedly needing to ‘balance’ action against climate change with the need to keep businesses open. (That ‘balance’ strategy of course immediately re-appeared when Covid hit.) But it’s what funds these…/4

…beliefs that will come into the spotlight this year as well. Cheap money. Cheap money has been the ICU for neoliberal/libertarian (let’s call it “N=1 society” as a shorthand) ideas. As community and collective assets and institutions have been progressively destroyed by…/5

…the N=1 crowd, what’s taken their place is astronomical private debt. That’s where the investment has had to come from, facilitated by historically low interest rates. Society wasn’t ‘freed’ by this demolition of its collective institutions, the functions they perform were…/6

…just privatised. Meaning you and I started paying for all of the collective things out of our own pockets, but without any of the economies of scale the collective version provided. And as this debt binge unravels, we can see prices/inflation starting to rise, as any…/7

…collective control and regulation (any social economies of scale) evaporate, leaving us all nakedly exposed to an almost survivalist social ethic. All of this, because of one simple, core, idiotically wrong belief. That individuals and society are TWO things, at war. /8

That’s the nonsense the N=1 people believe. (And some only pretend to believe it, because it makes them rich - they don’t do much thinking of any kind.) You don’t have to balance the individual and society. That’s what society *already was*, that balance. Individuals, sick of…/9

…having no economies of scale, of having to do everything themselves, worked together to create collective institutions, like government, to make their *individual* lives easier. Even those opposed to the N=1 crowd often make the mistake of arguing this as a binary. /10

They argue we need to ‘balance’ individual freedoms and collective priorities. Falling straight into the N=1 framing trap. There is no balance, there are not TWO things here. Just one. Individuals, who use collective things to make the lives of *individuals* easier. /11

If you set up a football club, it’s because it’s a lot easier to organise football games, collectively. The club doesn’t inhibit your freedom. It creates your freedom, to play football. Until we get back to core beliefs, N=1 thinking will continue to destroy our societies. /end