In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.Īmong the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia.

Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising.

The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.Īttempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology.

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