Aaaaand I was 100% WRONG About China

[pbrower2a]

(08-28-2022, 02:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Please watch again, and get it:





Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/a...ge-monbiot

Neoliberalism is of course a definition of human nature and aspirations in the "market". It perfectly fits a 3T after the collapse of the Idealist 'voyage to the interior'. Generation X (at least the first wave unless committed to some extant agenda such as the interests of one's ethnic or religious group) accepted that if there was no other purpose in life, then there would be wages and consumerism. Reactive/Nomad types are more likely to gamble, and neoliberalism is a gamble,  and most lost with lower wages, higher rents, and lesser public services). 

Unlike casino gambling (which has grown during the 3T) in which gains and losses are strictly individual, the collective gamble that many countries made on behalf on behalf of neoliberalism has been a net loss. We work longer and harder for less but pay more while economic elites get richer and more powerful. It's hard to feel sympathy for people who went to the casino and blew their car payment or at lest the funds for their auto insurance and have nothing to show for it other than unpaid bills. 

We are in a 4T, and so far we have done badly something that Americans have done well in a 4T, which is to divest themselves of bad habits from the 3T. In the last completed 4T Americans had to give up much to ensure that they would not have the victorious Axis taking much more. So we drove less; people car-pooled in commutes to do war work; we had rationing that gutted any possibility of conspicuous consumption. After all, some people were sacrificing far more as Americans, and most of us got a clear indication that Britain, China, and the Soviet Union were enduring far greater hardships -- before one even contemplated what was happening under Axis occupation. Maybe the perception of danger does far more to change attitudes than does 'mere' ugliness. We are obliged to sacrifice on behalf of landlords, plutocrats, executives, and giant farms instead of on behalf of our soldiers. Sacrificing greatly on behalf of economic elites responsible to nobody is easier, and at least those elites offer some mind-numbing, soulless entertainment. 

I'll say this of the crappy entertainment: it bores the Hell out of me. 

As Monbiot says, neoliberalism is a solution only for extracting large, quick profits for a few. It cannot save the world from itself. We need at the least Zero Population Growth if we are to avoid the calamities of Malthus' "population checks" of war, plagues, and famines. We need to find purpose in life other than conspicuous consumption, and for us to recognize conspicuous consumption as the trap that it is we must reject the mass atomization inherent in neoliberal ideology and practice.