One evening recently, my husband and I got together with some neighbors for drinks and snacks. It was a small group of just eight of us. We were sitting on our neighbors' porch and the conversations ended up being two groups of four each. One of the people in the group I was talking with works for local government and occasionally, he will bring up issues that he sees important on the local level. That evening, he was talking about something that has been bothering him for a long time in this small community. He defined it as a lack of empathy and he said he would like to see a community wide effort to develop more empathy.

This subject seemed somewhat curious to me because our town is known throughout the area as a town of volunteers. We have a large population of retirees who invest a lot of hours volunteering for schools and other various organizations in the area. So to say our community needed to develop empathy was a little puzzling to me. But as he talked further, I realized what he was saying. One example he gave was this. We have a very small percentage of minorities here in this community and while things seem fine on the surface, to the majority white population, our people of color are mostly invisible. And that was his point about empathy.

I am using this anecdote as an analogy of how the ideology of neo-liberalism has diminished our capacity as a society for empathy. First, let's begin with a definition of empathy. I have chosen to use the definition from Psychology Today. The bolding is mine.

Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. Empathy is known to increase prosocial (helping) behaviors. While American culture might be socializing people into becoming more individualistic rather than empathic, research has uncovered the existence of "mirror neurons," which react to emotions expressed by others and then reproduce them.

So how does empathy relate to neo-liberalism? The foundational belief behind the neo-liberal ideology is the idea of meritocracy. I wrote about the myth of meritocracy a couple of weeks ago. The clever marketing of meritocracy to a naive populace has led to wide acceptance of the idea of meritocracy among the general population of the United States. However, in practice, meritocracy does just the opposite of what it is purported to do. Therefore, understanding meritocracy goes a long way to understanding just why neo-liberalism is such a toxic ideology.

Meritocracy, in contemporary parlance, refers to the idea that whatever our social position at birth, society ought to facilitate the means for ‘talent’ to ‘rise to the top’. This article argues that the ideology of ‘meritocracy’ has become a key means through which plutocracy is endorsed by stealth within contemporary neoliberal culture.

In layman's terms, those who went to the right schools and have succeeded in rising to the top of the intellectual and social ladder are the ones who deserve all the financial rewards in life. It is a bootstraps philosophy on the surface, but it ignores all the structural reasons why not every one has an equal opportunity to go to the right schools and make the right contacts to hit the economic and power jackpot.

Back in the first essay in this series, I wrote of my experience in local government in which we were given training in a "new paradigm" of working based upon competition. The net effect of that new paradigm, which included the way we were evaluated and how pay raises were given, effectively destroyed the cooperative atmosphere of the workplace and led to a significant decrease in morale. When looking at the definition of empathy above, what the new paradigm did was, in effect, removed much of the empathy out of the workplace. For older workers, it was difficult to let go of the empathy aspect, but for younger workers, they embraced it whole heartedly.

Empathy has no place in the neo-liberal ideology. In fact, much of the neo-liberal ideology is parallel to that of objectivism, an ideology developed by Ayn Rand.

Of course, there are people in human society who do not believe that taxes are "the price of civilisation", and do not believe that government should provide collective services. From a psychological point of view, these people appear to have a severe lack of empathy.

These people are generally today called "economic liberals", "neoliberals", or "conservatives". Modern-day Neoliberalism has its roots in the thinking of Ayn Rand, who developed a philosophy called "Objectivism". The key value in this philosophy can be summarised as "the virtue of selfishness" (also the name of one of Rand's most famous books). Conventional morality (in effect, what we understand as "empathy"), is turned on its head...

In a June 2015 interview published in Salon, professor Wendy Brown of the University of California at Berkley had the following to say about the relationship between neo-liberalism and a democratic society.

Even more than the extreme inequalities and empowerment of capital that neoliberalism brings about, it’s the casting of every sphere of existence and every phenomenon as a market — and human beings as nothing other than market actors — that undoes democracy.

When human beings are wholly reduced to market actors, the very idea of a self-ruling people vanishes. On the one hand, the demos is literally dis-integrated into bits of human capital, each preoccupied with enhancing its individual value and competitive positioning.

Brown further explains the impacts of neo-liberalism upon society in which every person is monetized. As a result, we have gutted the arts from our education system and created a public school system that is based upon testing, competition and rankings of schools against one another. And the stakes are very high. Each student is seen as an interchangeable faceless part in the system which is designed to produce more and more wealth while ignoring the real needs of each of these human beings who are treated simply as cogs, and seen without humanity or empathy.

One sees it very clearly, for example, in education today, where instead of thinking about educating citizens for the value of democracy or civilization or simply being educated people, everyone thinks now of education — and especially higher education — as simply an investment in one’s own individual future as a bit of capital that wants to enhance its value, become worth more, and become capable of earning a higher income.

And so the neo-liberal system strips the humanity from those who are not part of the meritocracy. Thus the neo-liberal meritocracy protects itself from any guilt over how it treats those who are not part of their small and exclusive club by rationalizing their ideology to themselves.

As these people see it, the financial crisis was not the result of a broken and utterly corrupt "neo-liberal" financial system, but the fault of government spending too much on society. Again, this is turning a conventional understanding of recent history on its head, blaming the lower half of society for the ills of society overall. Like sociopaths, these people find a moral justification for declaring economic war on the bottom half of society. Poverty is the enemy; therefore, poor people must be treated worse in order to encourage them out of poverty. It a "sociopath government" way of applying the principle of "tough love".

Henry Giroux wrote a tour de force article that was published by Counterpunch in October 2015. Its title is The Culture of Cruelty: the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism. I am only going to quote a very short snippet from this article, but I urge you read it in its entirity. Giroux spares no words in his chilling descriptions of the neo-liberal state and its deliberate cruelty to the underclasses in particular.

The mantras of deregulation, privatization, commodification, and the unimpeded flow of capital now drive politics and concentrate power in the hands of the 1 percent. Class warfare has merged with neo-conservative polices to engage in permanent warfare both abroad and at home. There are no safe spaces free from the rich hoarders of capital and the tentacles of the surveillance and punishing state. The basic imperatives of casino capitalism-extending from eliminating corporate taxes and shifting wealth from the public to the private sector to dismantling corporate regulations and insisting that markets should govern all of social life have become the new common sense. Any viable notion of the social, solidarity, and shared democratic values are now viewed as a pathology, replaced by a survival of the fittest ethic, the celebration of self-interest, and a notion of the good life entirely tied to a vapid consumerist ethic.

There is a certain arrogance of the meritocracy toward the rest of the citizenry who struggle while they reap the rewards of the system they designed to benefit only those like themselves. If you did not go to the right schools and live a "righteous" life based upon climbing to the topmost rungs of the elite ladder, then you must suffer for your lack of achieving the same status as those in the meritocracy. There is no empathy for those caught in the collateral damage of neo-liberalism's voracious appetite for creation of wealth for the already wealthy. In fact, neo-liberalism seeks to punish the poor, the under classes, the elderly, the youth, and anyone else that they deem to be undeserving.