George Monbiot had a great article on neoliberalism posted at the Alternet recently. Upon reading it, I realized just how deeply this ideology has penetrated not only our economic and political systems, but also has stripped us of much of our humanity. What instantly came to mind when I read Monbiot's article was some training that we went through back in the 1990's when I worked for the City of Tallahassee. In fact, the way this training was introduced was completely different from any other training we had ever done in my 31 years with the City.

The training was to introduce us to a new paradigm of how we were to operate in the future. Every employee was given a small book to read in advance of the training. Then other employees were selected within each department to do the training. I was one of those trainers. Back in those days, my political interests and knowledge was basically limited to local issues since I was a local government employee. What I did not realize at the time was that when every employee in city government was indoctrinated into this new paradigm just how greatly it would affect us individually and as a whole.

I long since had thrown away the book so I do not have it to reference and everything I writing about that experience is from my personal recollection. The training manual included exercises that we were supposed to lead our groups through in order to get the employees to rethink how they would be operating going forward. What I distinctly remember is that the emphasis upon the training was that we were entering a new era in which everything would be competitive. Obviously one aspect was that now government would be in competition with outside private enterprises. But another very disturbing aspect of this training was that even those of us within the government would be competing with each other. At the time, I thought that was a complete crock. Little did I know just how wrong I was. This is the insidiousness of neoliberalism and how it has crept into our lives.

This brings me back to Monbiot's article that I read in the AlterNet. It is very appropriately titled Neoliberalism – The 'Zombie Doctrine' at the Root of All Our Problems. Back in the 1990's, I had never heard of neoliberalism, And now, even though I read of it often, I really have not been particularly sure of its definition until recently. I always saw it simply as an economic system, but is it much more. Monbiot captures the essence of neoliberalism very well in this short paragraph of his article.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

When I read Monbiot's recent article, the purpose of the training we did at the city back in the 1990's became very clear. No longer were we employees going to be seen as valued assets, but instead we were now simply cogs in the competitive system that bleeds people dry of caring for one another and helping each other, even on the job.

I remember one supervisor telling us that competition with one another will make us a better and more productive department. What I saw was just the opposite. And analogous to that is how deeply the neoliberal ideology has failed us as a nation, a society, and the world.

In an article published by the Guardian in 2014 and titled Neoliberalism Has Brought Out the Worst in Us, author Paul Verhaeghe, a Dutch psychoanalyst and University of Ghent academic, states that neoliberalism is an economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits and as a result, has changed our ethics and our personalities

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal.

Meritocracy? Where have I heard that word before? Meritocracy is the great myth behind the American Dream

Americans are, compared with populations of other countries, particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meritocracy, a system that rewards merit (ability + effort) with success. Americans are more likely to believe that people are rewarded for their intelligence and skills and are less likely to believe that family wealth plays a key role in getting ahead

As we have seen in the recent decades, neoliberalism is destroying our sense of shared responsibility and ethics. It has handsomely rewarded those who are willing to succeed at all costs while leaving many destroyed lives in its wake. The ideology behind neoliberalism has lead to the privatization of public facilities and the shredding of our social safety nets while funneling the majority of economic gains to the few at the top.

Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Neoliberalism has been promoted as a way for people to have more freedom. But as George Monbiot notes, the result is not so much personal freedom, but corporate freedom.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Milton Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

After reading Paul Verhaeghe's book, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society, George Monbiot wrote in 2014 the following:

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.

The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear.

So what happened after the city adopted its new paradigm of competition? First, every employee was evaluated on a points basis and those with the highest scores received the limited pay raises available. This led to an atmosphere of non-cooperation, especially across divisions within our own department. Many employees, particularly the younger ones, refused to cooperate with other employees, even within their own divisions. I often felt as though I was now working with a bunch of strangers, each of us vying for the few crumbs that would be thrown our way if we succeeded by climbing over each other.

Sure, it is a dog eat dog world out there, but it does not have to be. In a way, we have not let go of the bootstraps myth and it is time to do so. I see this as one of the promises of the Sanders revolution. There is so much more to explore on this subject and I intend to be writing more essays in that regard in the future.

As always, this is an Open Thread so feel free to post whatever is on your mind today.