The current mess is the social and economic outcome of 40 years of widespread #neoliberal policy and ideology. This did not appear from nowhere. It was built deliberately through institutions, media, economics, and politics over generations.
Thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman developed and promoted the core ideas: society should be organized primarily through markets, competition, privatization, and individual self-interest. The role of the state was to enforce market logic, not protect social commons.
Politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan implemented these policies at scale during the 1980s, fundamentally reshaping government, labour relations, education, housing, media, and public life.
The goal was clear enough: restore elitist wealth and power after the post-war era of stronger unions, public infrastructure, welfare states, and redistributive social democracy had partially limited the dominance of capital.
Business interests, financial institutions, think tanks, academic economics departments, and much of the media ecosystem all played roles in normalizing and spreading this worldview. Over time, neoliberalism stopped appearing ideological and instead became framed as simple “common sense.” That is its real power.
The crises of the 1970s – oil shocks, stagflation, industrial conflict, and declining profitability – created the opening for #neoliberalism to present itself as the only serious alternative. Once embedded, the ideology spread far beyond conservative parties. Traditionally left-wing parties, including Labour Party in the UK, gradually absorbed the same assumptions about markets, privatization, growth, managerialism, and competition.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, meaningful opposition inside mainstream politics had largely collapsed. Different parties still argued culturally and rhetorically, but underneath they increasingly shared the same economic operating system.
This is why the current crisis feels so total. It is not simply a matter of “bad politicians” or individual corruption. The problem is structural. Over 40 years, neoliberalism fundamentally altered how people, institutions, and governments understand themselves and their role in society.
Citizens became consumers, communities became markets, public goods became investment opportunities, education became job training, journalism became content production, politics became branding and human beings became “human capital.” Even resistance movements were reshaped by this logic.
The result is the rise of what can be called #stupidindividualism – the idea that every social problem should be solved through personal lifestyle choices, branding, competition, and individual moral performance rather than collective action and shared responsibility. This thinking now feels like “common sense” precisely because neoliberalism successfully embedded itself into everyday life. People who believe they oppose the system often still reproduce its assumptions:
- careerism over solidarity,
- competition over cooperation,
- visibility over substance,
- branding over organizing,
- management over trust,
- and market logic over commons.
This is why so many well-meaning projects end up reproducing the same failures. The ideology operates socially and culturally, not only economically.
Importantly, this was not primarily a conspiracy. It was a historical convergence of self-interest, institutional incentives, economic crisis, and #mainstreaming cultural momentum. A lot of people genuinely believed these policies would create freedom and prosperity. Others simply adapted because the system rewarded conformity and punished alternatives.
The result, however, is the mess we now live inside, collapsing public infrastructure, housing crises, ecological breakdown, permanent precarity, weakened communities, platform monopolies, endless culture wars, rising authoritarianism, and widespread social fragmentation.
In the current era of #climatechaos, this increasingly looks like a #deathcult path. We continue pushing endless growth, extraction, privatization, and consumption despite overwhelming evidence that the system is undermining the conditions needed for human and ecological survival.
And because neoliberal logic has become embedded as “reality,” many people struggle to even imagine alternatives. This is one of its deepest victories. That is why rebuilding commons culture matters so much.
Projects rooted in mutual aid, the #4opens, cooperative process, federated governance, gift economies, and grassroots organizing are not side issues. They are practical attempts to recover social relationships and collective capacities that neoliberalism systematically eroded.
The challenge now is not only resisting the current system, it is relearning how to build outside its assumptions.
I've been thinking more of this lately.
Isn't part of the problem actually that society thinks virtually every problem is to be solved by the state?
In 1900, the state made up about 10% of GDP. There was no income tax in most places at all. Today, the state makes up about 50% of GDP, and blue collar workers might spend 50% of the last dollar they make in income taxes.
We've replaced the role of family, church, and community with the state. Instead of having duties to one another, we have entitlements granted by the global megastate. When there's a problem to be solved, often the claim is that it's the state that must fix it.
It is a sort of stupid individualism, because it isn't individualism. We replace everything with a totalitarian state that takes over everything and tries to control everything, and culturally we start to think that it's normal and desirable for the state to control more of our lives and to provide for more of our wellbeing.
No wonder society is breaking down and both men and women are in a perpetual state of peter pan syndrome, they never have to grow up because there's a tyrannical father figure who tells us it will take care of us and if we try to take care of ourselves we're doing something against nature.
The criticism of neoliberalism is in fact criticism of that totalitarian state taking from everyone to "take care" of us and once the work is done, handing the fruits of that sacrifice to a privileged few. To many people it's self-evident that such behavior is evil, but that's also the power and danger of a totalizing state presence overriding individuals, communities, and forces such as organized religion. The tyrannical father giveth, and also taketh away at his discretion alone.
Father Government says "Worry not, my child, you shall all pitch in some money, and I will use my mighty power to force a few people to give up their lands, and we will build a power plant for everyone. Ok, it's built. Now I shall be giving it to my campaign donors for a pittance because it's really absurd that everyone should pitch in money for something and that I should use my mighty power to force anyone to give up their lands so we should really prevent that." and because unlike individuals Father Government is immortal, he can do so over time spans that hide his hypocrisy.
In this way, the problem with both individuality and neoliberalism isn't the ideas themselves, but their disingenuous use as part of an effective cycle of kleptocracy. Take much from the common man while saying "we need to work together" when it's time to build common goods, then once those goods are built wait for people to forget that those are the people's common goods, and then "we need to stop having control over everything in your lives!" so those common goods can be sold at a loss.
In that way, the individual ideas of state power vs. autonomy are actually irrelevant, because both are just tools of a totalitarian regime. The same way Mao implemented freedom of speech after a long period of controlled speech, but with the intention of loosening the lips of dissenters so he could have them killed.
A result of this is that the current path isn't sustainable. Federal debt, provincial or state debt, municipal debt, and personal debt are all at levels and rising at levels virtually guaranteed to lead to a collapse or revolution that totally changes the paradigm, and I think it'll happen during my lifetime.
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Yep, it’s an issue of how we think of the state – control or “common wealth” – we are so fixated on control that we can’t see any other path. This is why I am doing all the posts to build a base for thinking outside this mess, It’s why our #openweb reboot matters as it’s a path that is “native” to outside the current mess, though people bring the mess into this path, let’s try not to get swamped https://hamishcampbell.com/what-works/
@info
>The “mess” we are in is not the result of a conspiracy
oh yes it is. a multitude of conspiracies and corruption and the neoliberal ideology where ends justify the means supports that.
now stop with the deboonking conspiracies trope. the conspiracies have been laid bare.
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This is why I am doing all the posts on http://hamishcampbell.com to make everything in plain site #4opens if you look you see 🙂