Crisis? What crisis? Another brick in the wall

Not everything that counts can be counted

– Billy Bragg

The venomous tentacles of neoliberalism have ensnared almost every industrial and commercial sector. Its brutal and adversarial boom, bust and quit framework creates unaccountable political and economic turmoil with many incalculable social and ecological or environmental consequences.

Once a particular scheme or project turns pear-shaped or reaches the end of its life cycle, all that remains are the exsanguinated brittle bones of the carcass. There is plenty of substantive evidence around the globe involving financial scandals, industrial diseases and fatalities and deplorable responses to natural disasters to corroborate this egregious strategy. The predatory 3D (dig, dump and depart) tactics are most notable throughout the resources and extractive industries sector. Several high profile examples include WR Grace at its asbestos contaminated vermiculite mining project near the Montana township of Libby in the United States.

This inconsiderate and thoughtless modus operandi was replicated by CSR at its now defunct Wittenoom asbestos mine in Western Australia and at the abandoned Rio Tinto Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. There are countless more shameful episodes elsewhere around the globe. Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring, which was initially published in 1962, provides a litany of ecological devastation following widespread and indiscriminate use of toxic agricultural chemicals over many decades.

Creative Destruction

Additional disturbing features of neoliberalism include its inordinate emphasis on Ayn Rand objectivism, individualism, creative destruction and social atomisation, which is a traditional divide and conquer strategy. Neoliberalism implies that we are creatures of our own destiny and the state bears no responsibility for those in economic distress.

Every skerrick of social cohesion is under attack. This even includes the family unit, which is the strongest social bond in any community. Real estate agents thrive on the conflict, especially when partners divorce or split and disintegrated family members desperately require somewhere to live. Demand soon outstrips supply and the ugly side of capitalism prevails. It distorts the property market, inflates rents on leased properties and sends house prices soaring through the roof.

In most neighbourhoods it was traditional to know nearly every family and their siblings in the immediate vicinity by their given or Christian names. Nowadays many residents are just passing strangers and never acknowledge or even communicate with their next door neighbours. We are divided by intimidating walls and fences and require bridges not gated communities.

Individual consumers can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes but through a determined process of collective coherence our potential is unlimited yet this brutal doctrine inveigles us to walk alone. It advocates the pinnacle of human achievement is the accumulation of extraordinary wealth with trophy homes, luxury yachts and Gulfstream jets aggravated by a cringeworthy adulation of celebrity status.

Escalating Inequality

This has generated escalating inequality, which is underpinned by a fomenting culture of solipsism and narcissism. Vanity, pride and egocentricity are evident across our shopping malls and high streets through ubiquitous body adornment, which includes repulsive tattoos and conspicuous piercing. Macho tattoos were traditionally the preserve of society’s chthonic class or merchant seafarers. Now omnipresent tramp stamps such as slatternly butterflies or dolphins tittivate the bodies of many pubescent and even elderly females.

The ostentatious ink is typically supplemented with iridescent hairdos and tacky jewellery protruding from almost every conceivable orifice. Body art has even become a prerequisite for joining our police force. This establishment has since degenerated into a disparate uncouth rabble reminiscent of Papa Doc’s Tonton Macoutes in that democratic republic of Haiti and is no longer a reliable and trustworthy community service.

Several seasoned jailbirds prefer the inferior and self-administered Always Carry A Bible (ACAB) acronym. Each letter is crudely etched in Indian ink above the knuckles on either or both hands. Maybe it provides evidence of redemption ahead of the next indictment before a judge and jury accompanied by their compulsory emotional support animal, which is usually a Staffordshire pit bull terrier or Rottweiler.

Life at the Bottom

Similar topics are discussed by Theodore Dalrymple, a prolific columnist with The Spectator and author of the highly acclaimed Life at the bottom – A worldview of the underclass. It is a collection of essays and vignettes relating to his experiences as a physician at Birmingham’s Winson Green prison in the United Kingdom. Some critics believe the author merely enjoys wallowing in the abject misery of the underclass and belittling the canaille.

This escalating braggart culture is also reflected by an increasing prevalence of quirky or personalised registration plates on motor vehicles, which are easily acquired from state roads and traffic authorities. Preliminary behavioural studies indicate a relationship between vanity plates and road rage, territorial dominance and other forms of aggressive driving although correlation does not imply causation.

The intensification of neoliberal ideology has created many additional adverse social consequences. This includes epidemics of mental health, widespread vagrancy, gambling, obesity, loneliness, anomie and escalating deaths of despair, especially amongst the working and middle classes throughout most developed nations. Meanwhile we continue scratching our heads in bewilderment when another In Cold Blood gun crime in the United States involving multiple horrific homicides creates ghoulish headlines across the Breitbart News network.

Casualisation of Labour

An uberisation or casualisation of labour through the gig economy has destroyed many working lives. Job security is replaced by precarious employment with fluctuating incomes without any vocational or career development. This extirpates communities of practice, incidental learning and most importantly tacit knowledge and we no longer have a professional calling, it is a life of working at the carwash supplemented by other operose and mundane McJobs.

Despite an alabaster exterior of perfection, neoliberalism is nothing more than a gigantic festering Ponzi scheme underpinned by a crude Darwinian survival of the fittest ethos. It is a hydraulic pump that drives the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Indeed, the impoverished become a goldmine because many of the underprivileged masses with meagre disposable incomes will always spend far more than a handful of obese aristocrats sitting on a fortune. Affluence has much less to do with growth than with the distribution of power and when neoliberalism dominates only the rich flourish. If democracy prevails the prosperity of entire communities or nations is enhanced.

The underclass has no need for the megarich to control their lives but multinational corporations with aristocratic billionaires at the helm sure as hell require an untapped resource of deprived consumers. Moreover, a rubbish dump can grow without developing but an individual can develop without growing.

Rationalism

Neoliberalism demonstrates an extraordinary preoccupation with scientism, positivism, and rational decision making with a dogmatic focus on binary cause-effect ideology. More recently, this has been exacerbated by nudge theory and artificial intelligence, which has generated a relentless and unhealthy pursuit of perfection. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. The scientism or positivism is underpinned by a science, technology, engineering and maths (stem) worldview. Its rather narrow, naïve and dehumanising perspective treats people as objects and all in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.

Scientism has an established tradition of manipulating evidence, data and analysis to create and maintain an auspicious environment for industry at material and ideological levels. Dr Ben Goldacre has repeatedly exposed bad science throughout many pharmacological trials and more recently, the Monsanto papers revealed extensive duplicity during the controversial glyphosate approval process.

The anachronistic concept of behaviourism often accompanies scientism although it is no better than phrenology and just another brand of snake oil that lubricates the carousel of culpability. One of its pioneers was BF Skinner, who performed most of his experiments on rodents and pigeons but extrapolated the fragile findings to encompass human behaviour. The tenuous theory is underpinned by operant conditioning using the pleasure or pain principle of positive or negative reinforcement. This delusional anthropology with its feeble stimulus and response relationship treats humans as extensions of machines using a materialist assumption, which ensures behavioural change is only ephemeral.

Many critics claim the focus on behaviourism is an extremely capricious trajectory and if your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. This harvests an accumulation of antagonistic outcomes such as blame and fear, which destroys trust. It tells us far more about observers than the subjects under surveillance. Is it better for individuals to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon them?

This stem and behaviourist worldview has created a binary, shallow and ineffective hard and soft systems management framework using a command and control structure. It merely offers some psychological comfort rather than dealing with the reality of a complex adaptive organic process with emergent properties. It has been aggravated by rapid advances in communications technology, especially smartphones, personal computer tablets and artificial intelligence. The technology does not alter what we think but twists the hermeneutics and distorts how we interpret communication. Indeed, the medium is the message.

Major decisions or choices throughout our fleeting existence are typically impulsive and include getting married, having children, purchasing a house or buying car and frequently occur without rhyme or reason. Getting married and having children can hardly be categorised as rational and Montaigne once proclaimed that most successful marriages are between a deaf husband with a blind spouse.

A Reductionist World View

The black box psychology of a digital computer with its binary inputs, process and outputs mechanism hardly replicates human decision making or choice. Living is far more gratifying and complex than a sterile accounts ledger with a featureless record of credit and debit transactions. Moreover, human beings are not inanimate objects or robots and decisions involve satisficing with a sinuous or non-linear trajectory. It cannot possibly be duplicated or rationally explained using perfunctory computerised event or fault tree logic diagrams littered with binary and/or gates.

This reductive Cartesian worldview with its mechanistic linear cause and effect analysis is a vast oversimplification of decision making amidst a thorny entangled rhizome. Its deductive logic disregards inductive and abductive reasoning or additional critical concepts such as embodiment, personhood, interaffectivity, interconnectivity and intercorporeality. The human brain is a complex biological organ and does not issue commands. It merely hosts conversations and we should always challenge any coward’s explanation that hides behind binary cause and effect logic.

In 2008, the behavioural economics hypothesis of nudge theory emerged. Several Barack Obama shills promoted this tenuous concept to influence and improve decision making amongst groups and individuals. It tempered coercive interventions using choice architecture under a rubric of libertarian paternalism.  It has since been applied to artificial intelligence using algorithmic nudging although the programming is designed to benefit corporate and state interests at the expense of the powerless. The technology is abused by technique to deliver the objectives of neoliberalism, which expedites transfer of wealth from the underclass to the aristocracy.

Dehumanising AI

Artificial intelligence or machine learning places an inordinate emphasis on quantitative measurement. This aligns with the Harvard Business School sophism of what gets measured gets done but critical noble virtues such as love, trust, honesty, loyalty and grief cannot and should never be measured. Any attempts at measuring these righteous traits are fraught with complexity and turn the virtue into a vice, which eventually dehumanises people. Following tragedies with the loss of partners and other loved ones, the fairytale of closure frequently arises but with grief there is no one size fits all remedy. It is a personal journey without a destination. Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.

The deification of shareholder theory forces businesses to improve productivity and efficiency and places an uncompromising effort into a pursuit of perfection. It often involves using the business improvement technique of operational excellence with statistical tools such as Six Sigma.

This hyperanalysis eventually creates paralysis. Instead of tackling and improving performance the metric gets manipulated, which extinguishes movement, critical thinking, integrity and learning.

Transhumanism

Artificial intelligence or machine learning evolved from the mechanistic disciplines of engineering and computer science, which readily accept that learning is data transference and replication. This amalgamation of humans with machines or transhumanism has no reference to subjects and its inordinate emphasis on objects implies anything can learn. Machines have no social identity and cannot dream, create, meditate, fornicate or imagine and the attribution of learning to an object is absurd. The discourse of machine learning disguises an ideology of perfectionism. Its delusional misrepresentation about learning and faith in machines is merely technique and a denial of human fallibility.

The objective of transhumanism is to radically alter human nature by means of technological advancement. It endeavours to move society into the next stage of human development, where man achieves super intelligence and emotional wellbeing. Much like Hayek’s neoliberal ideology, there is plenty of substantial evidence to verify its spectacular failure.

The rapid expansion of science and technology in the new millennium has radically transformed our social landscape with a foreboding trajectory and corrosive impact on democracy. Society has become more abstract with virtual and fabricated images that are dissociated from reality. Technology is a patient and contiguous assassin that merely replicates its friendship towards humanity. The forces of mechanisation restrict our ability to make choices or process information. It ignores diverse learning styles and the unique human traits of empathy and free will that allows mistakes to be confronted with honesty.

This enables us to experience reality from different perspectives, which acknowledges fallibility and inspires each other to repent, recover and learn with dignity. Fallibility is the essence of humanity. Extensive research in neuroscience confirms the human brain does not replicate a computer, which uses a binary process for making decisions or choices. This rationalist perspective is incongruous with embodiment, personhood and a holistic attitude towards life, being and living.

Human decision making is best explained using heuristics, which is invariably an automatic, intuitive or unconscious choice that provides an approximate or near enough solution through satisficing or inductive logic. This typically occurs through a situational and embodied interaction of our three minds, which include the head, heart and gut. The brain is not a data centre and merely coordinates decision making.

Squaring the Circle

Artificial intelligence or machine learning attempts to square the circle and rationalise our 3.14159265 minds into one brain but it cannot possibly mimic the enormous complexities involved with human decision making. Indeed, objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends but the primary goal and longing to fulfil it must come from another source.

Human beings live in two worlds. This includes an external environment of objects, events and other people surrounding you and it prevails without or beyond your existence on the planet. The other world is a private domain containing personal thoughts, beliefs, perceptions and feelings, which only exists during your lifetime. This world came into being when you did and will cease when you kick the bucket. We only know the external environment from the world within us through our perceptions and sensemaking.