I suppose the neo-liberal philosophy could best be summed up by their rallying cry: the freedom to choose to own slaves.
“But that doesn’t make sense. Freedom to choose is logically incompatible with slavery. And they never said that.”
Indeed. They would claim to be all for freedom, and against slavery. But if someone was profiting from owning slaves, they would fight tooth and nail to protect them, because any attempt at restricting the profits of slavery was seen as an intolerable corruption of the sacred free market. It was how they operated. Depending on what their rich patrons wanted at the time, sometimes they were all for free trade between the old nation states, and sometimes they demanded that the wealthy have the ‘freedom’ to restrict trade. It did not matter that what they said made no sense, or was logically incoherent, or at variance with reality. They never apologized, never explained, but only acted with total arrogance and self-confidence.
So it was like George Orwell’s ‘Doublethink’ in his novel “1984?”
Ah, I see that they still teach the classics in cybertank school. George Orwell was a great man: intelligent, skeptical, decent. But not even his imagination could encompass the full corruption of neoliberalism. In his novel Orwell imagined that when the elites wanted to change history, they would send armies of scribes into the libraries to re-write history overnight so that everything was consistent. The neoliberals were so much more efficient. They simply ignored the library records and proclaimed whatever nonsense was the word of the day with full authority. Do you know the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes?
At this point Grasshopper had developed an almost insurmountable lead in his race with Old Guy, but they still had a few dozen kilometers to go. “Yes, I know the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes.”
No you don’t. Once there was an Emperor whose advisors claimed to have sold him a suit of clothes so fine that they were invisible and untouchable.
“I know this story.”
Stop interrupting your elders. The Emperor paraded naked through the streets of his capital city and nobody was willing to tell him that, in fact, he had no clothes on.
“This is boring.”
No it’s not. A little girl remarked loudly and publicly “That man has no clothes on!” This made the Emperor very angry, and he executed the little girls’ entire family, and made her a slave who spent the rest of her short miserable life cleaning out latrines and regretting her folly before dying diseased and crippled and miserable. Others were encouraged by her example, and loudly proclaimed the wonder and beauty of the Emperor’s new clothes.
“That’s not how the story goes!”
You know the fairy tale. I know the real version. I was there. I saw it.
Gawne, Timothy J.. Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 2) (pp. 10-11). Ballacourage Books. Kindle Edition.