Everyone hates Neoliberalism – But We’ll Still Miss It When It’s Gone

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

Neoliberalism is doomed because everyone hates it. They are mostly wrong about the reasons they think they have for hating it. But explaining what neoliberalism actually is - classical liberalism updated for the era of big centralised government - only presents new and clearer reasons to hate it. For liberalism itself has always been a minority view: most people have always viscerally rejected the idea that other people - the wrong people - deserve freedom and rights. Its influence came not from convincing the majority of its principles, but from offering the arena within which more powerful political doctrines and cabals could safely compete with blunted weapons for a reduced prize. Now the political tides have turned back against moderation, and liberalism’s gift of proceduralist constraints has itself become the target of our rage.

I. Neoliberalism is not what you think you hate about it

The term ‘neoliberalism’ was successfully expropriated by the left shortly after its coining and now functions in public, political, and academic discourse as an exonym: “a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it” (Moira Weigel, quoted out of context). The left’s success here has been so great that almost the only people talking about neoliberalism these days are those trying to explain why they hate it.

The Extinction of the Human Species Won't Matter

All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won't matter, and so it also shouldn't matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.

My basic point is the same as Epicurus' philosophical medicine against the fear of death:

Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.

The Post-Westphalian World: Reflections on Trump 2.0's Military Adventurism

The weak are meat, and the strong do eat

(Cloud Atlas)

The international rules based order sets normative expectations, deters transgressions, and manages conflicts. It does so via a host of treaties and institutions mostly introduced soon after WWII, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN and its many affiliated organisations and treaties (WTO, UNLCOS, ICJ, World Bank, NPT, etc) to private members' clubs like the G7, EU, OECD, and NATO. 

Like all institutional orders, it is maintained by and for the powerful actors in whose interests it was designed, especially the USA, the most powerful of all. This obvious fact is often willfully misinterpreted. 

First, an order instituted by the powerful to protect and advance their own interests need not come at the expense of the less powerful, when compared to a situation without any such order. To the contrary, by constraining all it is often of even more value to the weak - who have no other source of protection - than it is to the strong. Merely because an international order can be judged as lacking compared to some hypothetical ideal ('fairness') does not mean that any rational state would prefer a world without it. 

Eating The Rich Won’t Fix Climate Change

The world’s richest 1% have more purchasing power, and hence more command over what the economy produces than ordinary people. They can afford a more extravagant lifestyle - at the extreme including multiple yachts, mansions, and private jets. 

One may reasonably quibble with the way activists like Oxfam produce their numbers (e.g. in their enthusiasm to generate the most outrageously large numbers, they include the emissions of companies rich people hold shares in). But it is obviously true that the average 1 percenter has a far greater climate impact than the median person in a rich country, let alone the world. What a waste! What a crime against the planet! How can it be allowed to continue?

Oxfam, Guardian readers, an unfortunate number of my academic colleagues, and many others are confusing questions of fairness (whether huge economic inequality can be justified) with questions of harm (whether inequality speeds up climate change). Specifically, it can be true that

1. Per person, rich people do enormously more harm to the climate than ordinary people, and

2. It is unfair that the rich consume such a high share of the world’s economic output

Without it being true that

Redistributing rich people’s wealth would result in less harm to the climate

Deepfake porn is not going away. Recognising that is the first step to dealing with it

In a world in which anyone can create fake sexually explicit images of anyone else, we should not be surprised when it happens, and we should not get especially upset if it happens to us.

Incentivising War Crimes: The High Cost of International Humanitarianism

Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests.  For example, various countries - the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar - have been involving themselves in Sudan's ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages - especially access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.

Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks' 1820's war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people's wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.

The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated - and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering - the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians.

If Climate Change Is As Bad As Activists Say, Their Demand Should Be 'Geoengineering Now'!

Some climate activists claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, if not the entire biosphere. This is the justification for groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil to engage not only in demonstrations and civil disobedience to raise awareness of their concerns and persuade fellow citizens to demand government action, but also blocking and disruptive actions aimed at coercing governments and businesses to speed up the transition to net zero.

Blocking public transport systems, vandalising art, offices, SUVs, pipelines, and so on are attempts to impose direct and indirect costs on society that will continue and escalate until we comply with the activists’ demands. It is a Mafia-esque strategy of extortion by a small minority that is clearly directly opposed to liberal democratic principles and values - especially, the idea that decisions should be made in a way that respects the equal moral reality of other people (by counting up opinions) rather than by consulting your own feelings of righteousness. Moreover, its logic is clearly escalatory, since a rational government will only concede when the costs of compliance (several percentage points of GDP per year) are lower than the costs activists can impose.

Yet many people who do not themselves feel the call to join such coercive actions remain sympathetic to the reasoning of those who do. From a distance these activists may even be mistaken for heroes. The human mind’s innate attraction to story book reasoning (previously) makes us easily slip into assuming that those taking extraordinary actions to oppose an extraordinary challenge must be the good guys, the heroes of the story of climate change.

But that reasoning is flawed. It is not enough that the cause be worthy of heroic action. The action itself must be worthy of the cause.