Transcription
[Music] Hear it then. Yeah. And and again, it sort of resonates with most of that, with what's happening now with sleeps as well. So it does all seem to check out. So it's it's it's essentially, you know, Thatcher and Reagan were the were the sort of the the big proponents of of this.
Yeah. So it had been road tested, I would argue first in Suharto's Indonesia in 1966. Um, and you know, it was massive; his coup against Sukarno was massively supported by the US, the UK, World Bank, the rest of it. Um, and he rolled out what I think we would now recognize as a neoliberal program, with, you know, having killed a million people in order to smooth the path for this transition.
And then in um 1973, in in in in Chile, Salvador Allende was thrown overthrown in a US-backed coup. Um, Augusto Pinochet was installed instead as as president, and again they could impose neoliberalism by force. Um, anyone who resisted was killed or tortured. Yeah. And then killed. And um, and Friedrich Hayek himself later went to Chile and said, "Yeah, this is great. I'd rather have this than your so-called um so-called liberal democracy, your democracy without liberalism," by which he meant it's economic liberalism, neoliberalism. Uh, I would rather have this than what we got at home, he basically said.
And so and so they'd sort of they tried out these um this this new ideology in those places, and in both cases it had caused absolute catastrophe, as you could imagine. So they thought, yeah, we'll have some of that, and so yeah, Thatcher was the the first leader of of what is now a G7 nation to um to to impose it in 1979. And we called it Thatcherism because by then they'd stopped calling themselves neoliberals.
So from 1938, when the idea was first mooded mooted at a symposium in Paris until the mid-1950s, they call themselves neoliberals. This is neoliberalism. This is our ideology. But then they deliberately dropped the name, and the reason they dropped the name is that they wanted to portray this, and again, you know, these are clever people. They thought very hard about what they were doing. They wanted to portray it not as an ideology at all. This is not a doctrine. This is not a human-made artifact. This is the natural order we are describing. It's as if we're talking about gravity or natural selection. This is just how society is. We're not we're not trying to change society. We're just trying to reveal society. Human beings are innately selfish and greedy, and that's a good thing, and we must mobilize this selfishness and greed.
So Thatcher comes along and everyone says, "Oh my god, what's what's she talking about?" Oh, let's call it Thatcherism. And Reagan comes along a year later and they say, "What's he all about? Oh, let's call it Reaganism." And no one ever could come up with a name for what this thing is. Oh, maybe we should call it monetarism. Maybe we should call it supply-side economics. Oh, maybe we should call it laissez-faire, you know. No, they already had a name for it: neoliberalism. It's a crap name. It's a rubbish name. It doesn't say what it is, but at least it was a name, and it's the only one they ever gave it.
Yeah. But it sort of operates on on people not being a not knowing it's there. I mean, this is this is well this is its great power. It's invisibility. You know, that that that's and you know, they they really work this out. They and they got it right. They they were super smart about this. You know, if you tell if you tell people you're coming, they're going to resist you. But if you seep into people's lives and you promote this idea, which incidentally is completely wrong, that we're innately selfish and greedy. We're just not. You know, we all have a bit of selfishness and greed in us. But these, in the great majority of cases, these are not our dominant values. And there's a huge body of work in in anthropology, in social science, in psychology, in neuroscience showing that our dominant values are things like um family, community, belonging, empathy, altruism. We want a better world for ourselves, but also for other people, right? And we have this selfishness and greed, but it's not dominant in 99% of the population. There is 1% of the population in whom selfishness and greed is dominant. And we call these people psychopaths.
Now, unfortunately, we vote them in. I mean, we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. It's this crazy situation, and we keep doing it to ourselves. We keep voting these people in. And so, what they're describing is the psychopaths who who their ideology then enabled to take power.
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of f I mean, you know, obviously it goes on from there as well, but it sort of is fascinating that they that it they successfully do control people that much, and that you know, as we if we fast forward to now and you see people, I mean, it's sort of spreading confusion as well amongst people, isn't it? And and and but people buy into that. I mean, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it control, no, um, because you know, it's it's cleverer and subtler than that; it becomes a hegemonic idea, and I think what we got to understand in politics is that it is that any dominant idea becomes a hegemonic idea.
So, for instance, uh, Richard Nixon, you know, who you would hardly associate with it in the 1960s, was alleged to have said, "We are all Keynesians now," and it's true that it didn't really matter whether a party was Democrat or Republican, Labor or Conservative; basically, they all followed Keynesian economic and to a large extent political and social prescriptions. It was the only thing people could see. This is the only way it could be. And I think it's fair to say, or it was until fascism started coming up again, that we are all neoliberals now. Um, and and and it it this this is another huge part of its power that um it operates at the psychological level, the social level, the cultural level, as all hegemonic ideas do, until you can't see anything else. This is the only option you can see; it shuts down the moral imagination. And political failure at heart is a failure of imagination. And if you're going to succeed in politics and your idea is to become hegemonic, you have to shut down that imagination. And so we had that saying, "There is no alternative," which is kind of weird for a doctrine which is supposed to be all about choice. But um and she said it so often that it got reduced to an acronym: TINA.
Um, I mean, the the the thing is in the in the modern world, I mean, there's all these competing ideas and all these complete you know, all these conspiracy theories that that that come up, and this sounds like a conspiracy theory as well. That's well, it is. I mean, I mean, you know, it is a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory. Um, a a a theory is is a hypothesis for which there is evidence, subject to disproof. Yeah. A conspiracy is when people get together out of out of public sight to hatch a plan. It is a conspiracy theory. What it is not is a conspiracy fiction. And one of the things which Peter and I constantly try and do in this book is to challenge the language on everything. Yeah. And we lazily call crazy unfounded ideas for which there is no evidence conspiracy theories. They're not theories. They are fictions. They're conspiracy fictions. And there's loads of them around. But we know that genuine conspiracies happen. We know about the PPE scandal. We know about the Post Office scandal. We know what T's Waters been up to. You know, you can go on and on. There's endless conspiracies going on. And until you can absolutely well, I mean, nothing is ever definitively proved forever, but you know, you can say this is a theory in the same way that a scientific theory is a theory. This is a theory as to how things have been organized and you know, with something like the Post Office scandal, you can say there's a great deal of evidence supporting this theory, and there isn't any significant counterveiling evidence. You can say the same about this.
Yeah. But you know, one of the fascinating aspects of this is that because it has worked its way so successfully into our subliminal consciousness, our subconscious, um, we we and we find it so hard to see because it's too big to see because it's all around us. Now, um, we look for other explanations, and and one of the um outcomes of neoliberalism has been a massive explosion of conspiracy fictions. Some of which, incidentally, have been spread deliberately by um neoliberal think tanks like Americans for Prosperity, which kicked off the Tea Party movement in the UK, said Obama wasn't born in the US, all this crazy stuff. I mean, a lot of this was deliberately seeded. This was a Koch-funded, you know, Charles and David Koch. They set up Americans for Prosperity. They then set up the Tea Party movement out of that, and that became a massive vehicle for conspiracy fictions.
Now, this is one of the many reasons why we are seeing this further mutation now um from neoliberalism back to fascism. One of them is that fascism thrives on conspiracy fictions. They they are the fuel of fascist movements. But the other more important one is that neoliberalism very successfully shuts down political choice and political engagement. Uh, Will Davies at uh professor at Goldsmiths here in London. He's got this lovely phrase. He said, "Neoliberalism is the disenchantment of politics by economics." Um, and and and which is which is the neatest definition, and and and that works so well because what it does is to say, you know, we should not resolve our problems through politics. We should resolve them through buying and selling, and that determines that sort of sifts people into the winners and the losers, which is how we should be because everybody should be categorized as winner or loser. But what it really means, economic choice is that those with economic power make the choices. Um, and you know, you get a $11 one-vote system, and we see where that leads right now.
And and so when you have disenchanted politics and when you have said to people, "There's no point in voting because a they all subscribe to the same ideology and b they're not going to change anything anyway because they've told you they they're not going to change anything," they told you they want to shrink the state. They've told you they want to reduce the scope of government. They told you they want to cut public spending. Austerity is an absolutely fundamental aim of of neoliber neoliberalism. Um, so they're not going to transform your life. They're not going to deliver the changes you want. I mean, it's profoundly ironic that the current government campaigned on a single word which was change, and we're still looking for it. Where is this change? Sorry. What fundamentally has changed? They've decided change by making it more more conservative than it was before. And so then people give up. They give up on politics, right? Or they give up on conventional politics. And then in come the killer clowns.
Yeah. So, you know, for until, you know, a few years ago, capital's favorite politicians were the technocrats. They were these dull men in suits who all looked the same and sounded the same. It didn't matter if it was Blair or Cameron or you Kle or anyone, you know, they were all fundamentally the same. I remember Rory Bremner saying saying it's just become impossible. You can't you can't caricature these people anymore because you can't you have to say, "I am now being David Cameron." Careful. Wish for Rory. Well, exactly. Now you've you guys have got the opposite problem. You you can't caricature them because they're already way beyond where you could go. And so and and that was a phase when you know they they had reached a kind of accommodation. Capital had reached an accommodation with the state, and it was dominated by these these long-established blue-chip companies which could tolerate a tiny bit of democracy as long as nothing really changed. Um, they they wanted they had five-year plans. They wanted stability. Uh, they wanted security. They they didn't want to be disrupted by protest or by change of policy or anything like that. So you what what you end up with in politics is is you know what what capital wants primarily; very occasionally someone goes against that grain, and you end up with with with Lula or someone like that, and oh god, what happened there, this is outrageous, oh my god, we can't give these people a sniff of of power, Jeremy Corbyn, kill the beast, you know, so so you um uh but but you know what what you get is what they want, and so they wanted these dull, suited technocrats who all delivered basically the same agenda.
But then the opening came for what we call warlord capitalism, where where there's a whole different bunch of capitalists who want to be lords of the desert because they can make a fortune by ripping the whole thing down and then picking the assets out of the ruins. And there was this um uh Ian Hargreaves, who is um partner in um this stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown, as a billionaire, major funder of Brexit, and he said, "Brexit is Brexit will be fantastic uh because it will make us insecure again, and insecurity is is is great, is what drives us." He said, "Hang on a moment, us, who is this us you're talking about because it's not you."
Yeah. And so so so you got this sort of new strand of capitalism. What they want are the people who are going to smash the system, and those are the killer clowns. This is why suddenly you get this whole tranche of very similar politicians. Silvio Berlusconi was the first of them. But then you had people like Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, of course, Donald Trump again, of course, um um um Javier Milei um and um uh Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, you know, all over the world, these very similar people cropping up because that is what the new the the new mode of capitalism wanted.
Yeah. Um, and and of course, then the killer clowns, you can come to the people and say, "Look, you know, we're not like those boring technocrats. We're not those people who have sold you down the river and shut down political choice. We stand apart from politics. We're mavericks. We're different. We're not we don't succumb to that political corruption." Of course, the moment they get into power, corruption just but but people are attracted to them because they've been so disenchanted by mainstream politics. And that then opens the door to fascism, and capital says, "Thanks very much."