" l' education peut tout"
neo-liberals have shown, time and time again, that they gravitate to anti-capitalist, anti-freedom philosophies. And upon introspection of the individual, most often in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failures entirely their own fault.
It was the philosopher Helvetius, a progenitor of neo-liberalism, who, denying free will, told us that moral notions are derived exclusively from man's experience with the sensations of pain and pleasure. Thus, people are neither good nor bad, they merely act, involuntarily and mechanically, in their self-interest, which is dictated by the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure. Hence, only by shaping man's environment is what determines what he thinks and how he behaves. Hence, Helvetius logically came to believe man no longer is God's creation: he is his own product. As Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a major influence on Vladimir I. Lenin, said: "Man is God to man." Society, too then, becomes a product rather than a given or datum. Thus existence, as shaped by millennia of experience and embodied in tradition, custom, and historic institutions, not to mention its relationship with a transcedent, is, in this conception, irrational.
So, neo-liberalism, adopting and acting guided by that theory's precepts, led them to claim status as mankind's educators in the broadest sense of that word by claiming they are the enlightened repository of reason, which they believed to be always superior to experience. That they alone claim to know the right things, in general, which entitles them to demand that existing practices be abandoned and existing institutions destroyed. They, the self-appointed illuminati, know the path to virtue and, through virtue, to happiness, and consequently, according to them, their legislation also takes on a necessary pedagogic function.
For the neoliberal the criterion of truth is not life: they create their own reality, or rather a sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which it approves. Contradictory evidence is ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence is ruthlessly cast out. Augustin Cochin described that by saying: "Whereas, in the real world, the arbiter of all thought is proof and it's issue is the effect, in the neo-liberal world the arbiter is the opinion, and the aim their approbation... It is opinion that makes for existence...the truth is which they say, that good of which they approve...Opinion here is the cause, and not, as in real life, the effect... And the goal...of that passive work is destruction... Thought which submits to this initially loses the concern for the real, and then, little by little, the sense of the real...it does not gain in freedom, orderliness, clarity except to the extent that it sheds its real content, it's hold on that which exists." The criterion of validity is consistency and conformity. Live reality is treated as a perversion or caricature of what they call the genuine.
That attitude of course enables the neo-liberal to accept, as true, propositions those that are at total variance with demonstrable fact as well as common sense. Hence, neo-liberal revolutionaries of this nature can be ruthlessly pragmatic in exploiting, for tactical purposes, what they term the people's grievances. However, their notion of what the people desire is the product of sheer abstraction. Not surprisingly then, when they come to power, these types immediately seize control of the means of information and institute a tight censorship: for it is only by suppressing free speech that they can impose their sur-reality on ordinary people bogged down in the quagmire of facts.
This of course calls for the creation of a special language. This language, with its own vocabulary, phraseology, and even syntax, describes not reality but woke 's ideal depiction of it. It is severely ritualized and surrounded by lexical taboos.
In the neoliberal view, the establishment of a just and free society requires the destruction of the status quo. But contact with flesh and blood people quickly reveals that few if any neo-liberals want their familiar world to be destroyed: what they really desire is satisfaction of specific grievances - that is, partial reform, with everything else remaining in place. Meanwhile striving to establish dictatorial power over "the people" in the name of "the people." In their case liberty for the citizen is not the independence of the individual. It is only by reducing the people to a mere idea that the neo-liberal can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom.
CONTINUED...
Supplemental Info:
https://brownstone.org/article....s/a-diagram-of-elite
