The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot)

By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The current world order is designed to be complex and confusing. Its function enshrines the power of our rulers, who purposely obscure its origins and underlying philosophy. Politicians, the media, so-called intellectuals at think tanks — along with the inertia of systemic falsehoods — perpetuate this veiled system. Neoliberalism has maintained its dominance through exploiting the many to sustain the prosperity of the few.

Author and The Guardian columnist George Monbiot joins host Chris Hedges to discuss the book “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism,” written by Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson. Together, they tackle the truths of neoliberalism, including its origins in colonialism and how it became the dominant ideology in the most powerful countries in the world.

The discussion, Hedges and Monbiot make clear, extends far beyond economics and policy decisions. Neoliberalism affects every aspect of people’s lives and for this reason, it remains an elusive topic of discussion amongst its victims and beneficiaries. “Neoliberalism has permitted a kind of full spectrum capitalism, which could be described as totalitarian capitalism in that it penetrates every aspect of our lives,” Monbiot tells Hedges. “Everything becomes monetized, everything becomes commoditized, even our relations with each other.”

Neoliberalism establishes a tollbooth over the essential systems necessary for human survival. With little regard for regulation (other than its diminishment), the law or the overall well-being of humans and the planet, this system enables “this tremendously rich class of oligarchs emerging out of the rentier economy (to use) their exclusive capture of assets, assets which the rest of us need, to ensure that we pay way over the odds to them in order to use those assets.”

Monbiot illustrates this dynamic through his own experiences in the United Kingdom, referencing the privatization of the water supply, which allows for private companies to charge outrageous fees, invest minimally in maintenance and use rivers as sewers. “We have no choice,” Monbiot says. “We have to use the water. There’s only one supplier in each region of the UK, so we have to go with that supplier. So they can charge pretty well what they want. There is a regulator which is supposed to limit that, but the regulator, as so often happens with neoliberalism, has been completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”

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Host:

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges  

Neoliberalism is a stealth ideology, one that at once dominates our lives, but exists in relative anonymity. Its effects have radically reconfigured western societies through deindustrialization, austerity, the privatization of utilities, postal services, schools, hospitals, prisons, intelligence gathering, police, parts of the military and railroads, along with spawning wage stagnation and debt peonage. It has deformed a tax system and gutted regulations to funnel wealth upwards, creating an income inequality that rivals pharaonic Egypt. Yet neoliberalism remains largely unmentioned and unexamined, especially by academia and a media that has been captured by a ruling class that profits from neoliberal doctrine. Neoliberalism was behind the catastrophic financial meltdown in 2007 and 2008. It is behind rise in chronic underemployment and unemployment, the assault on organized labor, the drop in health and educational standards, the resurgence of child poverty, the degradation of the ecosystem and the rise of demagogues such as Donald Trump and the far right. In the world of neoliberalism everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity that is exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Neoliberalism inverts traditional social, cultural and religious values. The market is God. All will be sacrificed before the idol Moloch. This callousness has seen the hundreds of millions in the industrial world who have been disenfranchised succumb to diseases of despair including, suicide, addictions, gambling, self-harm, morbid obesity, sexual sadism and a retreat into Christianized fascism – the subject of my book America: The Farewell Tour. It has eviscerated the moral authority and traditional role of government, reducing government to a stripped-down system of internal control and national defense. Joining me to discuss the ideology of neoliberalism is George Monbiot who along with Peter Hutchison wrote “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism.”

So let’s begin with the book, which, as I said before we went on the air, is, I mean, you’re a journalist, so you can write… And this idea of neoliberalism’s anonymity, I found and I think you’re right, it’s accepted as sort of part of the natural order without being questioned anymore. You write at the beginning of the book “To handle the greatly increased scope and scale of transactions, the colonial nations established new financial systems that would eventually come to dominate their economies, instruments of extraction whose use has intensified. It continues today with ever increasing sophistication, assisted by offshore banking networks.” I want to ask to what extent neoliberalism is sort of the next stage of colonialism.

George Monbiot  

Thank you, Chris and thank you for that excellent introduction, which I thought beautifully encapsulated the problems of neoliberalism. So I think, in our view, Peter and I, we see capitalism as a sort of foundational product of colonialism. And we see neoliberalism as the means by which capitalism seeks to solve its biggest problem, which is democracy. So, capitalism emerged as a form of colonial expropriation on the back of colonial looting. I mean, it’s amazing. We have all these discussions about capitalism, and most people in those discussions don’t seem to know what it is. We date it back —  following the brilliant work of the geographer Jason Moore — to about 1450 on the island of Madeira, which we see as the first place in which Karl Polanyi’s three pillars of capitalism — the commodified labor, commodified land and commodified money — all came together simultaneously, and they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor with unprecedented speed, created a great deal of profit, and then ecological collapse, followed by abandonment. And that then became the model which was followed. The Portuguese moved from Madeira to São Tomé, did exactly the same there. Coast of Brazil, worked their way up through the ecosystems of coastal Brazil, trashing them one after another, destroying huge numbers of lives through slavery, through murder. Moved into the Caribbean, started doing something very similar there, whereupon they’d been joined by other European nations doing the same thing. This is this thing called capitalism. What capitalism is often mistaken for (is) commerce, which is just buying and selling things. And sure, there are elements of commerce and capitalism, but it is absolutely not the same thing. Commerce goes back thousands of years, capitalism goes back hundreds of years. And it is an extremely coercive, destructive, exploitative mode of economic organization, and then, about 150 years ago, it runs into a problem, which is that larger numbers of adults got the vote. And when adults get the vote, they have the temerity to say, actually, we don’t want to just be commodified labor anymore. We’d like to have some labor rights. We want to be able to organize our own labor. We want to get a bigger share of the value that we create. We want outrageous things like the weekend and by the way, we’d quite like nice homes as well, and we don’t want our air to be polluted and our rivers to be poisoned. We’d like to eat better food, whatever it might be. All these demands are inimical to capitalism. So ever since adults began to get the vote in large numbers, people sought to solve that problem, and one means of solving it is fascism. And fascism can be a highly effective means of solving the problem of democracy. But then, when fascism collapsed in Europe in 1945, they had to find another means, and that means was neoliberalism. And neoliberalism turns out to be a highly effective way of solving the problem of democracy.

Chris Hedges  

Well let me ask about unions, because, certainly within the United States, but then also the union movement in the UK, in France were extremely important in pushing back against the more rapacious characteristics that you just talked about in capitalism.

George Monbiot  

So an absolutely fundamental idea in neoliberalism is that unions are against the natural order. You spoke very well in your introduction about the way in which neoliberalism tries to describe itself as a kind of natural law, like gravity or evolution. It’s just something that is there, not something that was invented by people. It’s not a human made system, it’s just the way that we are bound to interact with each other. But of course, it’s nothing of the kind. I mean, what neoliberalism involves is the stripping away of all impediments to capital, of the means by which the rich can make themselves even richer, however they wish to do so, and at whatever cost to human beings and the living world. And of course, one of the main impediments to capital is unions, because what unions want is for the workers to get a larger share of the value which they produce, rather than seeing themselves completely exploited and their production seized by someone else. And so from the very outset, with the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in 1944, their respective books, “The Road to Serfdom” and “Bureaucracy,” we saw the start of the attack, the concerted attack on trade unions. And within three years, by 1947, with the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, we saw the development of what’s been described as a neoliberal international, an international network of organizations supported by some of the richest people in the world. Extremely powerful bosses and the corporations they ran pouring money into this, and one of their primary aims was to crush elective bargaining and trade union organization and over the years, especially when their favored politicians came to power by fair means or foul — Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan — trade unions were duly crushed.

Chris Hedges  

Let’s go back to Hayek and these figures. David Harvey, in his book ” A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” argues that the ruling elites understood, and figures like Hayek were considered, by many economists, certainly Keynesians, to be third rate economists. They didn’t take them that seriously. Harvey argues that the ruling business elites understood the deficits that were inherent within the economic policies, but embraced it because it essentially justified or gave an ideological cover to this neoliberal project. Do you agree?

George Monbiot  

Yes, and it’s very interesting to see the way that, in turn, Hayek then went on to embrace his new sponsors, because that book, “The Road to Serfdom,” I mean, you can see its obvious flaws. I mean, it’s one gigantic slippery slope fallacy. It’s effectively saying if there’s any move towards protecting populations as a whole, towards the redistribution of wealth, towards the creation of robust public services and an economic safety net, that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism. You’ll end up with Stalin. You’ll end up with Hitler. I mean, it’s logical fallacies the whole way through. It’s a philosophical nonsense, but they were very happy to embrace it because it served them. But then what was really interesting was the way that that process happened in reverse, where Hayek then embraced the demands of his super rich sponsors. And by the time he came to write “The Constitution of Liberty,” his book published in 1960 and his doctrine had really gone from a flawed, if honest discourse on economics and politics to an absolute confidence trick. It was just a scam. I mean, “The Constitution of Liberty” is completely mad. I mean, it’s a totally crazy book. You cannot read it without worrying for the guy’s mental state. But actually, what’s happened is not that Hayek had lost it, it’s that he was telling these very rich people exactly what they wanted to hear. And what he was saying was, it doesn’t matter how you made your wealth. Because you are rich, you are a fantastic guy. You are a brilliant person. And the people who have become rich, whether they inherited it, whether they stole it, however they acquired that money, they are the scouts whom the rest of society should follow, because wherever they go, that is going to be a fantastic route to take, and we must go down that path, whatever it may be, and he dropped his opposition to things like monopolies. He overtly said, we’ve just got to exploit and destroy the natural world, extract as much money as we can from it, and then reinvest it elsewhere. And it doesn’t matter what damage we do. I mean, crazy proposition after crazy proposition, but this was what was being fed back to him by his sponsors. And so the further development of the doctrine was in direct response to the demands of that oligarchic class.

Chris Hedges  

And embraced by figures like Margaret Thatcher.

George Monbiot  

Yes, I mean, one of the many anonymities of neoliberalism. Because the neoliberals themselves, they coined the term. That had been their word at the very beginning, when they started to discuss it in 1938 at the Walter Lippmann colloquium in Paris. They used that term into the 1950s and then quietly began to drop it. And they didn’t give any term with which to replace it. They just said, well, this is the way things are. This is a natural law. It doesn’t have to have a name. And so we started calling it things like Thatcherism and Reaganism, or we called it monetarism, or we called it supply side economics. We didn’t have a name for it, and because we were unable to identify its source, we were unable to combat it. And the story goes well, Thatcher came up with these ideas. No, absolutely not. I mean, there’s a fantastic story which is told by members of what was then her shadow cabinet at the time, whether it’s completely true or not, but we know that it’s true in spirit at the very least. But the story the first (inaudible) cabinet members told is that soon after she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 which was then the opposition in the UK, it was out of power. Labour was in power. The shadow cabinet — which means the sort of group of people who want to become ministers if they take power — were having a meeting about what is the true nature of conservatism in our time. And they were all a bit pathetic, these characters, you know, she was a very dominating character, and she came in late, picked up what they were talking about, and said, this is what we believe. And out of her handbag, she takes this tattered, dog-eared book, almost unrecognizable, and slams it down on the table, and that book was “The Constitution of Liberty.”

Chris Hedges  

Let’s talk about how, and it’s interesting, by the way, 1947. Because that was the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States, which was the most devastating assault against organized labor until, you could argue, NAFTA. So they coalesce, the global elites, the wealthy coalesce around this ideology, and which, you’re right, essentially, very swiftly becomes unnamed, and you write about how the rich backers hired policy analysts, economists, academics, legal experts and public relations specialists create a series of think tanks that would refine and promote the doctrine. These institutions, many of which still operate today, tended to disguise their purposes with grand and respectable names, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Center for Policy Studies, and the Adam Smith Institute. I think these think tanks were important, as you point out, but also they very swiftly took over in, at least in the United States, economic departments as well.

George Monbiot  

Yes and indeed, in the UK as well. And not just economic departments, but also the media. I mean, you cannot have a discussion about anything which touches on economic life on either side of the Atlantic without one of these rather sinister people being brought on to talk about it. And in the UK, at any rate, they’re never asked, who funds you? On whose behalf are you lobbying? Because they are effectively lobby groups. You know, the term “think tank” disguises a whole load. I mean, it’s one of these many terms which is designed not to enlighten, but to disguise and it gives the impression that these are independent people who sit around and think about things. They really don’t. I mean, Hayek himself said that they should be dealers in second hand ideas. So basically, people like Hayek and von Mises and Friedman and others would develop the fundamental ideas. And then what the so-called think tanks, or junk tanks, as I prefer to call them, did, was to turn these often outrageous proposals into what sounded like common sense, to sort of make them sound like things which were good for everyone, that they would be in our benefit, rather than being as they are so devastating to society, to workers, to citizens in general and to sell them to the public. That’s what these junk tanks exist to do. But also, of course, they’re whispering into the ears of politicians. Sometimes they’re shouting like Project 2025, of the Heritage Foundation. But often, they’re doing so quietly and subtly. In the UK, our most disastrous Prime Minister ever, Liz Truss, who lasted a grand total of 49 days before she was effectively forced by her own failures to leave office. She was entirely a creature of the junk tanks. Her team was taken from the junk tanks. All her ideas, none of them were her ideas. They were all fed to her by these junk tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Center for Policy Studies, Adam Smith Institute, a TaxPayers’ Alliance and others like them. And she just became their mouthpiece. She became their mannequin. And we saw the result, which was economic collapse in remarkably short order.

Chris Hedges  

Although, of course, neoliberalism runs like an electric current through every, at this point, in the United States and I mean, now Starmer as well in the UK. Obama, Biden, none of these people are challenging neoliberal policy, Hillary Clinton. I want to go back to the point you made about language, because it’s important in chapter six and of course, what they peddle is this idea of freedom. And, the free market, they equate the free market with freedom itself. They’ve been very effective at doing this. And you write, “freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means freedom for bosses to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to exploit and endanger workers, to poison rivers, to adulterate food, to design exotic financial instruments, to charge exorbitant rates of interest. It leads to train wrecks, both literally and figuratively, from the recent string of toxic spill derailments in the American Midwest to the financial meltdowns and bank bailouts we now seem to have expected as an inevitable fact of economic life. Freedom from taxation, which by definition involves the redistribution of wealth, throttles a crucial mechanism to help lift the poor out of poverty. The freedom that neoliberals celebrate, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to be freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.” Now that’s a very important point because, and we’ll go back to the media, which speaks, as we both come out of it, in sound bites and cliches, and doesn’t get to the point that you just made in the book. So let’s talk about their co-opting of language, which they have been frighteningly successful at, to mask the reality of what they’re carrying out. And then let’s talk about the role of the media as an amplifier of this.

George Monbiot  

Yes, thank you very much for raising this, Chris. So it’s very striking now they have taken values which we all support, you know, we support the idea of freedom, and so we should. And the freedoms we possess are freedoms which were very hard fought by our ancestors. Much blood was spilt in order to ensure our freedom to speak, our freedom to vote, our freedom to organize, our freedom from highly oppressive institutions and government practice. And every freedom we have is something that people have died for and we tend to forget. Even the weekend is a freedom that was very hard won. And the neoliberals come in and being very careful not to specify exactly what they mean by freedom and co-op this word, to make it sound as if the things that our ancestors secured and that we all benefit from, is what they’re offering, whereas actually they are intending the exact opposite. They are taking those freedoms from us. In fact, it’s very clear from a lot of neoliberal writing that they are deeply opposed to the concept of democracy itself. This is what happened when Friedrich Hayek visited Pinochet’s Chile and he said, I would rather have a political system which has this economic freedom, which meant basically the freedom of the capitalist class to do whatever that hell they wanted to people and anyone who got in the way was dropped out of a helicopter or tortured to death in a basement. I’d rather have this economic freedom than what we call democracy, which doesn’t have that element of liberalism. And again, liberalism and neoliberalism, these terms are also stolen. You know, there is nothing liberal, in the social sense, about classical, sorry liberal in the (inaudible) sense about neoliberalism. It has taken away so many of our social liberties. And it’s this endless illusion and misappropriation of language that, alongside everything else, we have to fight on a daily basis.

Chris Hedges  

Let’s talk about the consolidation of wealth, the funneling of wealth upwards, which is the whole raison d’etre for the neoliberal project. Since 1989, America’s super rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50% by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer. Why? Because trade unions, essential for securing higher wages, were crushed. Tax rates for the very rich were slashed, regulations that big business viewed as constricting were loosened or eliminated, and perhaps most important, because rents were allowed to soar. What is rent? The term has several meanings that are readily confused. So let’s talk about that. Because the Not only have they consolidated wealth, but they have accelerated exploitation, especially of the most vulnerable. I teach in a prison. So everything’s been privatized in the prisons. These are the poorest families in the country, and their phone rates, their money transfer rates are exorbitant, far higher than you or I pay. So let’s talk about that, with the consolidation of wealth and the consolidation of political power, especially in the United States, which is at this point, just a system of legalized bribery. It comes with a turbocharging of what you call rent or rentier in French. The Economist will use the French term often. So explain that.

George Monbiot  

So what neoliberalism claims to create is an entrepreneurial society, but what in reality it creates is a rentier society because it has stripped away the protections, the social protections, which prevent our gross exploitation by capital. And that gross exploitation in a monopolistic situation is effectively rent. And rent is the unearned income you get from monopolizing an asset which people need for their survival or for their well being. So classic case you’ve just discussed of communications in prison. If you’ve got a corporation sitting on that, erecting a toll booth through which everyone must pass in order to communicate, they can charge pretty well what they want for that, and everything above what could be seen as a normal rate of profit, 5% or so, on communications, everything above that is rent. It’s just some money that you can take because you are in a monopolistic position, and there’s no one to stop you taking it. The same goes with privatized public services of all (inaudible) and prisons is one example. Here in the UK, our water has been entirely privatized, and the companies which own our water supply can charge exorbitant fees while investing as little as possible, with the result that they are instead now using our rivers as open sewers while still charging people through the nose for the water that comes out of their faucets. We have no choice. We have to use the water. There’s only one supplier in each region of the UK, so we have to go with that supplier. So they can charge pretty well what they want. There is a regulator which is supposed to limit that, but the regulator, as so often happens with neoliberalism, has been completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. That’s another aspect of the neoliberal approach, and everywhere, we see this tremendously rich class of oligarchs emerging out of the rentier economy and using their exclusive capture of assets, assets which the rest of us need, to ensure that we pay way over the odds to them in order to use those assets. And that’s mission accomplished for neoliberalism, those figures you cited for the transfer of wealth away from the poorer sections of society into the hands of the richest people, that is exactly what neoliberalism exists to do.

Chris Hedges  

And of course, the NHS, the National Health Service, has been consciously underfunded to the point now it’s in crisis. Was it Thatcher who privatized your postal service? So of course, it doesn’t work. I mean, we have pressures to privatize our postal service, and you can talk a little bit about how these fundamental institutions essentially collapse under the onslaught of neoliberalism, because it’s all about profit. So they have set out to starve and destroy the national health service so that you can end up with our horrendous for-profit health care system. And within the industrial world, of course, in terms of indicators, we have arguably the worst, or one of the worst healthcare systems of all of the industrialized countries.

George Monbiot  

Yes and this is exactly what the neoliberals over here envy and want to emulate. They see this totally dysfunctional health system in the United States and say, well, that looks good. Why does it look good? Not good for our health. It’s not good for the people of this country. It’s good for profit. Boy, does it generate profit because, again, it’s a tollbooth system. If you are ill, you need healthcare, you have no choice, and if that healthcare has been captured by the private sector, you have to pay those fees to pass through the toll gate in order to acquire that service, and those fees will be far higher than the value of the service itself. But because, of course, you know you’re weighing that up against the value of your own life and your health, you will pay those fees if you possibly can, or your insurers will pay those fees. And we all pay higher and higher insurance. Now, one thing the conservatives have not been able to do, or labor for that matter, is overtly to privatize the National Health Service. That would literally inspire a revolution in this country. It is our most treasured asset. It’s a big part of our identity. I mean the 2012 Olympics, the opening ceremony was basically a (inaudible) to the UK National Health Service. We all love it. You know Thatcher ran into enormous difficulties privatizing the water companies, the water industry, the railways, the postal service, the rest of it, but even she balked at privatizing the National Health Service. So what they do instead is to try to take it down piecemeal. It’s death by a thousand cuts and subtly and cleverly destroying services which are publicly funded until we are forced to go to the private sector, and increasingly, a large number of operations are now being conducted by the private sector because they’ve destroyed the capacity of the NHS to provide those operations, by underfunding it. Dentistry in this country is exactly where they want the whole system to go. NHS dentistry has effectively collapsed in this country, is almost impossible to get it now. People cannot afford to have their teeth fixed so they’re making their own fillings and sticking them in with super glue, overdosing on painkillers. This is one of the richest countries on earth, and people are suffering massively because they cannot afford an absolutely fundamental aspect of healthcare.

Chris Hedges  

Let’s talk about the contradictory nature of neoliberalism. Because while it claims, as you write, to promote free enterprise, you say it does two contradictory things at once, it valorizes and fetishizes competitive enterprise, while, in reality, rewarding and empowering the established wealth that controls crucial assets, such as land. And you see this, what it does is essentially create monopolies, Silicon Valley, Amazon and then these people, the last thing they want is free enterprise. They want total control, and they get it.

George Monbiot  

I mean, two very indicative trends we’ve seen during the neoliberal era is one, the deconstruction of antitrust laws so that we see mergers and acquisitions making companies bigger and bigger and bigger, with very dangerous consequences for society, as we saw in the financial crisis, where banks that were too big to fail actually failed. To be even worse if food companies go down the same route, because they go down, well, you can’t just create food out of quantitative easing. There’s enormous hazards in this. But at the same time, as they ripped down the antitrust laws, they raised massive intellectual property barriers. So in other words, they granted two corporations huge and sweeping intellectual property rights far, far greater than they had before. Now what’s interesting about that is that it’s completely against their whole claim to be supporting free market economics, but neoliberalism has got nothing whatsoever to do with free market economics. It’s all about monopolization and capture. And sweeping intellectual property rights is all about monopolization. That’s completely the opposite of freedom and even in the most sort of basic market freedom terms. And those two things in combination, and people often forget about the way that intellectual property rights have changed, because those two things in combination are really important. You know, the shift in the IP regime has, to a large extent, driven the desire for new mergers and acquisitions, because in taking over other companies, you take over their IP as well, and then you can start to integrate these monopolistic empires, which ensure that you can start building some very big and very lucrative tollbooths.

Chris Hedges  

Let’s talk about the political effects. I know Tony Blair, as a young politician, was very heavily funded by the wealthy and by the Zionists, which essentially allowed him to ignore the traditional base of labor, which were the unions and the working class. But this is probably even worse in the United States, but the corruption of the democratic process, I mean to the point where you have political philosophers in the United States, like Sheldon Wolin, arguing that the American political system is what he calls inverted totalitarianism. But let’s deal with that, because it’s deteriorated and destroyed many democratic institutions. And then I want you to talk about what you do in the book, about the relations, how it has affected our relations with the rest of the world, neoliberalism.

George Monbiot  

So I think the first thing to say is that neoliberalism has permitted a kind of full spectrum capitalism, which could be described as totalitarian capitalism in that it penetrates every aspect of our lives. Everything becomes monetized, everything becomes commoditized, even our relations with each other. And I think there’s a very strong link between the way in which we have become monetized and self commoditized, and the way in which we have accepted this shift in our identity from being citizens to being consumers, and the mental health crisis which is so salient in many rich nations today. I think we are all neoliberals now to one extent or another, and that has had really devastating impacts on our well being. It has instrumentalized our relationships. It has torn down so much of our social networks, our genuine social networks, of our community life, of our trust in each other. It’s told us, it’s made this mathematically impossible promise that we can all be number one. Sorry, how’s that possible? So I know only one person can be number one, but we’re told we could all be number one, and when it turns out we’re not number one, we get really angry, humiliated, frustrated, and then the siren voices of the far right are calling to us and saying, there’s a reason why you’re not number one. It’s those people, it’s the Muslims, it’s the Jews, it’s the immigrants. It’s the asylum seekers, it’s the women, it’s the (inaudible) people, it’s the Black people, whoever it might be, they are stopping you from achieving your natural destiny, which is to be number one. So all of these things have major impacts on our intimate lives, as well as on our public lives, our political lives. And of course, at the same time, the full spectrum nature of capitalism as neoliberalism sweeps away all the restrictions on capital, ensures that all parties, as you have said, become essentially neoliberal. The dominant parties within politics: Democrat/Republican, Labour/Conservative, we’re all neoliberals now. And that creates a generalized exploitative mindset. And so to move on to your second question there about our relations with the rest of the world, what is learned has been a recapitulation of colonialism. We have a new set of colonial relations developing, brokered primarily through the financial industry, the clever means by which money is extracted from poorer nations and poured into rich or not into the nations themselves, but into institutions exported in the richer nations, and then into the offshore domain where no one can touch it, no one can tax it, and then creating this new ruling class of a sort of transnational, hyper-rich oligarchy, which becomes a kind of off law state.

Chris Hedges  

Well, you saw it with Syriza in Greece. So when a government rises to power that essentially wants to challenge the neoliberal project, they strangle them financially and destroy them. And in the end, Syriza became an appendage of the international banking system. You had a wonderful phrase, you quote William Davies, this is a professor at Goldsmiths College, who calls about neoliberalism, “the disenchantment of politics by economics.” Oh, that was great. You also, this is you, you said “neoliberalism is a political neutron bomb. The outward structures of politics, such as elections and parliaments remain standing, but following the irradiation of market forces, little political power remains to inhabit the space between the facades.” This is Sheldon Wolin. I don’t know if you’ve read his work, “Democracy Incorporated.” Let’s talk a little bit about what you touched on before, which you write about in the book. This what you call the spiritual void. And I think that is, again, as you mentioned, directly related to these diseases of despair. 100,000 people in the United States die every year from opioid overdoses. You have all of these pathologies which Émile Durkheim said were a consequence in his book “Suicide,” of what he calls “anomie,” this disconnection from society and then these self destructive behaviors predominate. So it is poison, neoliberalism has poisoned almost every aspect. But let’s talk about that spiritual void.

George Monbiot  

Yes, so this question of the meaning and the purpose with which our lives are invested. And this is absolutely essential to our psychic well being, unless you think you have a useful role in society, and unless you think you have some purpose which transcends your everyday life and your everyday interactions and your getting and earning and spending, your mind will fall in on itself. I think this is what we’re seeing on a massive scale, and this disenchantment of neoliberalism, it disenchants us with everything which cannot be measured in dollars and cents, even the natural world now. There’s this attempt to… we’re going to save nature. We’re going to save the world’s living systems by putting a price on them, this natural capital agenda we see now right across the world, and of course, it does nothing to save living systems whatsoever. All it does is to create a new frontier for capital. But in doing so, it tells us these systems are not innately valuable. Never mind the wonder, never mind the joy, never mind the the astonishment of living in this fantastic, natural world. They exist purely to service and purely to service in instrumental and monetary terms. And if we go with that agenda, and some people do, they destroy that relationship as well, because they’ve instrumentalized it. And that sucks the spiritual marrow out of us. It destroys something, as far as to put your finger on, you can’t say this particular thing has been taken away from me, and I feel this particular loss, because it goes beyond something that can easily be measured or even easily be described, but it’s something which I think is absolutely fundamental to our well being, which is the meaning not just of our place in the world, but the meaning which one sends that place that the world reflects back to us.

Chris Hedges  

Let’s talk about chaos. You write chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the billionaires thrive. In essence, and you quoted, before, Steve Bannon about the destruction of the administrative state. What they want is chaos, because chaos increases profit. Talk about that.

George Monbiot  

Yeah. So I see there being two forms of primary forms of capital, there’s what we call the house broken capital, the sort of domesticated capital which will make some sort of accommodation, grudging accommodation, with the semi-democratic state or the nominally democratic state. And then there’s warlord capital which says we just want to destroy everything and pick through the ruins and take what we can. And so if you look at Brexit, for instance, here in the UK, I see that as a civil war within capitalism between those two fractions of capital, the domesticated capital and the warlord capital. And some of the warlords were very clear about their aim. So Ian Hargreaves, a billionaire who was one of the main funders of the Brexit movement, said, what Brexit will deliver is insecurity, and insecurity is fantastic because it creates opportunity. Yeah, sure, absolutely. It creates opportunity for people like Ian Hargreaves, but it destroys opportunity for other people, it destroys your secure job, your secure home, your secure public services. It’s the insecurity and the chaos on which such people thrive. And this is one way I feel we’ve seen this remarkable shift in the politicians that capital supports. So a few years ago, almost universally, our politicians were really dull and boring people. They were technocrats in suits, and they were scarcely distinguishable from each other. And this satirist I know here was complaining that they’re almost impossible to satirize anymore because they’re all the same. They all look the same, they all sound the same. And those were the people that capital had chosen, because capitalism was, at the time, dominated by the domestic, by the domesticated wing, which wanted safety. It wanted security. It was primarily driven by corporate power and these big blue chip corporations, they have their five year plans. They want a stable political environment. They want security. They want the government to insulate them from risk. They don’t want too much democracy either. Of course, they don’t. They want trade unions crushed. They want regulations reduced. But what happened was that, as a result of that, and as a result of neoliberalism’s attrition of public protection and regulations, out of the corporate sphere, we saw this new oligarchic class emerging where the owners and bosses were able to award themselves a larger and larger share of profit and become extremely powerful in their own right. And some of those became the warlord capitalists, who then wanted the exact opposite of what the domesticated, the house broken capitalists wanted. They wanted to tear it all down. And so we then saw the emergence supported by those capitalists of what we call the killer clowns, people like Donald Trump, people like Jair Bolsonaro, people like Boris Johnson, people like Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu, and people like (Viktor) Orbán and (Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan and (Rodrigo) Duterte. All over the world, this very similar cast of characters, these flamboyant, charismatic and utterly chaotic people who (inaudible) the foundations of the state, who destroy stability, who rip down security. Why? Because these are the people chosen by what has now become the dominant strand of capitalism, warlord capitalism, to represent them. And so we can see that as a kind of mirror of the way that under neoliberalism, the nature of capitalism has shifted to become something even more rapacious than it was before.

Chris Hedges  

And they peddle, as you write, these conspiracy fictions that tell people, in effect, that they don’t have to do anything. They rob us of agency. And that’s part of the attraction. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely other, rather than a system in which we are deeply embedded, which cannot be changed without a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstitution, you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. And I often think of figures like Trump as being more cult figures than political figures. But what they’re playing to, as you point out, is these conspiracy fictions which, along with the idea that the deep state or these nefarious forces are trying to destroy you. But there’s also that sense of self aggrandizement, reassurance, you write, and freedom from civic responsibility. You see that at a Trump rally.

George Monbiot  

Yeah. So conspiracy fictions. I mean, people call them conspiracy theories, but actually, conspiracy theory is a theory about stuff going badly wrong, and we know that does happen, but a conspiracy fiction is one is a story about a conspiracy which doesn’t actually exist. That’s what we should call them. And Trump and Vance and many others peddle these conspiracy fictions precisely for those reasons, because they say, I am your sole savior. There’s nothing you can do to sort things out yourself. I will fight these vague forces out there which are destroying your life, trust in me to do so. And they are fantastically disempowering, those fictions, their whole purpose is to disempower people and that’s why people like them. It’s why they embrace them. Because actually a lot of people find the idea of involvement in political change, the idea of political agency, as being quite scary and frightening. I’m going to have to make a huge effort. I’m going to have to talk to other people. I’m going to have to combine with others and mobilize to create change. I don’t want to do that. But here’s this (inaudible) telling me that, actually, it’s nothing to do with political structures. It’s nothing to do with power. It’s to do with (inaudible) people over there, and we’ve just destroyed those people. That’s problem solved. And so it lets people off the hook and and a large number of people welcome that for the very reason that it deprives them of political agency.

Chris Hedges  

Well, Hannah Arendt lists that as one of the chief attractions of fascism, the surrender of moral and political authority. That was George Monbiot, who, with Peter Hutchinson, wrote “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism.” I want to thank Thomas (Hedges), Sofia (Menemenlis), Diego (Ramos) and Max (Jones), who produced this program. You can see me or find me on ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.