What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

Success as a yardstick fosters certain characteristics: flexibility, speed, efficiency, results-orientedness, and articulateness in the sense of being able to sell yourself.

we can never make a naïve choice for the individual and against society, or conversely, for society and against the individual. We cannot do this, because we know that their apparent opposition cloaks mutual dependency.

People can perfect themselves if they try hard enough — perfection being measured in terms of success and power. All too easily equated with economic success and financial power, these two factors combine to generate the new goal in life.

The modern individual has grown up in a highly unstable environment in which almost everything is attainable and just about anything goes — the only rule being that you have to consume. The snag is that you must engineer your own success: if you fail, you must be either lazy or sick.

Official statistics show an exponential rise in the use of pharmaceuticals, and the aim of psychotherapy is rapidly shifting towards forcing patients to adapt to social norms — you might even say, disciplining them.

First, the notion that everyone starts off in the race of life with equal opportunities is illusory. Second, after a while, a meritocracy gives rise to a new elite, who carefully shut the door on those coming up behind them.

Yet at first sight a combined meritocracy (economic and educational) seems very appealing and easy to sell. Equal opportunities for all, the greatest rewards for those who make the greatest effort — who could object to that? Experience shows, however, that discrepancies at the start strongly influence the final result. In the case of an educational

Beyond the highest rung of the ladder, a penthouse awaits, an earthly variant of the heavenly paradise where we can finally become what we originally were — namely, the image of God.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s most cited political pronouncements was, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ She went on to make this come true.* The dissolution of society gradually eroded people’s sense of community, and increasingly turned individuals into each other’s competitors.

The ultimate goal of present-day education is ‘self-management’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. Young people must regard themselves as enterprises, and see knowledge and skills above all in economic terms — that is, as something they can use to increase their market value.