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

Progress is a moral judgement by a creature that loves to regard itself in the mirror.

To this day, no single scientific study has succeeded in distinguishing between what is mentally normal and abnormal without using social criteria.

People are competitive beings focused on their own profit. This benefits society as a whole because competition entails everyone doing their best to come out on top. As a result, we get better and cheaper products and more efficient services within a single free market, unhampered by government intervention. This is ethically right because success

Throughout history, economies have always been embedded in religious, ethical, and social structures. This no longer applies in the case of neo-liberalism. On the contrary, religion, ethics, and society are subservient to ‘the market’. In that sense, neo-liberalism is no longer an economic theory, but a much broader ideology.

The postmodern individual suffers from a strange type of dissociation, a new form of split personality. We condemn the system, are hostile to it, and feel powerless to change it. Yet at the same time we act in a way that reinforces and even extends it. Every decision we make — what to eat and drink, what to wear, how to get about, where to go on ho

This feeling of alienation between old and young is indicative of a changed identity resulting from cultural shifts — something that apparently has always sparked generational conflict. Each new generation is indeed different from the previous one.

From then on, acting ethically became associated with ‘self-conquest’, a concept that still resonates today. We all want to behave well, but the flesh is weak, so we have to resist it, which means resisting ourselves. The more strictly and consistently we do this, the more moral we are; a ‘self’-conquest that takes no effort doesn’t count. Being vi

The stories and ideas that are passed down to us by our families, the social class to which we belong, the culture of which we are a part — all these things combine to form a symbolic order, the Great Narrative shared by a larger group, resulting in a more-or-less common identity.

Nowadays we have lost sight of this question because an answer has been forced on us, along with a new order. The earlier debate took place in a society where a reasonable balance existed between the political, religious, cultural, and economic spheres. Now, these typically human dimensions have all been made grist to a single mill: the neo-liberal