Sublime

Any positions that characterize people as bereft of agency, as passive automatons open to manipulation or behavioral management, are usually deemed reductive or irresponsible.

The forms of control accompanying the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s were more invasive in their subjective effects and in their devastation of shared and collectively supported relations.

It is attained not by the making of similar individuals, as theories of mass society used to assert, but through the reduction or elimination of differences, by narrowing the range of behaviors that can function effectively or successfully in most contemporary institutional contexts.

This brings one of the more troubling aspects of neoliberalization more sharply back into focus: the curious relationship between state and nation. In principle, neoliberal theory does not look with favour on the nation even as it supports the idea of a strong state. The umbilical cord that tied together state and nation under embedded liberalism

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.