Is NEO-Liberalism a Mental Illness?

[Frank V]

I just wanted to comment on this little part here...

Posted by Oouthere (here)
I do not see any difference in drone bombings/missile attacks and fully manned aircraft.

Well, call me cynical, but there is a difference. With a manned aircraft, the pilot/aircrew may lose their life when shot down, or - from the sociopathic vantage of military command - even worse, the pilot/aircrew may fall into enemy hands, and could then possibly become a liability, i.e. they might reveal classified information when tortured. And of course, the US government knows all about torturing, so they expect no less from the enemy, whoever that enemy may be - there's always at least one, and there are so many to choose from, right?

On the other hand, with a drone, all that's lost when it gets shot down is just the taxpayer's money - not that the government cares about the taxpayer either. No liability, no required personnel retrieval operations behind enemy lines. No fuss in the media.

So drone strikes - and possibly drone dogfights, should it come to that [*] - are a more cowardly manner of killing people.


[*] There was an episode of Stargate: SG-1 which was dedicated to this issue. To summarize, Jack O'Neill and his team arrive on another planet by way of the Stargate and are asked to assist in an air combat situation by way of drones, and they are assured that this is how wars are fought on that particular planet, but when O'Neill shoots down an enemy plane, he notices that it was not a drone and that it was manned by real live people, which results in an ethical conflict between the SG-1 team and the people among whom they had arrived via the Stargate.

[NancyV]

This pretty much says it all... In my opinion, of course.

[ExomatrixTV]

• How neoliberalism broke economics | Dr Abby Innes:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zb07GSYG_sY

Abby Innes goes in-depth into how neoliberalism has 'Sovietized' Britain, and the field of economics itself. Is Keir Starmer a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?

Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the European Institute, London School of Economics. Her research focuses on state theory, post-communist transitions, and the political economy of the UK. She is the author of Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail.

Interviewed by Harry Carlisle at HowTheLightGetsIn London, in September 2024.

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:33 How did you make the connection between the modern
• British government and the Soviet Union?
• 05:06 Why has the field of economics been led so astray?
• Why is there still such an appeal to utopianism?
• 11:27 Why does the Left have a blind spot to economic methodology?
• 16:17 Is there a way we can navigate past this methodological rabbit-hole?
• 23:43 Keir Starmer: is he a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?

While Innes masterfully exposes neoliberalism's Soviet-like pathologies—its utopian dogmatism and institutional failures—she arguably overlooks a broader, more insidious framework: the technocracy movement. This perspective, articulated by researcher Patrick M. Wood, positions neoliberalism not as an isolated ideology but as a transitional phase in a century-old push for expert-led global governance, now advancing through entities like the World Economic Forum (WEF), UN Agenda 2030, and Transhumanist visions. Wood's work, including Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism (2023), traces this back to the 1930s Technocracy Inc. movement in the U.S., founded by engineers like Howard Scott.

• more here

[sdv]

Posted by Oouthere (here)
I do not see any difference in drone bombings/missile attacks and fully manned aircraft. The trigger is still pulled by a human and the result is the same.

Communism (which is liberalism imo) sounds great, but until each person feels a need to help society as a whole it will not and cannot work. There are simply too many sociopaths, psychopaths, drug damaged brains, religious freaks, and any number of other issues that cause it not to work.

Brainwashing/conditioning to react to words and phrases, such as communism, socialism, democracy, terrorist, Islam, Hamas, Third World ... is very apparant to me, and people end up living in a box.

What struck me in your comment is that you get to the heart of the problem of any system ... the diversity and complexity of human nature. Every system has its weaknesses: democracy assumes that groups will make rational choices and that politicians in office will behave like extrememly competent civil servants. In reality, that does not happen. Communism/socialism assumes that everyone will work for the common good and ignores selfishness in human nature.

My only answer to that problem is that we must embrace complexity and have different approaches and use different tools for different situations. Politics is expensive and corruptible, so that must go. Those who serve in government should have a high level of competency to manage shared projects and tasks required by the country as a whole. The people can express their opinion through referendums, but with no persuasive advertising or political rhetoric ... discuss the facts and then vote for what is important to you.

Supposedly we are approaching the Age of Aquarius (so much disagreement about when it actually starts!). Parts of the old always carries through to the new (like Vatican City as a still influential relic of the Roman Empire), and the Age of Pisces will probably operate alongside the Age of Aquarius, but Aquarius will become much stronger and end up dominating. What kind of Aquarius though? And how much violence and suffering will there be as we move from one age to another?

Aplogies if my thoughts tend to be scattered and rambling, but I think that there are people here on PA who are already living in the Age of Aquarius but have not cut themselves off from those living in what they think is the height, rather than decline, of Pisces.

[Tintin]

This is probably better attuned to what liberalism has now morphed into: neo-liberalism, which is the iteration now adopted and promulgated so noisily by its adherents.

This Australian woman (Farrah) has neatly encapsulated its flaws, and has articulated this in what she calls her letter to the left - an escapee if you like:

________________________

A Letter to the Left

To those who still believe, from someone who once did too.

I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear me out before you decide what I am.

I was one of you. Not in some distant, theoretical way. I was deeply one of you. I marched. I shared the posts. I believed, with total conviction, that the progressive vision of the world was not only morally correct but self-evidently so. Anyone who disagreed was ignorant or malicious. I had Trump Derangement Syndrome, but then, I complained about all politicians. I couldn’t see it was a case of choosing ‘the best of’. I had no middle ground.

And that’s what finally shook me awake: the realisation that I had stopped allowing for middle ground. My thinking had become entirely black and white. I had radicalised—slowly, invisibly—without even noticing it was happening to me.

The moment of clarity didn’t arrive dramatically. It crept in through the small, uncomfortable questions I started asking myself. Why was I so certain? Why did I feel such fury toward anyone who hesitated, even slightly, on positions I held? When had I stopped thinking and started simply reacting?

When I tried to share these doubts with friends and family—people I loved, people on my side—I wasn’t met with conversation. I was met with a wall. A similar wall to what I had previously put up for anyone daring to question me and my positions.

“No discussion.” “You’ve gone right-wing.” Lies were constructed about my motives. It didn’t matter that I was asking questions in good faith. The act of questioning was itself the crime.

That is not normal. A political movement that forbids its own members from thinking critically is not a movement for justice. It’s something else entirely. And it worried me then. It worries me more now.

Do you remember the 1980s and 1990s? I do. We had done real, meaningful work on race relations. Most people in the West genuinely did not care about the colour of your skin. Were things perfect? Of course not. But we were heading somewhere good. We were building something.

And then we pulled it apart. We decided that every small, clumsy human interaction was a “microaggression.” We reframed the past as one hundred percent negative, as though nothing decent had ever been achieved. We became so obsessed with naming every tiny slight that we forgot what real progress looked like. We unstitched the good work and called it enlightenment.

Once I began looking with honest eyes, the contradictions were everywhere. We decided blackface was a mortal sin. But woman face? That was brave and fabulous. We insisted entire societies must be restructured to accommodate the preferences of fractions of a percent of the population, and if you questioned the pace or method, you were a bigot, evil or fascist.

We pursued reckonings for the crimes of Western civilisation—slavery, church child abuse, colonisation—and those reckonings were important. But we stopped there. Only the West was held to account. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a horror, yes. But it was the British who ended it. Meanwhile, the Islamic slave trade ran for centuries, and pockets of it persist to this day. Where is that reckoning? Who is demanding it?

We created a world in which nobody is allowed to simply settle and build a life. Indigenous people must perpetually identify as victims. Everyone of European descent must perpetually identify as perpetrators—for events centuries old. Yet nobody seems interested in acknowledging that white Westerners were not history’s only colonisers, or that colonisation, in softer forms, is happening right now.

Mass immigration into Western countries is a form of soft colonisation. That sentence will make some of you furious. But consider: why is it only European and other Western nations being pressured to “diversify”? No one bags Nigeria or China or Latin American nations for a lack of diversity and not promoting the idea of multiculturalism. Only white-majority countries are told their cultures must be diluted or they are racist. Wanting to preserve the native peoples and cultures of European nations is not xenophobia. It is a right that in the 21st century we wish to grant to every non-white culture on earth. But apparently it’s a sin to want it or expect it for ourselves.

And when it comes specifically to Islamic immigration into Western democracies, there are countless videos—not propaganda, but Muslims speaking plainly—describing a vision in which the world becomes Islamic, in which Sharia law replaces secular governance, in which their growing numbers translate to growing power. These are not conspiracy theories. These are now publicly stated intentions. History tells us what happens when these numbers reach a tipping point: the freedoms we take for granted begin to erode. Some know this because they are ex-Muslims. Some know because they are Westerners who converted to Islam and found it wanting. Frightening, even. Expressing that concern is not Islamophobia. It is pattern recognition.

Being concerned about how trans medicine affects young people is not transphobic. Asking how trans ideology impacts women’s rights and the gay and lesbian community is not bigotry. These are legitimate questions that deserve honest answers, not silencing.

So much of what I had taken for granted on the left collapsed under the lightest touch of common sense. I had to accept something I’d been resisting for years: the world will never be perfect. It won’t. And if you spend your one and only life railing against the world because it refuses to become your utopia, you will lose. Worse, you will drag the rest of us down with you. Constantly tearing society apart because it cannot meet an impossible standard doesn’t make you righteous. It makes you destructive.

What I did instead was start asking a different question: ‘What’s the optimal way to improve this?’ Not achieve perfection (#impossible). Not burn it all down and rebuild a utopia from the ashes (also impossible). Just better. What specifically needs improving, and how do we do it? That shift—from ideological fury to practical problem-solving—changed everything for me.

So those are the things that drove me away from the left. Not toward the right, but away from what the left has become: reactive, unquestioning, hostile to dissent, and increasingly detached from reality. I wasn’t changed by the right, I was changed by the left. My left.

If the West is going to survive—and I think it’s that serious at this point—the left has to start thinking again. Questioning again. Demanding evidence instead of demanding obedience.

So I’m asking you—begging you, really—to think. Consider that an alternate view might not be hatred. Consider that you may have been wrong about some things. I was. That’s not a confession of weakness. Admitting a mistake and choosing a different path is braver than marching further down a road you already suspect is leading somewhere dark.

You are not a bad person for questioning. You are not a traitor for thinking. The people who tell you otherwise are not protecting you. They are controlling you.

That’s all I ask. Just think. Please.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Tintin (here)
This is probably better attuned to what liberalism has now morphed into: neo-liberalism, which is the iteration now adopted and promulgated so noisily by its adherents.

Yes indeed! I've just changed the thread title to reflect that. (The thread was started back in 2014)

[norman]

Despite the chosen title for this video, by the time you get to the end of watching/listening you'll probably realise that it's bang on topic for this thread but it's not sociological language.

Mental Illness ?, It's the desperate side effect/collateral damage of the end game of a 400 (ish) years steal/harvest cycle according to E.M. Burlingame. Mental (and spiritual) illness of the tricked naïve. A very sinister spiritual illness on the part of whatever entity is behind the perpetration of it.

The video title, it seems to me, misses the point of what this conversation became after it got off the ground, but it does point a finger at a warning sign.


CIVIL WAR: Spain's 500,000 Migrant Betrayal EXPOSED ft EM & Cummins
Rich Does Politics - Jan 30, 2026

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4ypl08aDXUo