Blaming personal profligacy for the crisis presumes understanding individuals were denied

Evidence

The fallacy with the Tea Party slogan “Your mortgage is not my problem” is that most people are not continually scheming to live beyond their means: they have to be introduced into structures and schemes larger than themselves that are constructed precisely to attain that end. To attribute the crisis to the profligacy of the average person presumes a level of understanding that is otherwise denied to the individual in the neoliberal era. As John Lanchester put it: “From the worm’s-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment … People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 352

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core paradox: neoliberal era simultaneously demands individual responsibility while structurally withholding the knowledge needed to exercise it — a contradiction worth sitting with.
• SEED: Essay angle: the worm’s-eye economic epistemology — how ‘bewilderment’ is a deliberately manufactured condition when risk is privatized but information is not.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 433; Meritocracy belief blames excluded individuals for their own exclusion — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 711; Scapegoat theories collapse when they must justify the specific victim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 68 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 433
• Blaming individual borrowers hides a systemic precariousness produced by finance #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 208
• Crisis scapegoating of out-groups masks the true political and economic causes #expands (0.78)
• Crisis-time scapegoating of religious out-groups masks political and economic causes #expands (0.78)
• Meritocracy belief blames excluded individuals for their own exclusion #expands (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 711
• Scapegoat theories collapse when they must justify the specific victim #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 68
• Necessity excuses renounced control but carelessness invites derision #expands (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 182