Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology

Evidence

Clearly, the role of all the stories is to keep your attention acutely focused upon yourself. The worse things get, you must not engage in rage, remonstration, or “stoicism,” much less communal support; instead, the space spanned by your consciousness becomes the perimeter of the “economy,” which is no longer about what you may make, but consists exclusively of the stories you tell about yourself. Your vigilance must never waver from its focus upon the center of your own little universe. If you encounter some difficulty in comfortably inhabiting your own little cubbyhole, there is always someone else who will tell you how to succeed at it, for a modest fee. Conjure the confidence fairy! The contemporary financial crisis collapses to a temporary aberration between your ears. Let them buy cake! If only you, the consumer, would rouse yourself to spend more! — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 433

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading list’s claim that anti-noise and individual-responsibility frames individualize systemic problems; also echoes White Noise’s treatment of consumer selfhood. — connects to: The 2008 crisis flowed from incentive structures, not individual moral failure — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 73; Development economics RCTs blame individuals while ignoring poverty’s structural causes — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 289; Cognitive dissonance drives economists and neoliberals to treat crisis as reinforcing their beliefs (+19 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how ‘the confidence fairy’ and self-help economics convert macroeconomic crisis into personal failure — the therapeutic turn in austerity discourse.

Broader Connections

• Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims #corroborates (0.95) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 337
• Individualized self-improvement solutions block collective confrontation of structural crisis #corroborates (0.92) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1074
• The bad-apples framing deflects blame from systemic causes #corroborates (0.88)
• Individual psychodynamic theories cannot explain coordinated mass scapegoating #corroborates (0.78)
• Victims of discrimination adapt through either externalization or internalization of blame #expands (0.75) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1048