Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk

Evidence

This is one reason that participation in neoliberal life necessitates acting as an entrepreneur of the self: unreserved embrace of (this version of) risk is postulated to be the primary method of changing your identity to live life to the fullest. Contemporary entrepreneurial autobiographies almost always start out with some variation on: “I am not sure what it is about entrepreneurs that makes us risk-taking thrill seekers, but every entrepreneur I know is an adrenaline junkie. We kite board, heli ski, race cars, and keep finding new creative ways to challenge ourselves.” Alternatively, anyone who participates in the welfare state is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that participation in the welfare state is culturally coded as being ‘a dull drone’ could be worth tracing empirically — when and where that framing first became dominant.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s ‘entrepreneur of the self’ concept and to the reader’s broader thought-collective tracing of neoliberal selfhood. — connects to: The ideal neoliberal subject is a self-sufficient entrepreneurial risk-taker — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 36; Neoliberal restructuring converts collective public goods into individualized risk management — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 266; Neoliberalism’s durability rests on fusing the economic with the cultural — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 298 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism induces risk-bearing then blames the victims when risk fails #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 351
• Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 302
• Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity #expands (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 176
• Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation #corroborates (0.75)
• Neoliberalism inverted the moral status of gambling from vice to virtue #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 345
• Neoliberals rejected population-level statistics and risk insurance as hubristic #corroborates (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 210