People accept cruelty to the poor but recoil at commodifying their own bodies

Evidence

One of the oddities of contemporary everyday neoliberalism is that people rarely get worked up anymore when encountering overt cruelty to the poor or murketing or endless scams consisting of privatized schemes of self-improvement, and seem to have passively capitulated to fallout from the crisis, but do tend to get distinctly queasy when entrepreneurialism of the self digs down deep into the corporeal. Somehow, that pound of flesh is deemed all the more offensive or transgressive when it really is a pound of flesh traded in the marketplace. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 414

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘flesh trades differently than money’ observation could anchor an essay on why moral queasiness clusters at the body despite broad austerity capitulation.
• DEEPTHINKING: Mirowski’s inversion — that self-commodification, not cruelty to others, breaks the neoliberal spell — is a genuinely surprising psychological observation worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: People usually refuse direct cruelty to humanized others even under authority — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 631; Most people refuse cruelty when victims are humanized; People disengage moral self-sanctions through euphemism, justification, and dehumanization — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2096 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• People disengage moral self-sanctions through euphemism, justification, and dehumanization #expands (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2096
• People usually refuse direct cruelty to humanized others even under authority #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 631
• Most people refuse cruelty when victims are humanized #qualifies (0.72)