Post-crisis public imagination fixated on survivors who profited, not victims

Evidence

In the aftermath to the worst economic crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, many people understandably have grown weary of accounts concerning recent forms of suffering visited upon various categories of the populace. Some disgruntlement can be attributed to the influence of the neoliberal theater of cruelty described in the last chapter, though one cannot altogether discount garden-variety disaster fatigue. More than four years out, what seems really to have captured the imagination of the general public are instead ripping sagas of those intrepid souls who managed to come through the crisis unscathed, impervious to the damage done all around them. One nice example is Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which Amazon at one time listed as one of the top best-selling books on the crisis: therein he relates the stories of a bunch of misfits and contrarians who managed to make substantial fortunes by betting against the securities derivatives that everyone else had found so seductive in the run-up to 2007. If Lewis’s plucky Boys Behaving Badly could have bucked the headwinds so handily, then why not the rest of us? — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 437

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that The Big Short’s individualist survivor frame displaced victim narratives deserves checking against actual bestseller data and book reviews of the period.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberals weaponize performative ignorance to paralyze post-crisis response — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40; People become more empathetic and resourceful after disasters, not selfish — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 123; Mainstream-post-crisis economic controversies absorbed public attention while serving the Thought Collective’s aims — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 825 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims #expands (0.85) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 337
• Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 433
• Neoliberals weaponize performative ignorance to paralyze post-crisis response #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40
• Mainstream-post-crisis economic controversies absorbed public attention while serving the Thought Collective’s aims #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 825
• Neoliberals actively engineered their post-crisis survival rather than winning by default #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 23
• People become more empathetic and resourceful after disasters, not selfish #contradicts (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 123