Self-help ideology has become the spontaneous ideology of the neoliberal era
Evidence
The propagation of magical voluntarism has been crucial to the success of neoliberalism; we might go so far as to say as it constitutes something like the spontaneous ideology of our times. Thus, for example, ideas from self-help therapy have become very influential in popular television shows. The Oprah Winfrey Show is probably the best-known example, but in the UK programmes such as Mary, Queen of Shops and The Fairy Jobmother explicitly promote magical voluntarism’s psychic entrepreneurialism: these programmes assure us that the fetters on our productive potentials lie within us. If we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct ourselves. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1502
Categorization
- SEED: Material for an essay on self-help/wellness culture as the covert political engine of individualism.
- XREF: connects to: Self-help ideology makes individuals feel responsible for misery that corporations create — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 533; Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332; Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 302 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation
#expands(0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332 - 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 - Neoliberalism exists to reverse modernity’s claims to self-determination
#complicates(0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 116 - Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self
#responds-to(0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421