Systemic economic transformations require a legitimising ideology to offset their cruelties

Evidence

In practice, Volcker’s controlled disintegration of the old system required, beyond the neutering of trades unions, an engineered recession in order to reduce workers’ bargaining power and the elimination of the shackles that President Roosevelt had slapped on bankers to restrain their recklessness. These were prerequisites for the Minotaur’s rise. But they were also big political asks with worldwide repercussions. As with every systemic transformation that hurts countless people, the cruelties necessary to bring it about had to be bathed in the light of a liberating, redemptive ideology. That’s where neoliberalism came in. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 219

Categorization

• APHORISMS: A genuinely reusable observation: every painful systemic restructuring is sold through a liberating ideology rather than on its real terms.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s interest in sacrificial legitimating ideologies, bridging to works on how elites finance painful reform with redemptive narratives. — connects to: Romanticism and medievalism are defense mechanisms against industrial capitalism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 195; Resources only become cheap when ideological and legal frameworks rationalize their appropriation. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 285; Postwar global economic integration was framed as requiring Western moral transformation (+11 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 219

Broader Connections

• Ideology shapes economic crisis rather than merely reflecting it #qualifies (0.95)
• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #qualifies (0.90)
• Capitalist relations must be reproduced ideologically, not just economically #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 628
• Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once #qualifies (0.85) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 275
• Ideological forms like wages serve to maintain capitalist domination #qualifies (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 903
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #qualifies (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600
• Socialism requires the material transformation of human beings, not merely of production #expands (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 35
• Organizational rupture with old socialism did not require ideological rupture too #complicates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 95