Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls – How Can We Promote Other Identities? — Christine Berry

At the simplest level, "it's the incentives, stupid."

And incentives reflect underlying values and value structure that shape interests and the their pursuit.

Foundationally, it about the level of collective consciousness. Want to change social behavior for the "better"? Raise the level of collective consciousness. But what are the criteria of "better"? How can they be determined – instrumentally by outcomes, deontologically on the basis of universally applicable rules), virtue based on character, or simply constructed institutionally through the historical dialectic, or some combination thereof? How would a combination be arrived at – theoretically, practically, or through emergence? How objective can a conclusion regarding this be?

The current dialectic between "capitalism" and "socialism" is about individuality versus community. This leads to various paradoxes of liberalism, such as freedom versus responsibility, individual liberty versus social order, homo economicus versus homo socialis.

This is reflected in part in the current dialectic between liberalism and traditionalism that dominates the world stage now that fascism and communism have more or less taken a back seat but not disappeared either, with nationalism and populism rising, and China still a communist country even though no longer Maoist.

Each of these political systems and theories on which they are based contains a kernel of truth. The challenge is harmonizing them in terms what is valuable while losing what is not, especially when what is not dominates.

This is not something that is going to be figured out intellectually and then imposed. It is going to develop organically on the field of history, where the future is uncertain. It is subject to emergence since societies are complex adaptive system. However, the unfolding of history is also path-dependent and constrained by "endowments."

Open Democracy
Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls – How Can We Promote Other Identities?
Christine Berry, freelance researcher and writer was previously Director of Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation

ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.