By Situation Theatre 10/3/2020
17th Century Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes said it was the state of nature that was a “war of all against all”. He hadn’t yet been to the toilet paper aisle of his local supermarket.
Thomas has since been to pick up some 2-ply at his local Woolies and written this about his experience:
“Aisle 7 is a place where every man is enemy to every man…wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. Beside the Quilton, there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’ recent posthumous change of heart about the true causes of human to human brutality in the face of the Global Bogroll Crisis (GBC) mirrors Guardian columnist George Monbiot’s thoughts on the ways neoliberalism has waged war on the basic humanity of, well, humanity.
His 2017 book, Out Of The Wreckage: A New Politics For An Age Of Crisis, makes a compelling case for our innately social and empathetic impulses. He synthesises the case in a 2019 TED talk in which he says,
Over the past few years there’s been a fascinating convergence of findings in several different sciences, in psychology, in anthropology, in evolutionary biology, and they all tell us… that human beings have this amazing capacity for altruism. Sure, we all have a bit of selfishness and greed inside us, but in most people those are not our dominant values. And we also turn out to be the supreme co-operators: we survived the African savannas despite being weaker and slower than our predators and most of our prey by an amazing ability to engage in mutual aid. And that urge to cooperate has been hardwired into our minds through natural selection.
Monbiot goes on to theorise why we’ve so radically departed from these innate characteristics.
But something has gone horribly wrong.
Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces but I think the most powerful of them is the dominant political narrative of our times which tells us that we should live in extreme individualism and competition with each other. It pushes us to fight each other, to fear and mistrust each other. It atomises society, it weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living. Into that vacuum grow these violent, intolerant forces. We are a society of altruists, but we are governed by psychopaths.
And there is perhaps no greater illustration of his point than this:
The toilet paper aisle at my local supermarket has bodyguards! #innerwestSydney
— Monica Attard (@AttardMon) March 8, 2020
Add that to bogroll-based assaults, taserings, brawls, armed robberies and rationing, and you can really ram the point home.
Explanations for the so called panic buying gripping Australia and other parts of the world abound. They mostly seem to involve psychology buzzwords like behavioural contagion, herd mentality, groupthink, as well as other more prosaic terms like fear, control, and trust.
All of these explanations have some validity.
Yet none have the explanatory power of a hegemonic political ideology which, according to Monbiot, “sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations” and “redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling...”
Under neoliberalism,
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty… efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve… we internalise and reproduce its creeds… in a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers. Among the results… are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. We are all neoliberals now.
The BBC interviewed a social psychology professor at the University of Sussex in the UK, John Dury, who has done extensive research into crowd psychology, for his perspective on coronavirus stockpiling.
He says that one way to escape panic buying mode is for people to think more about community. “When people think of themselves in terms of their social identities, they will be more cooperative, less ready to push into queues, and more willing to share dwindling supplies with strangers than when they think of themselves in terms of their personal identities,” said Drury.
Given neoliberalism’s three-decade trumping of personal identity and trouncing of social identity, its role at the root of this behaviour comes into stark relief.
Make no mistake, the scatological and civilisational mess in which we now find ourselves has its roots in the parasitically successful ideological project of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Her classic epithet “There’s no such thing as society” is a pithy summation of her corrosive individualism. Her belief that “economics is the method: the object is to change the soul” has so fundamentally transformed human behaviour, it’s even made it harder for you to cleanly go number 2 several decades later.
Christine Berry, former Director of Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation, writes beautifully about this phenomenon in a piece called Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls: How Can We Promote Other Identities.
For Berry, neoliberals succeed in drawing out the worst human impulses by taking control of identity formation.
By treating people as selfish, rational utility maximisers, they actively encouraged them to become selfish, rational utility maximisers… it squeezes out competing values that previously governed non-market spheres of life, such as ethics of public service in the public sector, or mutual care within local communities.
But Berry is no nihilist. Like Monbiot, she insists these values remain latent:
Neoliberalism does not have the power to erase them completely. This is where the hope for the left lies, the crack of light through the doorway that needs to be prised open.
Berry offers up academic studies in support of her claim, which show:
In game scenarios presenting the opportunity to free-ride on the efforts of others, only economics students behaved as economic models predicted: all other groups were much more likely to pool their resources. Having been trained to believe that others are likely to be selfish, economists believe that their best course of action is to be selfish as well. The rest of us still have the instinct to cooperate.
So the good news is, fighting each other to the death over scraps of paper to wipe our arses with is not necessarily our destiny.
Let’s now return to Monbiot’s 2019 TED talk, which offers more than just a critique of how neoliberalism has hijacked our empathy. Most importantly, his talk is about the power of new stories to shape our politics, economy, and society.
Monbiot discusses the universal appeal of what he calls the Restoration Story, a narrative structure used in tales from the Bible, to Lord of the Rings, to Harry Potter.
He argues that a compelling new Restoration Story has the power to reclaim our humanity from the neoliberals and fundamentally transform the world.
It goes something like this:
Disorder afflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of people who say “there’s no such thing as society”, who tell us that the highest purpose in life is to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin. But the heroes of the story, us, will revolt against this disorder. We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, inclusive, and generous communities, and in doing so, we will return harmony to the land.
With any luck, we’ll also return harmony to your ability to go to the toilet without making a mess.
And maybe our lives won’t have to be so poor, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short after all.