"FEAR IS THE ENEMY OF FREEDOM
"Another spin on the theme of "freedom"
By Ricardo Forster: The neoliberal construction of “common sense” has been based on the question of freedom, on the perception - artificially generated but solidly installed - that the individual is the undisputed nerve center of freedom. In this way, what is imposed is a worldview that revolves around selfishness, self-referentiality, individualism, the suspicion of any public intervention on "individual freedom" as restrictive, coercive and harmful, competition as the matrix of intersubjective relationships , the dissolution of the common together with the persistent suspicion regarding the "State" as a machinery at the service of the control of individuals and as a great usurper of free actions for the benefit of the "political caste" always associated with populist corruption or - - from the perspectives of the extreme right - to the neoliberal plutocracy (in Argentina the first and not the second of these associations prevails). The trilogy, turned into ontological, of freedom, individual and property (which is at the philosophical basis of classical liberalism) has been radicalized in the neoliberal stage until breaking any link of "responsibility" between the individual and his community, which was a trait A decisive ethical ethic in classical liberalism and which has now been practically discarded in favor of competition and individualistic hyperbole that arises from all responsibility in relation to that other that arises more as a threat than as part of an essential sociability.
It could be said that neoliberalism abandoned, as insubstantial and counterproductive, that “civic and community responsibility” that constituted an intrinsic value to the old liberalism. What he offers, in his direct and savage narrative, is the image of an all-powerful individual who is the architect of both his successes and the person responsible for his failures. Successes and failures that are always the result of his self-sufficient actions that are never aimed at the common good or the care of the community, but rather the search for his own profitability. The imaginary and the fantasies that inhabit the neoliberal subject suppose the contempt of those altruistic values that were even very present in the liberal thinkers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries (John M. Keynes's own economic conception is directly linked to that tradition of social liberalism that today is conspicuous by its absence). The irradiation of this mentality that enhances amoral individualism and the destructive competition of the social fabric have led neoliberalism itself to a dead end and the multiplication of resentment, anger and rejection from broad middle sectors deeply hurt by four decades of market economy and impossible races to a success that only a few achieve. The monstrosity of inequality constitutes irrefutable evidence of the supposed “success” of capitalism in its neoliberal phase. Everything indicates that the pandemic will continue to deepen this feature of a self-destructive system. Taking a look at the ruthless war that has been unleashed around vaccines gives us an image of the selfish horror and suicidal cruelty of those who today monopolize almost all the wealth of the planet.
In the last four decades, a double device has been imposed: on the one hand, sociability has been fragmented to the extreme, underpinning what some critics define as a gigantic desocialization process that breaks the bonds of solidarity and class within a world. socially devastated; and, on the other hand, self-realization is encouraged, the ability to adequately manage one's human capital, risk taking to achieve the objectives sought, the exacerbation of competition as a decisive value in social practices and the empowerment of fired narcissism for the exaltation of the meritocracy. Both devices are combined in the construction of a “common sense” that cannot think of freedom from anywhere other than self-referentiality: freedom as a pure exercise of the Self, as a permanent fulfillment of my desires and as a self-sufficient monad that is threatened by state devices that seek to restrict it, asphyxiate it and, using a successful metaphor, that end up building a “trap” that seeks to restrain it by limiting the individual and imposing external conditions on their needs and values, formatted in recent decades from the major media power plants. Communication.
The systematic construction of this "indestructible" relationship between the individual and freedom involved, at the same time, the meticulous work of annihilating in the imaginary of fragmented society the very idea of a "social and welfare state". What vanishes is society and gives way to the time of the individual as the center of the world, as the sole actor in the drama of his life, completely dehistoricized and absent of any reference to the common. It was Margaret Thatcher who anticipated, in the form of an ominous phrase, that "there is no such thing as society ... only individuals and their families." Without understanding this dialectic between the individual and freedom, to which the internalization of property as the founding component of human life is associated, it is very difficult to challenge society from another idea of “freedom” that can escape the bear hug of the selfishness to express itself from an interiority-exteriority, that is, from the idea of recognition that goes from the self to the us, from the individual to the collective, from the intimate to the shared, from the private to the public and that enhances the value of the intersubjective. In other words: we are obliged to rebuild the space of the common, to reinvent the areas in which the dimension of the social once again shelters people, opening up the perspective of the shared but without losing sight of the fact that we must also protect its dimension individual and the practices in which their freedom is at stake. Remaining only with the claim of inclusion and equality, no matter how just and necessary it may be, would constitute a serious error since that other component of the social imaginary, freedom, lies deeply embedded in the psyche of individuals, often putting it before their material interests leading them to defend options that irreversibly damage their lives. The common sense dispute involves intertwining the different spheres of the individual and the collective, the self and the we, the intimate and the common, the private and the public. It also involves breaking prejudices that prevent us from understanding the complexity of the social, cultural, economic and political fabric that reproduces a type of values absorbed immediately and thoughtlessly by those who will end up being its victims.
The new rights have been able, with great efficiency and cunning, to mobilize the feeling of panic and anger at the dissolution of the traditional spheres of belonging to the point of turning these feelings into anti-system energy and a critique of the globalized plutocracy (the electoral defeat Trump does not mean the end, much less, of the challenge of the radicalized rights that, in the way out of the pandemic that is seen as unfair in the countries of the rich north, will continue to goad the impoverished middle classes and the falling “indigenous” popular sectors free always "threatened" by the poor migrants of the global south and skinned without mercy by the capitalism of dispossession). From progressive, national popular and left traditions it has not been known to fight this battle that has its roots in the symbolic, in the affective and in identity logics without which people feel abandoned and disjointed. Politics, its emancipatory and popularly rooted narrative, should be able to reinstall this dispute for “common sense” without renouncing its idea of a freedom that includes both the individual and the community, that values the dimension of the Self but that it also recovers the value of what is shared, of what is done in common, of solidarity. There it becomes very important to reconstruct a sense of "homeland" linked to belonging, to childhood memory, to affections, to the deep threads that intertwine the life of each one with social life and the inheritances received.
Neoliberalism has been a successful counterrevolution in all the rule whose main focus was the dissolution of the links of integration and social and cultural identity in order to privilege, in an absolute way, the competitive individual and capable of realizing himself. It managed to legitimize, in addition to generating, "inequality, exclusion, private property of the common, plutocracy, and a deeply attenuated democratic imaginary" (Wendy Brown, In the ruins of neoliberalism, 2020). And it is, in this sense , that the appropriation of the idea and practice of freedom was a key factor and main nucleus of that radical reformulation of contemporary subjectivity capable of seriously damaging egalitarian social memory and making it difficult to find the modes of interpellation capable of restoring thickness and strength to that tradition that, in the last forty years, was harshly criticized and demonized by the dominant culture. In any case, the crisis that today strikes the heart of the capitalist system, and that is centered on its neoliberal aspect, leaves the individual devoid of certainties, existentially empty and thrown into the anguish of not finding anything solid around him. The problem with this crisis that radiates over the symbolic-cultural is that, at least until now, the only ones who have known how to take advantage of it by finding a language that challenges this threatened and scared subject, in addition to being traversed by a growing anger, is the extreme right. The problem, for egalitarian and democratic traditions, is that they have not been able to renew their language, they have not been able to understand the scope and dimension of a crisis that is not only economic but also reveals a civilizational corrosion of gigantic scope.
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