"They absolutely don’t care about us, even the people around us, most of the time, don’t give a damn, let alone random rich people. They just see most poor humans as useless eaters taking up space".

 A limited symptom attack (LSA) or limited symptom panic attack is a milder form of panic attack where a person experiences fewer than four of the standard DSM-5 panic symptoms. [1]

Key Characteristics

Symptom Count: Involves 1, 2, or 3 panic symptoms (such as a racing heart, trembling, dizziness, or a sudden fear of dying) instead of four or more. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Duration: Typically peaks within 10 minutes and can last from 1 to 5 minutes, or persist as part of a waxing and waning episode for several hours. [1]
Context: They frequently occur in people with panic disorder, phobias, or agoraphobia, and are commonly experienced by individuals recovering from or undergoing treatment for panic disorder as symptoms decrease in intensity. [1, 2]
Impact: Even though they involve fewer symptoms, they can still cause significant distress, physical discomfort, and worry. Learn more about symptom criteria through the Anxiety & Depression Association of America. [1, 2]

 "If somebody can't afford decent housing, telling them that: 'less is more' might actually get you punched in the face, in certain circumstances. Because sometimes, less is definitely less."

FM

 Sure. The clearest way to answer this is to use the UK under Margaret Thatcher as the case study, since it is one of the most important examples of neoliberal reform.

1. What problems existed beforehand?

By the late 1970s, Britain had several serious economic problems:

• High inflation: inflation reached about 27% in 1975, though it had fallen considerably by 1979.
• Low productivity growth: British industry was often less productive than major competitors such as West Germany, France and the US.
• Frequent industrial disputes: strikes and confrontations between governments and trade unions were a major feature of the 1970s.
• Weak economic growth: Britain had experienced relatively poor growth and repeated "stop-go" cycles.
• Large and inefficient state-owned industries: sectors such as coal, steel, railways and telecommunications were substantially state-owned.
• Fiscal and external pressures: Britain experienced a serious financial crisis in 1976 and required an IMF loan, although the crisis was not simply caused by excessive public spending.

So there were genuine economic problems requiring reform. The important question is whether the particular reforms Thatcher chose were necessary to solve them.

---

2. What reforms were introduced?

Thatcher's governments pursued a fairly broad transformation:

Reform	What happened
Monetarist policy	Interest rates were raised and monetary policy was used to reduce inflation
Privatization	State-owned companies such as British Telecom, British Gas and British Airways were sold
Trade-union reform	Laws restricted secondary action, strengthened balloting requirements and changed union liability
Financial deregulation	The 1986 "Big Bang" substantially changed London's financial markets
Tax reform	Income-tax rates were reduced while indirect taxation became more important
Deregulation	Various controls on businesses and markets were reduced
Council-house sales	Tenants were given the right to buy many council properties
Reduced subsidies	Government support for some industries was reduced
Greater competition	Competition was promoted in areas previously dominated by state monopolies

These weren't one single policy. They were a package of reforms, and it's important not to treat them as if they were all equally necessary.

---

3. Which reforms were arguably necessary?

There is a stronger case for some reforms than others.

Controlling inflation

This is probably the clearest example.

Britain had experienced repeated episodes of high inflation, and bringing inflation down was an important economic objective.

However, the fact that inflation needed to be reduced doesn't prove that every aspect of monetarist policy was necessary.

The government could have pursued disinflation through different combinations of:

• monetary policy,
• incomes policy,
• wage bargaining,
• fiscal policy,
• exchange-rate policy.

So:

Problem: inflation was genuinely serious.
Need for action: high.
Necessity of Thatcher's precise method: much more debatable.

---

Reforming inefficient state industries

There was also a legitimate argument for improving state-owned enterprises.

Some state industries suffered from:

• low productivity,
• overstaffing,
• political interference,
• inadequate investment,
• weak incentives to reduce costs.

But privatization was only one possible solution.

Alternative approaches included:

• restructuring public companies,
• giving managers greater autonomy,
• introducing competition while retaining public ownership,
• partial privatization,
• employee ownership.

Thus:

"The state industries needed reform" does not logically imply "they needed to be privatized."

That's an important distinction.

---

4. Which reforms were more ideological or politically chosen?

This is where the distinction becomes particularly useful.

Privatization

There was an economic case for increasing competition and improving management.

But selling state assets was not economically inevitable.

A government could have kept British Telecom or British Gas publicly owned while restructuring them and introducing competition.

Privatization therefore involved a political/ideological choice about the appropriate role of the state, in addition to an economic argument about efficiency.

---

Trade-union reform

Britain's industrial relations genuinely had problems.

But there were different ways to address them.

Thatcher's government chose legislation that significantly shifted the balance of power between unions, employers and government.

That was not simply a technical economic reform. It reflected a particular political conception of:

• individual bargaining,
• collective bargaining,
• property rights,
• union power,
• the role of the state.

So industrial-relations reform was arguably necessary; the exact Thatcherite form of it was a political choice.

---

Tax cuts

The government reduced the top rate of income tax substantially.

There was an economic argument that high marginal tax rates could discourage work, investment and entrepreneurship.

But there was also an ideological argument:

Should the government redistribute income extensively through taxation, or should individuals retain more of their income?

There isn't an objective economic theorem that determines the answer.

The need to maintain sustainable public finances is one thing; the choice of a particular distribution of taxation is another.

---

5. The biggest issue: could Britain have reformed without neoliberalism?

This is ultimately the most interesting question.

Yes.

There was nothing inevitable about Britain following exactly the Thatcherite path.

Consider two hypothetical alternatives.

Alternative A: Social-democratic reform

Britain could have retained more public ownership while:

• restructuring inefficient industries,
• increasing managerial independence,
• investing in technology,
• improving vocational training,
• reforming industrial relations,
• introducing competition,
• maintaining stronger welfare provision.

This would still have involved substantial economic reform without full-scale neoliberalism.

Alternative B: Thatcherite reform

The actual government pursued:

• privatization,
• deregulation,
• weaker unions,
• lower direct taxation,
• greater reliance on markets,
• reduced state ownership.

Both approaches could recognize that Britain's economy had serious problems.

The disagreement was over how far markets should replace government direction.

---

6. What happened afterward?

The reforms had both significant successes and significant costs, and their effects differed across groups and regions.

Inflation was brought down dramatically after the severe early-1980s recession. Productivity growth subsequently improved, and Britain's economy became more market-oriented and financially integrated.

But the adjustment was extremely disruptive.

Unemployment rose above 3 million in the early 1980s. Manufacturing employment declined dramatically, and many industrial communities experienced long-term economic and social disruption.

Regional inequality also became an important issue, with economic activity increasingly concentrated in London and parts of southern England.

So the historical debate isn't really:

"Did neoliberalism fix an economy that was completely broken?"

versus

"Did neoliberalism destroy a perfectly functioning economy?"

Neither description captures the evidence particularly well.

A better interpretation is:

Britain had genuine structural and macroeconomic problems in the 1970s. Some substantial reforms were necessary. But the particular combination of privatization, deregulation, union reform, tax changes and reduced state intervention was a political choice among several possible reform strategies.

---

7. A useful way to distinguish "necessary" from "ideological"

You can evaluate each policy by asking three questions:

1. Was there a real problem?

For example, high inflation → yes.

2. Did the government need to do something about it?

High inflation → yes.

3. Did solving the problem require this particular policy?

Inflation → no. There were multiple possible approaches.

That gives us:

Policy	Problem was real?	Reform necessary?	Particular neoliberal solution inevitable?
Reduce inflation	Yes	Yes	No
Reform inefficient industries	Yes	Generally	No
Improve industrial relations	Yes	Yes	No
Increase competition	Often	Often	No
Privatize state firms	Sometimes	No	No
Weaken trade-union power	Industrial relations problem existed	Not necessarily	No
Reduce top income-tax rates	Some economic arguments	No	No
Financial deregulation	Financial markets needed modernization	Not necessarily	No

That distinction is probably the best way to think about neoliberalism generally.

The existence of an economic crisis can make reform necessary without making one particular ideology necessary.

 While the classic "reject versus affirm" framing belongs largely to existentialism, the Age of Reason and the Anglo-American analytical and empirical traditions approached the value of life through different conceptual toolkits. Rather than framing existence as an ontological crisis of cosmic affirmation or denial, they interrogated the calculus of happiness, the limits of human reason, and the empirical verification of meaning.

1. The Age of Reason (Rationalism)

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists sought to ground existence in clear, distinct ideas and logical necessity, viewing life not as a tragic burden to be endured or a dramatic theater of absurdity, but as a structure to be understood and optimized through reason.

• Baruch Spinoza (Amor Dei Intellectualis): Spinoza offers the rationalist analogue to Nietzsche's amor fati. For Spinoza, everything that occurs does so with the absolute necessity of divine substance (Deus sive Natura). To reject life, sadness (tristitia), or suffering is to suffer from inadequate ideas—failing to see reality sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). True intellectual love of God is the ultimate affirmation of reality as it is rationally structured.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (The Best of All Possible Worlds): Leibniz famously argued that an all-good, all-powerful creator must have selected the best of all possible worlds. While this provoked Voltaire's savage satire in Candide (rejecting the Panglossian optimism that "all is for the best"), Leibniz maintained that the total sum of perfection outweighs the localized suffering within the system. Reason dictates that existence is fundamentally coherent and rational, even if human finitude cannot trace the full harmony.

2. British Empiricism

Empiricists discarded grand metaphysical frameworks in favor of experience, observation, and utility, treating life's value as an empirical question of pleasure and pain.

• David Hume (Mitigated Skepticism & Sentiment): Hume dismissed both dogmatic optimism and radical pessimism as flights of metaphysical fancy. For Hume, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. Life is not to be abstractly "rejected" or "affirmed" in a cosmic vacuum; rather, it is navigated through custom, sociability, and natural sentiment. If life becomes too heavy, Hume famously defended suicide in his essay Of Suicide as a rational choice when the pain of living outweighs the utility of existence, cutting against both Christian prohibitions and romanticized endurance.

• Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill): Empiricism culminated in the quantitative and qualitative calculus of utility. Life is affirmed if and only if it produces an excess of pleasure (or happiness) over pain. Bentham quantified this mechanically, while Mill introduced qualitative distinctions ("better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"). For the utilitarian, the rejection of life is a failure of social arrangements or individual circumstance to generate net utility, rather than an existential tragedy.

3. Analytic Philosophy and Logical Positivism

As philosophy shifted toward language, logic, and verification in the twentieth century, analytic thinkers argued that the question "to reject or affirm life" is, strictly speaking, meaningless in a technical sense.

• Logical Positivism (A.J. Ayer and the Vienna Circle): According to the verification criterion of meaning, statements about the ultimate "meaning," "value," or cosmic justification of life are neither tautologies (like logic and math) nor empirically verifiable facts. Therefore, they are literally nonsensical—emotive expressions of attitude rather than propositions about reality. An analytic philosopher would analyze the grammar of the question: what empirical conditions would falsify an "affirmation" of life? If none, the debate collapses into a matter of psychological preference.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus): Wittgenstein famously declared that "the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem." To worry about whether to accept or reject life is to look in the wrong direction; the mystical lies not in how the world is, but that it is. Life is not a problem to be solved or a thesis to be judged, but a boundary condition of language and experience.

Analytic vs. Continental Approaches to Existence

Dimension	Age of Reason & Empiricism	Analytic Philosophy
Primary Method	Logical deduction (Rationalism) or observation of utility/passion (Empiricism).	Linguistic analysis, formal logic, verification criteria.
Status of the Question	Addressed through ethics, political economy, and the calculus of pleasure/pain.	Treated as a category mistake or an emotive expression rather than a cognitive proposition.
Stance on Suffering	A problem to be minimized via social reform, institutional design, or rational understanding.	A clinical or psychological state, or a consequence of conceptual confusion.

The tension you are outlining captures the fundamental dialectic of natural and metaphysical existence: the co-presence of constructive, life-affirming forces alongside violent, extractive, and destructive mechanisms.

This duality can be understood across three interconnected registers: biological, moral-political, and metaphysical/theological.

1. Biological Register: Interdependence vs. Extraction

Nature presents two simultaneous operational modes:

• Life-Affirming Dynamics (Symbiosis, Mutual Aid, Nurture):

  • Symbiosis & Mutualism: Mycorrhizal networks in forests share nutrients between trees and fungi, demonstrating that survival often depends on shared infrastructure rather than pure competition.

  • Mutual Aid: As Peter Kropotkin observed, evolutionary success relies heavily on intra-species cooperation and solidarity, where group survival outweighs individual dominance.

  • Nurture: Parental investment, social grooming, and energetic sacrifice ensure the continuation of offspring and group cohesion.

• Extractive & Destructive Dynamics (Predation, Parasitism, Horror):

  • Predation: The transfer of energy required for life depends directly on the destruction of another organism's life.

  • Parasitism: Systemic exploitation where one entity lives at the direct, ongoing expense of a host without providing reciprocal value.

  • Natural Horror: The visceral indifference of evolutionary processes, where pain and suffering function merely as informational signals rather than moral events.

2. Moral & Political Register: Constructive Harmony vs. Structural Violence

In social and political structures, these biological patterns translate into human ethics and governance:

Constructive Horizon Extractive/Destructive Horizon Positive

Peace: Not merely the absence of active conflict (negative peace), but the presence of justice, equity, and structural conditions that allow all individuals to flourish. Injustice & Structural Violence: Systems organized to concentrate wealth, power, or agency by systematically exploiting or marginalizing subordinate groups. Mercy: The deliberate suspension or mitigation of judgment or harm when one holds the power to inflict it; an active restraint against total dominance. Cruelty & Cruelty-as-Policy: The instrumentalization of suffering or neglect to enforce hierarchy, discipline, or extraction.

3. Metaphysical & Theological Register: God, Satan, and cosmic Tension

At the symbolic and theological level, this conflict reaches its ultimate expression:

• The Divine / "God": Represents the source of being, light, ultimate order, unconditional love (agape), and the horizon of ultimate reconciliation (positive peace).

• The Adversary / "Satan": Represents division, total self-assertion at the expense of the whole, structural corruption, cynicism, and the reduction of creation to raw utility or chaos.

• The Cosmic Conflict: This tension is framed differently across theoretical traditions:

  • Manichaean/Dualist: Good and Evil exist as two equal, co-eternal forces locked in perpetual war.

  • Augustinian/Privatio Boni: Evil is not an independent substance, but a privation or parasitic distortion of the Good—much like parasitism requires a living host to exist.

  • Dialectical/Process: Creation is an ongoing process where harmony and destruction continually contend, making ethical action a deliberate choice to align with life-sustaining forces against entropy and exploitation.

Robert Musil’s idea of “intelligent stupidity” (intelligente Dummheit) is one of the most interesting concepts in his essays on modern culture, especially his 1937 essay “On Stupidity” (Über die Dummheit).

The paradox is deliberate: stupidity is not necessarily the opposite of intelligence. Someone can be highly educated, intellectually sophisticated, and capable of elaborate reasoning—and yet be “stupid” in a deeper sense.

What does Musil mean?

For Musil, there is a kind of stupidity that arises from intelligence itself.

A person may possess enormous intellectual ability but become trapped by:

• rigid concepts and categories,
• excessive rationalization,
• conventional assumptions,
• the desire to make everything logically coherent,
• or the inability to recognize what falls outside their conceptual framework.

In this sense, intelligence can become an obstacle to understanding.

Musil distinguishes this from simple lack of knowledge. Ordinary stupidity might mean not knowing something. “Intelligent stupidity” is closer to knowing a great deal but being unable to see beyond the framework through which you know it.

The central paradox

You can think of it like this:

Intelligence gives us tools for understanding reality; intelligent stupidity occurs when we become so attached to those tools that we mistake them for reality itself.

Someone can construct a brilliant argument for a fundamentally inadequate premise. Their reasoning may be impeccable, while their way of seeing is impoverished.

That's why Musil's concept is particularly interesting: logical correctness isn't the same thing as intellectual openness.

Why call it “stupidity”?

Musil isn't simply insulting intelligent people. He's pointing to a structural problem in intellectual life.

Imagine a brilliant political theorist who has a sophisticated theory explaining society. Every new event is interpreted through that theory. When reality contradicts the theory, they don't reconsider the theory; instead, they invent increasingly sophisticated explanations for why reality appears to contradict it.

The person's intelligence actually makes the problem worse: they have more intellectual resources available for defending their blindness.

That's “intelligent stupidity.”

It also has an ethical dimension

Musil thought genuine intelligence required something more than analytical ability. It required a capacity for uncertainty, flexibility, imagination, and responsiveness to experience.

This connects to a broader theme in his novel The Man Without Qualities: the tension between the possible and the actual.

Musil was suspicious of people who treated their concepts, ideologies, moral systems, or social conventions as if they were final descriptions of reality. Reality is messier than our categories.

So genuine intelligence sometimes looks less like certainty and more like:

“I have a theory—but perhaps reality is telling me that my theory is inadequate.”

A useful distinction

Ordinary stupidity	Intelligent stupidity
Doesn't understand	Understands within a narrow framework
Lacks information	Has lots of information
Can't construct an argument	Can construct extremely sophisticated arguments
May be corrected by learning	May use learning to defend itself
Simple error	Systematic intellectual blindness

The second kind is much harder to detect because it can look exactly like intelligence.

And Musil's deeper point

There is an important warning here for modern intellectual culture:

Being clever isn't enough.

Intelligence can produce increasingly elaborate systems of explanation without necessarily bringing us closer to truth. Sometimes the more intelligent person is better equipped to rationalize what they already believe.

For Musil, therefore, the opposite of stupidity isn't simply high intelligence. It is something more like intellectual openness—the ability to remain responsive to reality when reality refuses to fit neatly into our concepts.

That is what makes “intelligent stupidity” such a powerful idea: the most dangerous form of stupidity may be the kind that can explain itself brilliantly.