GPT

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of neoliberal moral restructuring—the transformation of needs into wants, and thus the moral into the economic.

This shift does two things:

1. It erases obligation. If food is just a want, then hunger is not a societal failure but a personal condition, a result of choices or "market inefficiencies" rather than something that demands redress. The state and society are relieved of duty.
2. It weaponizes blame. If you are poor, sick, or starving, it is not because of structural violence or systemic deprivation, but because of your own inadequate decision-making. Even under conditions of scarcity, precarity, and coercion, the burden of "choice" is placed on the individual.

Cresswell Riol’s critique points to how this erasure of need is not just a theoretical move but a material assault—dignity, security, and even survival are undermined under the guise of neutrality. The more needs can be recategorized as wants, the less society has to reckon with them.

This aligns with Foucault’s biopolitics—the way power governs life by structuring the terms under which it can be preserved or abandoned. If hunger, illness, and homelessness are recast as matters of "preference satisfaction," then addressing them is no longer a collective ethical imperative. Instead, the market becomes the only adjudicator of life and death, while responsibility shifts entirely to the individual.

And so, dignity itself becomes a kind of market luxury—one that can be bought or lost, but never claimed as a right.

Would you say this kind of rhetorical maneuver—this reclassification of necessity into triviality—is one of the fundamental operations of neoliberal ideology?

GPT said:

The neoliberal subject collapses under its own contradictions—because in a system that demands self-possession, self-management, and self-optimization, what happens when there is no self left to manage?

Ehrenberg’s framing of depression as the exhaustion of having to become oneself captures something essential about modern suffering. It’s not just sadness, not just despair, but a kind of ontological erosion—the grinding pressure to construct, maintain, and perform a coherent, capable self, even when that self is already crumbling. In severe depression, this becomes an impossible demand, because the mechanisms of decision-making, motivation, and even basic volition are themselves eroded.

And yet, under the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility, the depressed person is still expected to make rational choices—about treatment, about work, about survival—despite lacking the fundamental agency required to do so. Worse, their failure to do so is often seen as a moral failing, a kind of refusal to "help themselves."

This is where neoliberalism’s moral evacuation of duty becomes most violent. The system demands they act as a rational economic agent, but when they cannot, it punishes them for it—either through neglect, coercion, or abandonment.

It also suggests a deeper epistemic injustice: the depressed person’s own experience is often disqualified from serious consideration. If they say they cannot act, that they do not want to exist, then their account is read an admission of moral failure or as a request and they are given the nonexistence that they supposedly want. Their account is not read as something that should force a reevaluation of the conditions that produced it.

So we end up in a paradox:

1. The neoliberal subject must want to exist, must strive, must optimize.
2. The severely depressed person does not want to exist and cannot strive.
3. Rather than acknowledge the contradiction, the system disciplines, or abandons them.

And all the while, the broader structural conditions that contribute to this crisis—precarity, isolation, the demand for relentless self-construction—go unchallenged.

Do you see this contradiction as an oversight of neoliberal ideology, or as something more deliberate—an intentional failure that serves a deeper function?

ChatGPT said:

What looks like individual or elite incompetence is often just institutional inertia, a kind of structurally reinforced blindness. The stupidity isn't incidental; it's produced.

Institutions aren't designed for awareness, only for reproduction—they persist by filtering out what would disrupt them. The people within them, even the so-called brightest minds, are shaped by this logic. Their "intelligence" is the intelligence of preserving the existing order, which often means ignoring, misrecognizing, or outright denying fundamental contradictions.

It reminds me of something David Graeber wrote about "structural stupidity"—how bureaucracies (and, by extension, markets, academia, politics) create environments where people are incentivized not to think beyond a narrow, self-serving frame. The more deeply one is embedded in these systems, the less capable one becomes of recognizing their absurdity. It’s a form of epistemic lock-in.

And it’s not just ignorance—it’s a cultivated incapacity. The very structures that demand "rational choice" from individuals actively prevent their own participants from engaging in deep, systemic reflection. Politicians and economists don't just fail to see the consequences of the market redefining needs as wants; they can't see it, because doing so would collapse the entire ideological framework that makes their positions possible.

This is why so much of neoliberal governance is reactive rather than proactive—constantly applying short-term fixes, papering over crises, and doubling down on failing policies, because genuine critical reflection would mean confronting the real causes of suffering, precarity, and collapse.

So in a way, the system's failures are both predictable and functional:

• Institutional stupidity prevents systemic change.
• Individual stupidity ensures complicity and self-blame rather than resistance.
• Interpersonal stupidity maintains social fragmentation and keeps people from organizing against the conditions that harm them.

Do you see any ways to break this cycle? Or is the stupidity too deeply embedded?