Owning the Bullet: How Neoliberalism Turns Violence into Choice

“If someone shoots you in the head, then the bullet in your brain is you—you must own the bullet.” The sentence reads like a line from a dystopian manual on resilience. Yet it captures, with dark precision, the moral grammar of neoliberalism: the insistence that whatever happens to you—violence, poverty, illness, despair—is ultimately an expression of your choices. The self becomes both the battlefield and the casualty, and still must smile for the autopsy report.

The Logic of Self-Ownership

Liberalism begins with the premise that the individual owns themselves. This idea once promised protection against tyranny: your body, your labor, and your will are not property of the state or church. But neoliberalism—an intensified, economized mutation of liberalism—turns self-ownership into self-commodification. You are no longer a subject with rights; you are human capital to be invested, optimized, and leveraged.

Wendy Brown has shown that neoliberalism “economizes the political.” Citizens become little firms of the self, managing risk, branding identity, and competing for survival in deregulated markets. Every failure—losing a job, suffering burnout, being unable to pay rent—is reinterpreted as mismanagement. Responsibility is totalized. There are no accidents, only failed investments.

In this moral order, the bullet in your brain is simply a consequence of poor strategy. You failed to anticipate, failed to hedge, failed to “read the signs.” The distinction between what was done to you and what you did to yourself collapses. Power no longer needs to punish; it merely needs to persuade you that you deserved it.

From Risk to Blame

Foucault described how modern power shifted from the spectacle of sovereign punishment to the subtlety of biopolitics—the management of life. The state no longer kills directly; it shapes the conditions under which life and death occur. But in neoliberalism, the management of life is outsourced to the individual. You are told to “take control of your health,” “secure your financial future,” “own your mental wellbeing.”

This vocabulary of self-management masks a deeper displacement: the structural is privatized into the psychological. If you are anxious, depressed, or precarious, the problem lies not in the economy or the social order but in your coping mechanisms. Structural violence is redescribed as emotional incompetence.

The culture of wellness and “grit” completes the circle. It invites you to see pain as a performance metric, a test of resilience. Even suffering becomes data to optimize. The ideal subject is the one who can be wounded without complaint and call it growth.

The Bullet as Moral Technology

The bullet, in this frame, is not just a weapon—it is a moral technology. It transmits a lesson about responsibility. “You chose to be shot” is not a statement of fact; it is a command: interpret your wound as choice. The power of neoliberalism lies not in coercion but in shaping interpretation.

The absurdity of this moral demand becomes clear in moments of catastrophe. Natural disasters, economic collapse, pandemics—these expose the limits of personal responsibility. Yet the system’s genius is its ability to metabolize even these events into individual lessons. “You should have saved more.” “You should have worked remotely sooner.” “You should have been more adaptable.” Each crisis renews the catechism of blame.

To “own the bullet” is to inhabit this catechism completely—to see your own destruction as self-authorship. It is the endpoint of a culture that confuses autonomy with guilt.

Agamben and the Consent to One’s Own Killing

Agamben’s notion of bare life—life stripped of political significance—helps name what happens here. In a neoliberal order, even bare life must pretend to be empowered. The subject who is shot must still appear responsible for their exposure. What Agamben calls the “camp” becomes generalized: spaces where life and law blur, where vulnerability is normalized.

But there is a uniquely neoliberal twist. In the classical camp, the sovereign decides whose life is expendable. In neoliberalism, the subject is trained to decide it themselves. They “choose” their precarity, their exhaustion, their risk exposure. The sovereign violence is still there—it simply arrives wearing the mask of freedom.

This is what makes the line “you chose to be shot” so chilling: it reveals how far the ideology of choice can stretch before it becomes indistinguishable from death.

The Culture of Performativity

The compulsion to own every experience also defines the digital age. Social media platforms thrive on self-disclosure as currency. Pain must be performatively redeemed: the breakup becomes a “growth journey,” the trauma a “brand narrative.” The system demands that we aestheticize our injuries.

What was once confession (said to be a moral act before God) and then therapy (said to be a private act of healing) has become content (a public act of monetization). The bullet in your brain is now clickbait. Your suffering must circulate to prove its authenticity.

Yet behind this endless performance lies exhaustion. The neoliberal subject must continuously reinvent their pain as productivity. To stop performing—to refuse to narrativize the wound—is to risk invisibility.

Resisting the Demand to Own

The alternative is not self-pity or fatalism, but refusal. Refusal to translate every wound into a personal failure. Refusal to narrate suffering in marketable form. Refusal to be the manager of one’s own destruction.

This refusal can look like passivity from the system’s perspective. But it is closer to what Brown calls reclaiming the political: re-situating harm in its collective, structural, and historical context. It means seeing the bullet not as a moral emblem but as evidence of a system that distributes vulnerability unequally while demanding universal self-blame.

It also recalls Agamben’s call for inoperativity—the suspension of function. To refuse the command to “own” the bullet is to suspend the very logic that turns life into capital and suffering into a lesson.

The Ethics of Disowning

An ethics of disowning might begin here. It would reject the ideology of total responsibility, not in favor of victimhood but of relational truth. It would say: the bullet is not me. I did not choose to be shot. My pain is not a market failure but a social fact.

Such an ethics would reintroduce mediation—the sense that what happens to us passes through systems, relations, and histories that exceed individual agency. It would counter the moral flattening that neoliberal reason performs, restoring depth to experience.

Owning the bullet is the fantasy of a world without relation, where everything that happens is self-generated. Disowning the bullet is the beginning of another world: one that acknowledges interdependence, vulnerability, and the violence of systems that demand we confuse these for personal flaws.

Conclusion: The Freedom to Be Wounded

Neoliberalism promises freedom but delivers its inversion: the freedom to be wounded and to call that freedom. The subject of this world is both executioner and victim, CEO and casualty, endlessly reconciling their pain as profit. To “own the bullet” is to complete the circuit of this ideology—to internalize domination so fully that even being killed must count as self-expression. 

LLM