The Neoliberal Wokistan
Or how to conclude contracts at the expense of third parties
This short text may seem counterintuitive, even perhaps as a mental aberration. After all, what do our ›Woken‹ world saviors have to do with the Wall Street Wolves? In following their self-image, we see how they’ve taken an anti-capitalist position, claiming that our social system is exploitatively toxic. From this perspective, any notion that these zealots could even remotely have anything to do with Neo-liberalism seems downright absurd, especially since the actors' understanding of their roles is in diametric opposition. This is because before their house of cards collapsed, neoliberal social innovators behaved like Masters of the Universe, while Woken elites have cultivated an image of victimhood by basing their political identity on the claim they’ve been cheated out of their future by a fossilized nomenclature. But here, what should be suspicious is that we're dealing with an egocentricity whose essential goal is social advancement. In this sense, these Identity-Politics claims are neither forms of self-sufficiency nor those of self-reflexion. Instead, they’re demands in the form of guilt-assignations that others must meet. Thus, it isn’t any wonder how a form of moral supremacy arises from this – and with it, a claim to public attention, which, as we know in our age of social media, represents a source of monetization.
We must go back to the 1980s and early '90s to understand this deep, inner affinity between neoliberal thinking and woke ideology when neoliberal thinking (previously the creed of a minor, rather marginal group of economists) was coming into its own. If we ask what suddenly made this school of thought so attractive, we only have to remember with the advent of the computer age, the money economy also entered the age of free-floating – and that Capital, controlled by fax, email, and computer programs, could leave national borders behind. So when neoliberal thinkers proclaimed that the Market could take over the State's role, it was based only on a technological solution––and not because their level of reflexion had suddenly shot up to an unimaginable height.1 It didn't mean the business leaders pursuing the computer-augmented opportunities had undergone a digital literacy program by any stretch of the imagination, as the crash on October 19th, 1987––mainly due to brokers outsourcing their transactions to the same computer program––is an eloquent testimony to their digital illiteracy. Attempting to translate the seductiveness of neoliberal thinking into psychological terms, the term anti-authoritarian youth revolt could be used as a form of monetary patricide. According to the doctrine propagated by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, which found an open ear in politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the State is an authority leading its citizens into bondage. In contrast, the Market promises liberation from the yoke of the Leviathan. However, the promise of Market unleashing as a necessary means of increasing the common good soon proved to be nothing more than a marketing ploy. The first steps taken by the unleashed markets were the unfriendly takeovers of the 1990s. The procedure for these takeovers was always the same: investors and banks joined forces to forcefully take over a profitable company, sell off its less profitable parts––or replace them with the workforce of a third-world country. In short, the strategy was to realize an arbitrage profit – meaning that the capital owners concluded contracts at the expense of third parties, namely all the workers who were thus dismissed into neoliberal freedom (a.k.a. unemployment). However, this didn't create anything truly new; it was just a downward spiral allowing capital owners to enrich themselves primarily by reducing labor costs. Attributing this process––which was solely due to Digitalisation––to the emblem of ›Globalization‹ is proof of an intellectual aberration of being unable to distinguish cause from effect.
The extent to which the Zeitgeist had fallen prey to the neoliberal drug was becoming apparent as early as the 1990s. As a new form of political management established itself in England with New Labour, politicians increasingly saw themselves as brokers whose main task was scoring points for their country in locational competition contests to attract businesses. Consequently, they hurried to remove long-standing obstacles from their path. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under the Clinton administration, Capital had freed itself of all social constraints. In structural terms, every commercial bank became a global player who could join in the game of global limbo economy at will. What benefited the banks was only a cheap political solution. Just as the Neoliberal Masterminds gave themselves the appearance of greater wisdom by insisting on Market rationality, the political class was rebranding itself with a new, zeitgeisty coat of paint. The practices they resorted to were no less questionable than the piracy characterizing the unfriendly takeovers of the 1990s. For example, in 2000, the City Treasurer of Cologne presented an astonished public with a check for the princely sum of 1.3 billion euros. For what? Well, he'd leased the Cologne Waterworks to an unnamed consortium based in Georgetown, Cayman Islands – and this consortium was a company that enabled wealthy Americans to reduce their tax burden through investment––which once again constituted a contract at the expense of third parties. Even more astonishing than this sleight of hand was how the public didn’t criticize such behavior as a form of piracy but was widely celebrated. At the time, I saw a State Secretary when our two sons would periodically get together and enthusiastically play a Mafia computer game, so I had the pleasure of hearing him explain the inner workings of the Ministry of Economics – which he was in an excellent position to do, having served under Ministers of Economics of all stripes since the early 1980s. When I asked him whether there had ever been a discussion in the Christian-led, and later the Social Democrat-led, Federal Government about whether it made sense putting State assets into the hands of private owners like Ron Sommer, he replied: ›No, there had never been such a discussion. On the contrary, they felt that this was a way of freeing themselves from the burdens of the authoritarian state – as modern, progressive, and in keeping with the times as the New Labour movement under Tony Blair had shown in England.‹ Finally free!
The dot-com bubble should have made it clear to anyone paying attention just how much the ruling classes had succumbed to psychological inflation. But instead of racking their brains over how the digitalised landscape of thinking had changed and asking precisely what this New Economy meant for the Institutions, they let the music play – and enjoyed all the wonderful profits raining down on the heads of those who were able to recite the magic words in this game of Bullshit Bingo. And because even the less talented could count on a ›dumb bonus‹, the approval was overwhelming.2 What strange traits this neoliberal zeitgeist could take on became even more apparent through what another acquaintance told me. He'd been entrusted with modernizing the German stock exchange system – or rather: reprogramming it line by line. And because speed was of the essence in this undertaking, his programmers had spent months examining every single line of code for performance – creating a system that would enable the stock exchange to enter the new millennium with the support of JAVA. The bankers and programmers were invited to a party in one of Frankfurt's skyscrapers to celebrate this achievement. This would have been an opportunity not only to celebrate the completion of the project but also to explore each other’s worldview––but these two tribes had nothing to say to each other. So they stayed in their cliques. While one group celebrated the completion of their program, the other group could indulge in their dreams of becoming Masters of the Universe in self-empowerment fantasies immediately requiring corporeal expression. At the climax of this sad celebration, as my acquaintance told me in shock, the bankers had begun to open their champagne bottles as they aimed the corks at the passers-by, many stories below them. I was studying Melanesian cargo cults at the time, and an absurd story from the Second World War came to mind. The Americans had landed somewhere in Melanesia and were suddenly facing a Neolithic tribal society. And because they wanted to be friendly and hospitable, they invited the natives to take a sightseeing flight over the island. When the day came, the Americans were surprised that their guests had arrived with several heavy sacks for the flight. What these were for became apparent when they flew over the settlement of a neighboring tribe – because the native aero-tourists began throwing stones through the open doors of the transport plane down on their neighbors' houses. And because this came to mind when my friend told me the story, I burst out laughing – it cast the behavior of the champagne-cork-shooting stockbrokers in a new, neolithic light. However, it was not until the financial crisis of 2008/2009 that it became clear that these Masters of the Universe had, in fact, been taken in by their own fantasies. Because while the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, still claimed that the risk hedges were so complex that only a quantum mechanic could decipher them, the crash made it clear that the Wolves of Wall Street had been worshipping a digitalized cargo cult, and that their securitized loans were not even worth the paper they were printed on. What's more, the crisis's outcome made it clear that all the talk of Market wisdom had been hot air – in the end, the bankers had agreed to rely on Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac for government-backed funds, which means that the history of Neoliberalism, once again, boils down to a contract at the expense of third parties – namely, all those who had to pay for the actions of the pirates.
While this narrative may have long since become common knowledge in one form or another, the relationship between woken Identity Politics and Neoliberalism isn't yet apparent. The connections become clearer after returning to their origins and understanding Neoliberalism as a form of pleasurably organized irresponsibility. If Neoliberalism was first and foremost directed against the State, Identity Politics is directed against a patriarchal system that has been denigrated as toxic. It's no coincidence that Michel Foucault, the first philosopher who turned to Neoliberalism, has become the main inspirer of woken thinking. However, there's an inversion here. Because while Neoliberalism has heralded an apotheosis of the Market and homo oeconomicus that trumpets Greed is Cool! – Identity Politics is doing everything it can to market its victim status as profitably as possible. And the ideological tool that’s proven particularly suitable for this is the declaration of belonging to a discriminated against minority. Because if you can claim a historical injustice for yourself, you can use it to demand compensation and restitution. This isn't about questions of self-reflexion but about what Bourdieu called a currency of prestige – except that it changes its shape and form as it enters the moral economy: from luxury handbag to victim narrative. When Yascha Mounk spoke of strategic essentialism here, it was a polite way of saying this kind of warfare is a kind of moral protection racket. And because social media (and its logic of scaling) makes this possible, this form of warfare can lend the appropriate emphasis to its demands. In this sense, the lived experience is meaningless. It would be much more relevant to recall that in ancient times, the term ›Character‹ referred to the stamp used by the Polis for its coins. In any case, whatever form it takes, the question of identity misses the point. When Identity Politics are being negotiated, we deal with character masks whose real value lies in cloaking the underlying interest in clouds of moral rectitude. Just as the neoliberal financiers made a point of appropriating the assets of national economies, their woken successors are now busy turning their assumed victim status into hard cash – and like the financiers, they’re using the digitalised infrastructure to do so. After all, as the transsexual activists have shown us, small or even tiny groups can wield enormous influence with the help of social media. With this in mind, all the talk of civil society turns out to be a thin veneer concealing the influence of fronts of highly questionable organizations. When discussing purity, sustainability, and justice in the moral economy, it's not about saving the world but distributing State sinecures. The extent to which the woke mindset has taken over political discourse is evident in the self-identification law that the German government has put forward. A person, following their lived experience, may subscribe to this or that life or gender model, following the logic of liberalism, which is perfectly understandable – after all, we know that the will of man is his heaven. However, the situation looks very different when such a self-declaration is given the Force of Law – and can, from that point on, be used to make all those unwilling to follow it feel the severity of the law judicially – without the need for the State's direct intervention. If Christopher Lasch (in his excellent Culture of Narcissism) interpreted the call for a punitive state as an expression of some inner vacuum, it's clear that this punitive father-god doesn't want to go along with the denigration of the State, which is branded as a toxic, racist, colonialist system. If this blatant cognitive dissonance isn't experienced as such, it's because a privatization act has been carried out here. If the neoliberals fought the State to be bought out in the end – and by the State, no less – to be compensated for the losses they had caused themselves, the woke privatization measure consists of granting legal force to your privileges. If the song of systemic relevance was once sung (too big to fail), the moral superlatives of Wokistan are fed by lived experience (too moral to be misguided) – and you don't have to look far to see the absurdity of this way of thinking.
I don't look like Dieter Bohlen3, I don't sing or speak like Dieter Bohlen, but because I feel like Dieter Bohlen, I am Dieter Bohlen – and if anyone doubts that, they will be sued.
The fact that this obvious absurdity has passed into law despite this only shows how far Wokistan's demon has eaten its way into our public discourse. From a structural point of view, the individual who declares himself to be this or that slips into the role of the Central Bank, issuing his own currency that circulates as a valid means of payment.4 But this is precisely the point because it isn't the exploration of an unexplored continent that constitutes the meaning of fiat identity. Ideally garnished with a sacrificial bonus, it's a coin that can be used to acquire privileges that would otherwise be denied. How did Oscar Wilde characterize his sentimentalists?
»A sentimentalist is simply someone who wants the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.«5
This is the common ground that unites Neoliberalism and Wokism. People push their way to the front – taking advantage of the tools our digital age provides for self-aggrandizement. However, they're unwilling to pay the admission price that's due because this involves (as we never tire of emphasizing) leaving your identity behind – and realizing instead that the digital natives' prospectus is in your dividuality. In this sense, neoliberal Wokistan, however modern its behavior is portrayed, is so profoundly reactionary that even the most reactionary conservatives look pale in comparison. Here, the greatest danger lies in the toxic mixture of historical amnesia and the blind use of social media. When the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre asked the rhetorical question of whether there could be anything more frightening than a child endowed with superhuman powers, he provided the psychogram of today's infantilized discourse.
Once an identity phantasm has been given the power of social media, achievements such as the presumption of innocence, free speech, and civic civility seem like remnants of a bygone era.
The question is: what would happen if the tool that makes this self-empowerment fantasy possible in the first place were to fail? In this context, it's worth remembering what happened to the Neolithic airborne tourists of Melanesia after the Americans left the country. Once they'd experienced what it was like flying over their neighbors' territory in an airplane, they began to harbor the audacious hope that they could attract the extraterrestrials who had brought so many beautiful things. So, they built landing strips and lit fires to imitate the signal lights – and to recruit an air traffic controller, they put a wooden headset on one of the natives and told him to move his head back and forth. And because all this did not help, they wreathed the flight paths and sent flaming prayers to heaven, hoping the aliens would hear them and return. What anthropologists have labeled the cargo cult expresses nothing other than the fact that contact with modernity doesn't come without consequences – or, to put it another way, the only hope of sharing in its blessings is to undergo its essential lessons of alphabetic literacy. It's precisely this willingness that's lacking in neoliberal Wokistan. People want the luxury but aren't willing to pay the price. It could well be that the champagne corks will continue to pop for a while, but it'll get dark when the intelligentsia has left. What did they say about the collapsing Eastern bloc? The last one turns out the lights.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
On the contrary, if you read Friedrich von Hayek's »Denationalization of Money,« which he wrote after the floating of exchange rates, it's evident that the replacement of Central Banks by the Market, meaning by private banks, as he proposed, wasn’t able to solve the fundamental question. If we understand free-floating as a transition to a post-material, digitalized age, Hayek's suggestion that private banks should issue gold-backed currency shows that he was completely unaware of the real turning point.
To understand the term ›dumb bonus,‹ you only have to remember that, for example, the company EM-TV, which had little more than the film rights to Maya the Bee, had a higher market capitalization than Lufthansa – with its fleet of aircraft, subsidiaries and thousands of employees – at the height of the dot-com bubble.
Dieter Bohlen is a German pop star (known for his simplistic compositions), an influencer, and a judge on Pop Idol, who is often compared to Simon Cowell. He’s known for his quote, »Das Problem ist: Mach einem Bekloppten klar, dass er ein Bekloppter ist« [The problem is: make a crazy person realize that they are crazy], Bohlen, D. – Nichts als die Wahrheit, München 2003, p. 88.
See Burckhardt, M. – The Bill of Identity, Ex nihilo, Feb 23, 2024, for further elucidation.
Oscar Wilde: From De Profundis, in The Letters Of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, New York, 2000, p. 501.
