Yet it is HARD to Wake Up! So much of the world as I have known it has been turned on its head over the past 33 years, which is when I first embarked on - and sustained - my journey of seeking, of questioning, of opening, of awakening. Of course, for me at least, this is certainly a lifelong process. Because deepening consciousness necessitates peeling back layer after layer after layer of my ignorance, my indoctrination, and my utter unawareness of things right in front of my nose and residing within my own heart and soul and the Great Heart that connects us all.
Take neoliberalism. It's everywhere - it's everywhere! - yet it's been so hard to see, to understand, to articulate because I - and the vast majority of Americans - are under its spell. And you sure as hell are not going to hear about the "neoliberal nightmare" on FOX or CNN or MSNBC or ABC or NPR, etc. Instead the corporate media and our educational system and our politicians - with some exceptions (Bernie!) - and our cultural stories feed us this toxic stew and, instead of questioning what we are ingesting, the vast majority of us are swallowing its bullshit even though it is the poison that will kill us all. Crazy! Crazy making to wake up and increasingly be empowered to connect more and more dots, to fill in more and more pieces of this vast mosaic that is the dark side of our species, and to see more and more of how we humans do the opposite of what is in our highest good. The opposite!
And we stay stuck in distractions and addictions, in cultural stories and belief systems, in fear and apathy and anger that serves to disempower us, polarize us, propagandize us, wound us, sever our connection with our deeper selves and with each other, and have us pointing all our fingers outward - blaming poverty on the poor, fiercely believing that Hillary or Trump are the answer, etc., etc. - rather than exploring what is really happening within ourselves and each other and the belief systems we are indoctrinated into.
We need to be curious and courageous and seek to learn what our part is in perpetuating a system that serves greed and power and death and fear rather than life and love, empathy and compassion, connection and caring, joy and beauty, and wellness and a higher good for all.
The neoliberal spell we are under must be increasingly seen for what it is by greater and greater numbers of us. This is essential. Because there are no solutions for problems denied. We truly are all in this together. And we can be brave together!
Please read this. And share. We need to break out of our silence, our apathy, our ignorance, our collusion in systems that destroy rather than honor, respect, and nourish life. Another world is possible. And it begins within the hearts, minds, spirits, and souls of each and every one of us. We can remember what we have forgotten - a sense of the Sacred that is found in all of life.
Bless us all ~ Molly
Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word "neoliberalism," because I was told readers wouldn't comprehend the "jargon." This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.
People throw the term around loosely, as they do with "fascism," with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants, or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton. We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined!
Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?
Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people's self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the "new man."
It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.
I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism's long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything -- every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet -- in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology -- unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years -- that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.
Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36376-our-neoliberal-nightmare-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-and-why-the-wealthy-win-every-time
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