One of the most disappointing experiences since I’ve been paying attention to politics (which for me was around 1982 or so) has been to watch people I formerly thought of as intelligent and progressive array behind a warmongering neoliberal.

No, I’m not talking about Trump.

I’m talking about Hillary Clinton.

One of the reasons I started researching how ideas dominate the discourse and how other ideas are eradicated is from this experience, as I realized that even people who thought they remained untainted and unsullied by neoliberal modes of thought were in fact some of the people most in thrall to them. Prior to this being made so apparent, I’d written a little about how there was no discourse possible outside of the neoliberal one but that was just an intellectual examination.

But the realization became a much deeper one with watching bizarre behavior from Sarah Kendzior (and many others) who insists on believing despite all the statistics so easily available that the Sanders campaign was the resurgence of the KKK and was only supported by white men. The numbers just don’t bear this out. The true divide was by age. (You can always tell you are on the right track the proper appellation an ideology when people insist that the word not be used any longer, as with Kendzior and her supporters and the word “neoliberal.” Just as with racists and the “I’m not racist, but….”)

Ok, let’s rein this back in.

The evidence is overwhelming. Arguing that neoliberal thought hasn’t captured everyone is impossible, and “captured” isn’t even the right word as being “captured” implies for most that there is somewhere else to run. In this case, all I see is that those who believe they are fleeing from it run right back into the wolf’s mouth all the while thinking that they are free.

By the way, this even applies to me. There is no complete extrication from neoliberal ideas. Scientists claim brainwashing doesn’t exist, and the movie kind indeed does not; but this kind very much does. To break out of it — even a little — I have to imagine as hard as I possibly can that I’m a 15th Century Incan whose economy and cosmos operates so very differently that “neoliberalism” would be an inconceivable atrocity to living a good life, and that it would not make the least bit of sense as a mode of sustaining a civilization.

And then, it only barely works and only while I’m actively attempting that metempsychosis. Otherwise, I’m just as prone to “market solutions” and believing that living no other way is possible, with neoliberalism’s insistence of it is the natural state, with it as the tabula rasa of the universe itself, and that humans haven’t lived in hundreds of different societies of thousands of different sorts of social arrangements over hundreds of thousands of years.

Has ever a mode of discourse been so dominant as the one we have now? Has ever one so precluded and demolished other methods of inquiry, especially outside of a large religion?

Alas, I am doing a poor job of expressing what I’m attempting to state.

So let me try again: the ideas of neoliberalism have successfully swallowed up entire arenas of human thought and endeavor that were once seen as being outside such considerations. The reification of these ideas is “privatization” and treating the market as if were some actual entity, a Platonic ideal of human society.

But there are three other levels (at least) to what I’m actually concerned with. The first more surface-level one is that ideas and practices that successfully work in other countries and cultures and have done so for many years are seen as laughable, ridiculous, and so absurd as to not even be worth discussing. But again, this is just the alluvium.

The bedrock below is much more interesting, and that is the almost-unavoidable tendency that even when someone realizes that they are having a reflexive neoliberal reaction to then declare another solution that is just as firmly embedded in that accepted dogma while believing that they are rebelling against it.

That and the level below that (which I don’t yet have proper words for) is what I’m actually interested in. Not to trivialize mental illness, but in many ways neoliberalism’s adherents (which is in reality nearly everyone) seem to have the symptoms of a mental illness brought on by trauma, or the threat thereof. Or perhaps at least the behavior of a cult member before attempted deprogramming.

Oh, this is getting way too long.

In short, I’m arguing in the realm of politics (though that’s what I’m actually least concerned with but provides a toehold) that the rejection of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein is a reflexive reaction, no different than how at the end of 1984 Winston Smith is no longer simulating love for and utter devotion to Big Brother — he is actually and deeply experiencing it as a reality with no alternative even possible to consider.