Actually, the story about Mayor DiBlasio in one of the previous posts is a great example of the individualist ideology I’ve been discussing here. He proceeds in accordance of his deeply individualistic view of human beings. He sees humans as completely identical and ahistorical objects on a shelf. If anything goes wrong, they simply need to be moved to a different shelf.
The possibility that human beings are a part of something, that they don’t come from a conveyor belt, that they can’t be extracted from everything that went into their making is deeply alien to him.
Liberalism is about freedom. The greatest freedom it seeks is freedom from what an individual hasn’t chosen. Since nobody chooses their family, in order for this philosophy to be sustained it has to pretend that family’s impact either doesn’t exist or can be erased.
The question is, though, whether it’s an honest mistake or a desire – unarticulated and unacknowledged as it might be – to widen the gap between oneself and the losers in the neoliberal economy.
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