On this Ideology

Neoliberalism is more than a set of economic policies; it is an ideology and governing rationality that reconfigures all aspects of social life according to the logic of market competition, individual responsibility, and state facilitation of capital. Emerging in the late 20th century as a reaction against Keynesian welfare policies, neoliberalism positions the market as the ultimate arbiter of value, truth, and even morality. Its key tenets include deregulation, privatization, austerity, and the redefinition of citizens as entrepreneurial actors who must optimize their lives like businesses.

As philosopher Gilles Deleuze foresaw, neoliberalism gives rise to a society of control, where freedom is redefined as self-discipline and compliance with endless forms of evaluation, access management, and behavioral modulation. In such a society, direct repression is less important than the diffusion of surveillance and performance incentives. Individuals are not coerced; they are shaped. The state, rather than withering away, becomes a manager of competitive conditions, a shepherd of risk portfolios, and a subtle architect of inequality.

In Texas, neoliberalism began asserting dominance by the early 1990s under Governor Ann Richards and rapidly accelerated under George W. Bush. The 1995 passage of Senate Bill 1 restructured public education, prioritizing high-stakes testing and accountability metrics—the beginning of the “Texas Miracle” myth. These reforms masked growing disparities while feeding the charter school and textbook industries. By the 2000s, higher education was reframed as job training, leading to defunding and performance-based budgeting for universities.

Since 2010, Medicaid privatization, the public utility deregulation that culminated in the 2021 winter grid failure, and growing contracts with private prison corporations all illustrate neoliberalism’s entrenchment. Here, care, power, and punishment are outsourced—priced, managed, and controlled.

In this regime, suffering is reframed as poor personal management. Freedom becomes a race no one can stop running. This is not just ideology—it is the water in which Texas swims.

Annotated Reading List

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Anti-Reason

David Graeber – The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015)

Why It Matters: Graeber, ever the anarchist anthropologist, turns his wit toward the subtle tyranny of bureaucracy. He argues that far from being a neutral organizational tool, bureaucratic life under late capitalism becomes a utopia of control: full of forms, friction, and rituals of compliance. In neoliberal societies, we are promised endless freedom through markets and innovation, yet shackled by paperwork, metrics, and algorithms that erode genuine creativity.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: Graeber’s vision directly supports the critique of how anti-reason functions not only through ideological fervor but through banal structures—such as school testing regimes, healthcare claims, or university “learning outcomes.” The society of control is ruled not by sovereigns, but by spreadsheets. This text exposes how control sustains itself through psychic exhaustion masked as procedure.

Byung-Chul Han – Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power (2017)

Why It Matters: Han’s haunting thesis is that neoliberalism no longer represses—it seduces. It produces subjects who believe they are free while exploiting them through internalized self-discipline. The individual becomes both master and slave in their quest for “optimization.” Under surveillance capitalism, power operates through emotional branding, wellness rhetoric, and digital self-exposure.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: Han’s work crystallizes my own concept of the Current Empire: a regime of soft domination where people choose control under the illusion of empowerment. His critique of performance culture and “achievement subjects” supports existential reflections on false authenticity and the spiritual toll of living through, with, and in the neoliberal society of control.

David Harvey – A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

Why It Matters: This foundational text offers a clear historical and theoretical overview of how neoliberalism emerged from crises of capital in the 1970s and reshaped global institutions. Harvey traces the rise of privatization, deregulation, and financialization with lucid clarity.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: Establishes neoliberalism not just as an economic trend but a mode of thinking—aligned with my diagnosis of reason’s displacement and the framing of freedom as entrepreneurial compliance.

Wendy Brown – Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015)

Why It Matters: Brown details how neoliberalism converts democratic life into market calculus, remaking universities, courts, and subjectivity itself. The citizen becomes the competitor; the soul becomes a spreadsheet.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: Brown’s notion of “homo economicus” informs my own theme of the control subject—a person trained to internalize the logic of systems that erase dialogue and embodied presence.

Pierre Bourdieu – Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time (1998)

Why It Matters: A collection of short essays that offer a sharp critique of how neoliberalism undermines social solidarity while pretending to promote choice and merit.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: Bourdieu’s focus on “symbolic violence” supports a framing of ideological mystification and the role of mass media in manufacturing false authenticity.

Gilles Deleuze – Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)

Why It Matters: In a few dense pages, Deleuze anticipates the transition from disciplinary societies (ruled by institutions) to control societies (ruled by networks, codes, and access permissions). Writing about this was the very first engaged blog entry I ever did for this website back when it was still called Reason and Existent.

Link to Anti-Reason in 2025: This is the philosophical backbone of my naming the Current Empire. The society of control doesn’t suppress freedom—it reprograms it.

Mountain Dog School – Thwarting Anti-Reason Workbook (in development, Winter 2025 from Sparrowhawk Publications)

Why It Matters: This companion manuscript, rooted in lived teaching and philosophical witness, will practice how to envision, to reflect, and to resist/transist through poetic inquiry, lexicon reframing, and contemplative rebellion.

Link to All Texts Above: Acts as the applied rebellion—turning analysis into practice, and theory into transisting presence.