Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us (Paul Verhaeghe, Guardian): 3/10

In today’s The Guardian, professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis Paul Verhaeghe argues that under the last thirty years, “neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation” have caused people’s personalities to change. Psychopathic personality types thrive under the present economic system, and as a result people have changed in a psychopathic direction.

The fundamental problem with the article is the absence of evidence. Even though many articles of this type fail to give sufficient backing for their claims, this article stands out. It makes many bold (and interesting claims) but fails to provide the reader with sufficient evidence of any of them. This makes the value of the article dubious at best. I give it the mark 3/10.

Below I give a detailed criticism of the article, starting from the top and going down.

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities.

Personal experience is not very good evidence. Scientific evidence for this hypothesis should have been provided.

Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

These claims are not given any empirical evidence.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

The claim that the personality traits characteristic of psychopats are conducive to success in today’s society need to be backed up by empirical evidence. Also, the implicit claim that they were not conducive to effect in previous eras (not dominated by neo-liberalism, if our age is) should have been backed up by evidence.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace.

Where is the evidence of this thesis?

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

No evidence is given of this thesis.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

These thinkers are thoroughly discredited in large parts of the academia. His claims should instead have been backed up by empirical evidence.

An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed.

Where is the evidence of this?

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.”We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

One would like to see a detailed argument to the effect that we are now more powerless than, e.g. Roman slaves were.

A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

These are just individual examples. One needs to see statistics showing that parents really do dissuade daughters from becoming primary school teachers, etc.

About this blog: argument-checking

On this blog I will give detailed criticism of political texts (e.g. opinion pieces), debates and speeches from an argumentation theoretic perspective. Examples of the kinds of things I will point out include:

• Failure to present evidence for factual claims
• Failure to present arguments for controversial ideas
• False statements
• Misleading statements
• Invalid arguments
• Failure to address obvious counter-arguments
• Vague or ambiguous language, especially when that makes it more difficult for the reader to evaluate the author’s claims

In short, I will criticize authors who breach what the philosopher Paul Grice termed the co-operative principle (a number of more specific maxims, which broadly correspond with the opposite of the above bullet points, fall under this general principle).

Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

Though Grice claimed that people usually do follow this principle, it is easy to see that it is sometimes breached. This is especially true of political debates, which can be seen as a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. More often than not, defecting from the co-operative norm brings you an advantage (for instance, false or misleading claims can be used to defuse counter-arguments to your thesis). At the same time, as a collective we would, presumably, be better off if everybody followed the co-operative principle. This is precisely the kind of situation that the prisoner’s dilemma describes: while the collectively optimal situation is that where everybody follows the co-operative principle, each individual is better off if they defect (regardless of whether the opponent defects or not).

One way to escape the prisoner’s dilemma is by increasing the costs of defection or cheating. Breaching the co-operative principle is only effective in case this is relatively unnoticed. If every false statement came with a little tag saying “this statement is false”, the number of false statements in political debates would presumably drop radically (given that there is, as Grice rightly points out, a strong norm to the effect that we should not breach the co-operative principle, either through lying or in any other way). Hence pointing out argumentative errors can be a very effective means of forcing people to adhere to the co-operative principle.

Already today there are costs attached to breaching the co-operative principles. Salient breaches of the co-operative principles tend to get pointed out not only by political opponents but also by impartial media. Here factchecking sites such as factcheck.org and politifact.com and Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog deserve special mention. They meticulously go through politicians’ statements of fact, which gives politicians incentives not to utter any falsehoods.

TV and radio journalists who interview politicians also try to make breaches of the co-operative principle as costly as possible by pressuring politicians who are misleading or evasive. A good example of this strategy is that used by the BBC program HARDtalk. In HARDtalk, the interviewer takes a more “activist” approach compared to many similar programs. Interviewees who fail to answer the interviewer’s question or who make dubious statements are frequently interrupted and pressured (hence the name).

These efforts can only be applauded. My hunch is that if it were not for these and other journalistic criticisms, the public debate would have been far worse than it currently is. (It’s not easy to prove this hunch right, though one possible method could be to look at correlations between standards of political debates and standards of critical media cross-nationally and cross-temporally, while controlling for other factors.) If this is right, it makes sense to try to raise the price of breaching the co-operative principle even further, since that should improve the standards of political argumentation (which surely aren’t where we want them to be at the moment).

 

It seems to me that the standards of journalistic criticism gradually are improving (e.g., HARDtalk and the various factchecking sites are comparatively new). Things are moving in the right direction. My aim is to contribute to these endeavours by giving detailed criticisms of all breaches of the co-operative principles that I find in various political texts, speeches or debates. Hence I will not only criticize factual errors, but also the other kinds of argumentative errors mentioned above.

Now in order for an argument-checking website such as mine (or a fact-checking site, for that matter) to raise the standards of political debates, it needs to have three qualities.

1. It needs to have a wide readership.
2. It needs to have a comprehensive coverage (i.e. you need to cover a large part of the political debate)
3. It needs to be perceived as fair and accurate

My hunch is that if you reached all of these goals – i.e. if an argument-checking website perceived as fair and accurate offered a comprehensive coverage and got a wide readership – then you could improve the standards of political debate greatly. However, getting to that point promises to be very hard (perhaps it’s even impossible). My goal here is to test the waters, as it were – to check whether a grand-scale argument-checking project is feasible, and what methods it should apply. I’m therefore grateful for any input concerning my analyses of political texts, debates and speeches, as well as on the overall project.

 

For more discussion concerning this project, see this blog post of mine at the LessWrong website. I got a number of comments there, and especially liked this one:

There have been many proposals like this before. My favorite idea (which I cannot recall the name of right now) was a browser plugin that would overlay annotations onto arbitrary webpages. People could make it highlight certain questionable bits of text, link to opposing viewpoints or data, and discuss with each other whether the thing was accurate. Imagine a wiki talk page, but for every conceivable site.

I don’t know whether that’s technically and legally possible, but it’s a very nice idea. In effect you would indeed put a tag saying “this statement is false” on all false statements under this plan (and similarly for other argumentative errors). That is bound to have quite an effect.