Invisible Doctrine Quotes

“Capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it. The fairy tale that capitalism tells about itself—that you become rich through hard work and enterprise—is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.”
― George Monbiot, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan was to atomize and rule. Neoliberalism leads us to believe that relying on others is a sign of weakness, that we all are, or should be, ‘self-made’ men and women. But even the briefest glance at social outcomes shows that this cannot possibly be true. If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the ‘self-attribution fallacy’.10 This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you were not responsible. The same applies to the belief in personal failure that assails all too many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy today. From birth, this system of belief has been drummed into our heads: by government propaganda, by the billionaire media, through our educational system, by the boastful claims of the oligarchs and entrepreneurs we’re induced to worship. The doctrine has religious, quasi-Calvinist qualities: in the Kingdom of the Invisible Hand, the deserving and the undeserving are revealed through the grace bestowed upon them by the god of money. Any policy or protest that seeks to disrupt the formation of a ‘natural order’ of rich and poor is an unwarranted stay upon the divine will of the market. In school we’re taught to compete and are rewarded accordingly, yet our great social and environmental predicaments demand the opposite – the skill we most urgently need to learn is cooperation. We are set apart, and we suffer for it. A series of scientific papers suggest that social pain is processed11 by the same neural circuits as physical pain.12 This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the terms we use to denote physical pain and injury: ‘I was stung by his words’; ‘It was a massive blow’; ‘I was cut to the quick’; ‘It broke my heart’; ‘I was mortified’. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain.13 This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic.14 Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment; and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, so capitalism transforms every corner of the planet – from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor. The Earth itself becomes a sacrifice zone. And its people? We are transformed into both consumers and consumed.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“As a general rule, privatization is legalized theft from the public realm.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Friedman’s masterstroke was implanting the idea that ‘business freedom is personal freedom’ in the minds of Americans.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“He began the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. Hayek rejected the primacy of such notions as democratic freedom and equality, universal human rights, or the fair distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the rich and powerful, intruded on the absolute freedom from coercion – that is, the freedom to do whatever you want – that neoliberalism demanded. Democracy, by contrast, he claimed, ‘is not an ultimate or absolute value’.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“It is unsurprising that social isolation or loneliness have been strongly associated with depression,18 suicide,19 anxiety,20 insomnia,21 fear and the perception of threat.22 It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses that they can cause or exacerbate. Dementia,23 altered brain function,24 high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes,25 lowered resistance to viruses,26 even accidents,27 are all more common among chronically lonely people. One study suggests that loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.28 The doctrine has also helped to create what some people describe as a spiritual void: when human life is conceived as a series of transactions, when relationships are recast in purely functional terms, when personal gain counts for everything and pro-social values for nothing, the sense of meaning and purpose is sucked from our lives. We find ourselves in a state of alienation, of anomie, an experience of dislocation that extends beyond the more immediate determinants of mental health. Our psychological and economic welfare depends on our connection with others. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd, and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it. The fairy tale that capitalism tells about itself – that you become rich through hard work and enterprise – is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Boom, Bust, Quit’ is what capitalism does. The ecological crises it causes, the social crises it causes, the productivity crises it causes are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Free, Fair and Alive”
― George Monbiot, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“according to one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.[”
― George Monbiot, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“since 2015, the G20 nations have spent $3.3 trillion on subsidizing their fossil-fuel industries.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Capitalism’s genius is expressed in its ability to develop ever more inventive and aggressive strategies for extracting diminishing human and planetary resources.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“In April 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt sent the US Congress this warning: ‘the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.’19 It is a warning we would do well to remember.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“We stand together or we fall apart.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Fascism emerges in situations where the state fails, where politics fails, where our needs can no longer be met through the democratic process. What Friedrich Hayek claimed to fear – the rise of a new totalitarianism – has been accelerated by his own doctrine.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“In the thirty years following the Second World War, there was a broad political consensus. Taxpayers and politicians alike recognized that the best defence against fascism was to ensure everyone’s needs were met through a strong social safety net and robust public services. But neoliberalism dismantled these defences. Instead, it has promoted extreme self-interest and egocentricity. At its heart is a mathematically impossible promise: everyone can be Number One.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“We talk of ‘the failure of the state’, but the neoliberal state is broken by design. Its failures are engineered, grounded in an insistence that government cannot – and should not – solve our problems. It is not supposed to work.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“When neoliberalism prevails, only the rich prosper. When democracy prevails, the prosperity of the poor, and of society as a whole, is enhanced.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“At no point, however liberal its pretensions, has the fundamental condition of capitalism been altered: it is, and has always been, ‘an economic system founded on colonial looting’.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“We end up with what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described as ‘private opulence and public squalor’:12 the rich become ever wealthier, while the services on which the rest depend are hollowed out.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Remember that capitalism, under our definition, ‘turns shared resources into exclusive property’.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Neoliberalism is the tool used by the very rich to accumulate more wealth and power. Neoliberalism is class war.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“At the time, people referred to these political programmes as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganism’. But these weren’t ideologies in their own right; they were merely applications of neoliberalism.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Far from ensuring money trickles down, neoliberalism is the hydraulic pump that drives the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. During the ‘golden age’ of”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labour and money into commodities that can be accumulated.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“The US research group Global Financial Integrity estimates that $1.1 trillion a year flows illegally out of poorer nations,”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“One estimate suggests that, across 200 years, Britain extracted from India alone an amount of wealth equivalent to $45 trillion in today’s money.”
― George Monbiot, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism