American TV and movie comic Groucho Marx (no relation to Karl) had a gift for one liners, such as: “Honesty and fair dealing, that’s what people want. If we can fake that we can make a million!”

Who knew that 60 years after Groucho’s TV joke we would be swimming in a sewer of fakery, led by professional shysters and fed by modern forms of media where the goal is click baiting, and truth is the fastest growing roadkill statistic on the internet highway? There’s a moral somewhere in that tale.

Speaking of which, morality is the missing link in this chapter in human evolution, where free markets and neoliberal bullying have replaced any remnant of ethics, decency, compassion for the underdog, and belief in the Common Good.

So what happened?

According to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his last book, published just after he died in 2020 (Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Basic Books, NY 2020): “In a world where the market rules and its operation is driven by greed, people come to believe that their worth is measured by what you earn or can afford and not by qualities of character like honesty, integrity and service to others” (Sacks, p.97).

Part of neoliberal entrapment’s clever ruse is that people feel trapped in a vicious cycle of “this is the only way things go round”. But that’s not true. And I mean really not true, not just “fake news” untrue.

“Politics itself, because it can assume no shared morality among its citizens (in a world where ‘I’ takes precedence over ‘We’), ceases to be about vision, aspiration, and the common good and becomes transactional, managerial, a kind of consumer product: vote for the party that gives you more of what you want for a lower price in taxes” (Sacks, pp 97-98).

Ringing any bells?

So, in the quest to rid ourselves of this neoliberal curse, we need to get involved. We need to exercise our moral muscles, politically.

“Markets do not guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity… (they) need morals, and morals are not made by markets. They are made by schools, the media, custom, tradition, religious leaders, moral role models… Markets were made to serve us; we were not made to serve markets. Economics needs ethics. Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust, and decency, the things that have a value, not a price” (Sacks, pp 98-99).

Politically we citizens need to make a moral call. Both mainstream parties are so sold on “the market” running our world that they have been content to let the scammers, bullies and manipulators get off Scott free (pun intended… Robodebt, (reluctant) Banking Royal Commission, GFC ‘Too big to fail" vulture capitalism payouts from the public purse… with no one prosecuted or in any way held to account… need any more evidence?). Therefore, if wedging is the only thing they understand, don’t waste your vote. Wedge away, electing Greens, Fatima Payman and Teal Independents who can hold them to account on the floor of a hung Parliament. And hopefully stand for more ethical, moral and ultimately wise decisions on behalf of the common good, not the market.

Let’s check in with our Paradigm of Care Uncle & Aunty, Bob Stake and Merel Visse, and see what they think of this predicament we’re in: “How is it that means-goals (bureaucracy, procedures) can become more important than end-goals (serving, advocacy)? The same choice occurs throughout society. We live in a never-ending search for quality… Measurement governs much of our lives. Sometimes by choice, other times by rule or obligation (Stake & Visse, A Paradigm of Care, Information Age Publishing, 2021, p.63).

So let’s see how the contenders measure up.

“A carpenter’s memory is fixed: ‘Measure twice and cut once.’ We are all carpenters of one sort or another. We make things. We fix things. We care for things. But we haven’t cared enough about fixing the world so that its peoples, its creatures, its lands and its oceans, live good lives. Seeking the solidarity. Seeking the resonance. We have a need to nourish a more universal care paradigm” (Stake & Visse, p.64).

So there’s a clear call here: get involved and “be the change you want to see in the world”. When Clark Kent can no longer find a phone booth to switch into his Superman gear (remember phone booths?), we’ll all have to don our own capes. Represenative democracy needs to reclaim appointing representatives who are truly committed to a paradigm of care, not political spin and impression management.

“Society’s grand paradigm is more or less the sum of personal paradigms. Each paradigm has a distance function: it extends nearby and farther out. It is changing, not as a cyclonic weather pattern, but as an evolution of attitude” (Stake & Visse, p.140).

Getting back to basics for once does mean something real (rather than the horse that was flogged to death over the past half century regarding ‘the 3Rs!’). If local people elect local people who understand the trends that local contexts illustrate (“Case Studies”), we can revive representative democracy to mean something real. And rather than answering every problem with “more surveillance!” we can adapt to allow local discretionary judgements and delegated decisions about budgets and appropriate policies and programs.

“Compliance can be a hard hitter. But others are changing and will change more. People and agencies can make the rules more tolerable by changing the orientation from “compliance” to “adherence”, sometimes arrived at through dialogue and negotiation. Adherence emphasises shared benefit, lessening the feeling of submission and control” (Stake & Visse, pp 114-115).

This is part five of a six-part series - Replacing neoliberal entrapment with a paradigm of care.

Read the other articles in the series:

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/hoaxes-that-gush-for-winners-and-trickle-down-for-losers/

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/x-raying-the-architecture-of-empire-and-removing-some-tumours/

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/neoliberal-learning-horses-for-courses-and-donkeys-in-the-paddock/

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/making-the-commonweal-turn-turn-turn-again-out-on-highway-61/