Neoliberalism, Anti-Intellectualism, and Authority Gaps in the COVID-19 Envirusment

Nothing grinds my gears more than people listening to my research specialty infodump, and then them responding to it as if the rise of neoliberal capitalism is just my opinion.

As activists, artists, and academics can we all agree there is a distinction between:

1) discussing what information you've learned through education for the purpose of mutual gratification and/or shared mental stimulation of all involved, and

2) enacting elitist condescension for the purposes of a petty bourgeoisie ego boost?

Since 2016, I have observed a rather ironic shared neoconservative and neoliberal backlash to progressive academics. Namely, if anyone breathes word of opposition, intentionally or not, members of either group linguistically project a toolkit of defense mechanisms, ensuring a reproduction of traditional U.S. capitalist social relations.

A few common elements of this two-headed and business partied culture are:

1) a painfully zoomed in decontextualized perspective,

2) for-profit prosthesization, completely disconnected from reality, and — Most Of All —

3) descriptions of simple things, as if they are complex.

As such, the third element of business culture treats info as its own product. Figure heads take an ultimately cheap idea, and do everything they can to maximize it’s profit potential, framing a simple idea as expensive and necessary. Think: exactly how diamonds have been marketed (as valuable, when they’re actually common and cheap).

People forget that workers within capitalist structures of any kind (as a media) are inclined to fabricate the difficulty of their own skills and position in societies because then they are seen as less replaceable, creating a false scarcity. This dehumanizes all workers, reifying arbitrary value. We are all inherently “valuable” by birthright. Everything else is an advertisement. This leaves me torn as a critical media ecologist.

On one hand, this anti-intellectual slander that I started noticing really take off again around 2016 worried me because it appeared to have had a rebound effect on everyone (even those who did not self identify as staunch conservatives) then becoming apathetic towards social science knowledge seekers and findings of scholarly research.

But, how does it make sense to call the people who devote their lives to humanities, social science, and/or physical science research invalid sources of their own craft?

Sure, everyone regardless of degrees earned should be held to peer-review, and be challenged to further build on their conclusions and findings, but this seemed to have reached a boiling point of total intellectual stagnation outside of academic journals.

The way we were headed (aka, if the organizations expected to run our nations [cough the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)] continued neglecting an acknowledgment of renowned theories that have potential to spark progressive action, and resist ingrained discrimination) this looked like a one way ticket to never growing, individually, and, therefore, not as a society either. This is to say, I argue that this was the stage the current COVID-19 era anti-intellectual stepped onto, performing sensationalized anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and other eugenics rhetoric(s).

On the other, academics wonder why anti-intellectualism exists, yet (in preparation for my dissertation) I read an article that reminded those same academics that non-academics have the ability to employ strategic nuanced perspectives in conversations.

How much more patronizingly elitist can it be than academics being reminded of that?

People who have been historically and intentionally targeted reveal exceptionally valid historical criticisms of racist, ableist, sexist, and fat phobic medical and diagnostic practitioners, values, and practices. For instance, the White able-bodied cismale medical body, and the mythical construct of “Objective” “universal” findings contaminated the already embarrassingly narrow knowledge graspable from the Enlightenment bodied researchers who were allowed to be intellectuals — for most of Western history.

The thing about technologies is that they cannot reveal that which didn’t already exist.

This is why still today, I see mainly cismen, who have not earned doctorates, over-aggrandizing their personal authority and legitimacy online by wearing fake titles of “Dr.” like a costume, while in comparison anyone non-White able-bodied cismale continues to be deemed illegitimate to share findings about their research specialities.

For me, thirty-two years was enough time reading, listening, and otherwise deferring to, especially, White “allegedly greatest minds” cismen. Now it’s everyone else’s turn…

Both things exist in tandem, further complicating the ongoing COVID-19 eugenics denial and elitism/anti-intellectualism.

Speaking of: realistic reminder, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, and to talk about it like it is is to directly contribute to eugenics rhetoric. “Return to office” plans that ignore the ongoing pandemic are ableism normalizing policies. Also, the recent trend of both unqualified and certain malignant “qualified” folks downplaying the severity of immunocompromised risk is evil. If you aren’t an immunocompromised person or a trained medical professional who understands the risk to folks lives in the current context, it would be best for everyone if you don’t contribute to these conversations.

It is overtly hostile to be surrounded by people so brazenly inconsiderate of if you become sick, hospitalized, disabled, or even die from this ongoing pandemic. Everywhere you look there’s toxic normativity of in person networking events, risking lives. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic should be referred to as an UnCivil War between the corrupt corporatized U.S. government and citizens. One in six people who have died of COVID-19 world wide lived in the United States.

So how did we get here to a point where this kind of mass death could happen as norm? As a critical media ecologist, I have some possible suggestions. First, the current society trains people to know that the society we’ve built is killing us and the planet, and then ensures the only jobs for those people pay wages that do not allow them to live in a home and eat — without also risking their life during a pandemic.

On a related note, the flaw in previous generations perspective(s) of societal ideologies is that they considered them to function like trains. Folks (mostly illiterate, and thus, dependent) believed that societal ideas, values, and practices were stuck on tracks - only reproducible in the same linear way - as created by the generation(s) before them.

In reality (and this is what experiencing being revealed en mass, now, in the digital and increasingly algorithmic data colonial age) ideas and concepts that were normalized, actually, function in a much more freeform automobile or bike fashion.

Yes, there are roads mapped out purposefully to be followed. But you can also off-road.

And if someone (and more importantly, if entire generations) off-road enough, their actions create new roads, with potential to be cemented over into new normalities.

So, the problem in being unable to bridge an ideological difference between a traditional norm and more emerging ones is that anyone in our generation is literally trying to explain a fundamental change in the entire structural understanding.

But that isn't being even pointed out. We are deeply immersed in an entirely new age.

So often in one conversation or another what happens is that someone who believes that ideologies are immovable on their tracks attempts to explain their point of view to someone who realizes they’re alterable - and, then, miscommunications arise.

If you try to tell someone that the train can just run off its tracks, ANYONE who doesn’t see that as possible would be fundamentally confused, and disagree with you.

It's this kind of foundational miscommunicative basis that I see time and time again in our envirusment. Specifically, in the neoliberal present-COVID-19 age where foundational rationalities have metastasized into irrationalities. Max Weber and George Ritzer described these phenomena as increasing dehumanizations, evidenced by structural separations (treating ourselves and others like isolated emotionless cogs for profit). Now, this post-Roe v. Wade, ongoing COVID-19, mechanized inhuman capitalist structure still depends upon our compliance to progress into increasingly dehumanizing for profit practices. If we continue feeding into this insatiably inhumane neoliberal monster, it won’t stop until we’re all disabled, and then, dead.