Individual becomes Masse

Value Religion Racism Price Neoliberalism and consciousness.

We should be worrying about questions of value where value is absolutely distinct from price.

This is because neoliberalism both embellishes some values whilst hiding others behind a screen. It fools us, makes us feel aware even while we only have an imaginary relation to our real existing conditions, value is hidden, and values are manipulated behind an apparent democratisation of decision making based on price, numbers, and in the name of rational choice. The felt value and the stated price are two very different things.

To fight the deception and destructive effects of this we must realise that values can only be felt by us and shape us as if true if they are effects of conceivable practical consequences for the individual (to paraphrase Pierce).

If we can’t conceive it or imagine it it can’t be true.

Neoliberalism is a mask for the obfuscation of felt values, and is a filter that drains human value, and life, and agency, and retains only the compliant automaton, who ‘stupidly’, dehumanised, tries to calculate his or her way through decisions – not knowing how the dice have been loaded, how the individuals health is being stolen for the market. Individual become Masse – raw material, under a totalitarian ideological pragmatic philosophy of pure selfishness. Where the measure of truth is personal satisfaction and personal prejudice at the expense of the ‘totality of facts’.

Supporting Israel, is supporting a totalitarian neoliberal ideology of selfishness, identical to the ones we face ‘back home’ – in the U.K., Canada, USA, etc.

As Kurt Tucholsky put it, who in 1933 warned against totalitarianism under Hitler, whose un-German books were burned, and who probably committed suicide in 1935: “A country is not just what it does, it is also what it tolerates.”

And it was surely ironic to read these words in the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem yesterday August 2017. Where even the holocaust becomes a propaganda tool spreading fear amongst Israeli Jews in order to support Zionism and a Jewish, ethnocentric and inevitably racist apartheid state.
The Jews in Israel face exactly the same problem we face in the U.K. and the USA. The congregation in the liberal re-constructionist synagogue in Jerusalem, with their songs, fellowship, face the same problem. But, does religion offer a kind of seductive but false ‘hope’ that after the darkness God will fix things in the end? The talk of God, as Opioid, Tylenol for the masses. How do we resist the power of the neoliberal elite most effectively today. Israel is surely one of neoliberalism’ weakest spots because here the contradictions of neoliberalism, the brutal oppression of millions of Palestinians through colonisation, are most visible. What is the most effective response? Organise? Educate? Write? Publish?
Religion might offer the most personally satisfactory solution to life’s inherent paradoxes but that does not make it true. Even just as the arch pragmatist the American William James persuaded young minds to believe in God, using neoliberal arguments, his economised religious pragmatic form of belief devalues our own consciousness and increases our vulnerability to becoming disciples of false Gods, Gods of racism.