What do Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard have in common with the Piltdown Man? They all managed to sell a hoax that lasted for decades, before it was exposed as completely false. But wait, their hoax is still central to transglobal neoliberal capitalism’s stranglehold on us all, whereas Charles Dawson’s 1912 forged ‘missing link’ skull from East Sussex became a lesson in how dangerous it is to let preconceptions override evidence.

Today’s world is locked in a stranglehold of neoliberal ‘accountability,’ regulations and accreditations that determine whether or not you can participate in the economy. Whether businesses or non government organisations, everyone has to meet standards and pass audits that assess their suitability to provide their services. Or else they don’t get paid.

Nice. An entrapment device that holds everyone down by the neck, while those in charge – the politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders – continue to live untouchable lives.

It’s an ever-enduring hand-me-down from Milton Friedman’s economic rationalist and monetarist portrayal of how humans can really only operate ‘efficiently and effectively’ if they follow ‘the Free Market.’ By which we mean the ‘trickle down’ principle that basically reduces tax and hands public funds to the rich, so they can get richer, while the poor wait for the trickle down effect to provide their share of whatever’s left over.

There is no free market, except in some Ayn Rand libertarian universe, where all bets are off and the only thing to worry about is whoever you might meet on Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Road.’

Oh… That seems to be where my bus just dropped me off, feeling like ‘the Wisconsin kid with the cue ball head, who wishes he was home in a Wisconsin bed!’ (thanks to Tom Waits).

This scam would be depressing if it was allowed to continue. But in fact it’s despairing, because ‘the system’ of surveillance capitalism has now been ramped up to the point where every aspect of life is being monitored and assessed by the mechanical, amoral, detached Assessment, Audit and Accreditation system we live under mandatorily.

‘Are you Compliant?’ is the automatic question when anyone wants to transact with your organisation, be it a government department, an NGO, a small business. ‘Have you been Accredited?’ ‘When were you last Audited?’ Handmaid’s Tale eat your heart out.

The Labor Government even launched a 2023 Discussion Paper on ‘The Care Economy,’ which was a PwC/EY-style undergraduate essay on how care can be delivered in a market economy. Units of care being charged out, so publicly supported funds can provide profit margins to businesses on their way to delivering some sort of service to you, the customer.

This is life in advanced transglobal capitalist economies. Lockstep regulations overwhelm all human services, to the point where people who actually care about those they’re looking after hardly have a moment to share the time of day. Because they’ve got so many computer-controlled, preset reporting frameworks to fill in every day to ensure they ‘remain compliant,’ that there’s no time left for people-to-people relationships.

Except in a pandemic, surprisingly…

Professor Bob Stake, the ‘father of Case Study Research’ co-edited a book during COVID called ‘A Paradigm of Care (Merel Visse & Robert Stake, Information Age Publishing, Jan 2021). It is an eloquent, poetic evocation of how ordinary people took back their right to ‘Population Health.’ It’s full of case studies in how People-to-people help spontaneously sprung up when the system was overrun and failing all around them.

Disaster forced a paradigm shift. A new/old way of thinking about how humans can care for each other, in community. Market-oriented, Unit of Care costed, Individual Patient Care was organically replaced by Population Care, self-delegated to local street and neighbourhood level.

While we continue to wait for Milton Friedman’s trickle down benefit to finally reach us, let’s explore this world of alternative approaches to how our lives can be organised. This series will unpack some of the rhetoric we’ve all been living under for the past four decades, and see if we can’t determine some more caring ways of being human together.

This article is Part One of a Six Part Series – Replacing neoliberal entrapment with a paradigm of care...

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

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