Resilience and Neoliberalism in US Culture

I am a relatively new citizen of Los Angeles and have been recently thinking about the state of pollution in this city and how it affects my health, considering I have a lung condition called bronchiectasis. In a recent Instagram post I came to the conclusion that I should focus on what I can control, such as spending more time in parks. Within 24 hours I became intrigued and amused at my choice of words there, as “focusing on what you can control” is not something I am partial to, as it feels very individualistic, and that is not an aspect of culture I ascribe to. But the fact that it happened lends to a curiosity of how pervasive ideas in our culture can be and ways in which these ideas influence our beliefs and actions. Today I want to unpack ideas related to resilience and neoliberalism specifically, and how the political and economic system of neoliberalism also influences individual and societal beliefs.

I will start by defining a few terms that are pertinent to the discussion:

Individualism: a theory maintaining the political and economic independence of the individual and stressing individual initiative, action, and interests. (Merriam Webster)

Resiliency: An ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change (Merriam Webster)

Personal Agency: Agency refers to the thoughts and actions taken by people that express their individual power…agency is the power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their experiences and life trajectories. (ThoughtCo)

Neoliberalism: view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state (Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy)

Autonomy: the quality or state of being self-governing (Merriam Webster)

Resiliency in American culture is about having grit, overcoming obstacles & getting stronger against all odds. We valorize the hero & applaud self-sufficiency. It is an inward focusing mechanism that has individuals focus only on one’s actions, rather than question if there is something about the larger systems which could need attention.

Neoliberalism puts great emphasis on the individual, who must be responsible for oneself, to adapt and prepare for adversity. Rather than rely on the state, neoliberalism wants us to take individual action for our own social and economic well-being. “…in order to survive the uncertainties of complex systems, people have to show their own initiative as active and reflexive agents capable of adaptive behavior.” (Joseph) And if we do not succeed within this framework, it’s a matter of individually not working hard enough, rather than any fault of the state’s actions or lack of action. Ignore the state and focus on the individual long enough, and the people forget who is the origin of the chaos in the first place, the state. We only see that some individuals were “strong, resilient, and adaptable” and able to “overcome the odds”. The United States is an example of a Regime of Truth:

“Regimes of truth are the vehicle through which hegemony is maintained, as hegemony requires the consent of the ruled. The ruling class authorizes discursive ways of framing the Western capitalist political economy that inform the populace and become accepted as truth, diminishing the need for coercive power and giving ruse to a power that is maintained through the public’s acceptance/permission and retelling of a given discourse.” Gross (2011) explains that “consent may be intentionally given for personal benefit, or it may be a consequence of being unaware of one’s domination by a given ideology” (p. 54). The slow pace of time and normalization of the relationships between the ruling class and the oppressed classes is sufficient for the oppressed to internalize the “common sense” that justifies their own oppression.” (Clay)

A neoliberal system says “we all have to play our part” with local individuals, groups and communities contributing, diminishing what role, if any, the state will play. But we are experiencing liberty, freedom, agency and autonomy only within the framework considered acceptable by the governing body and economic system. An ideal individual in a neoliberal society is striving for greater economic success and upward social mobility. And the people who continue to experience economic and social hardship serve as examples of people who did not work hard enough, did not have enough resilience, and should motivate you to work harder.

When we become active players, not for our own well-being or that of our communities, but rather for the needs of the state, so as to keep the state from having to contribute, that reinforces the power dynamics and inequality, and strengthens the control and intentions of the state. Intentions such as mass accumulation of wealth, exploitation of people (both citizens and people in other countries) and an oligarchy of governance. A “Regime of Truth” indoctrinates its’ citizens and normalizes the mistreatment of citizens.

By having individuals focus only on themselves, they lose scope of the bigger picture and the problems that face the entire society, i.e., inequality, and fail to hold their government accountable for such inhumane methods of conducting a society.

Resiliency is a thing; I’m not trying to deny that it is a component of the human experience. People do “bounce back” from a variety of experiences, due to a complex web of influences internally and externally. What I want to bring attention to is how our economic and political systems have made this a norm of our culture, something to strive for, as a means of diverting attention away from government responsibility or support. Adversity is not something only orchestrated by the state. But the way that resiliency has become embedded in our culture, and has an elevated status of praise, prevents people from seeing how a system could be contributing to a problem and intentionally making people work harder than they have to, while simultaneously having us point to each other and say “You’re not working hard enough” rather than question why we should be working so hard to begin with, and whether it actually benefits us as individuals and/or as a society.

The individualistic definition of resiliency ignores systems that contribute to a person’s traumatic experience and/or support:

“It fails to explicitly acknowledge that individuals are embedded in social systems, and that these systems may be more or less resilient in their own right, as well as more or less able to support the adaptive psychological capacities of the individual. Thus, responses to trauma and significant stressors are determined by multiple dynamic, interacting individual‐level systems (e.g., genetic, epigenetic, developmental, neurobiological), which are embedded in larger social systems (e.g., family, cultural, economic, and political systems).” (Southwick et al)

It is important to acknowledge that neoliberalism is not just a system of the economy and government. It is reinforced through our personal day-to-day interactions and upheld through pervasive and deeply embedded cultural values:

“Neoliberalism’s promotion of free market norms is therefore much more than the simple ideology of free-market economics. It is a specific form of social rule that institutionalizes a rationality of competition, enterprise individualized responsibility. Although the state ‘steps back’ and encourages the free conduct of individuals, this is achieved through active intervention into civil society and the opening up of new areas to the logic of private enterprise and individual initiative. This is the logic behind the rise of resilience.” (Joseph)

An example of the pervasive nature of this culture is our emphasis on self-awareness. I experience and see this in the wellness, fitness and personal development spaces but it influences all industries. There is a notion that to become more self-aware is to become more empowered. But through self-awareness you grow to understand how small you are in the world:

“An important way in which resilience encourages heightened self-awareness is through constructing a picture of a world that is beyond our control. This sounds like a contradiction because it might create a sense of resignation. But the resilience argument is that even if we cannot change the world, we can survive better through knowing how to adapt. Hence although resilience appears at first sight as a systems theory, its main effect is to emphasize the need for adaptability at the unit level.” (Joseph)

Personal development is a huge industry. Focusing on oneself and elevating the one’s status and self-importance is a deeply embedded narrative in our culture. And this theory of resilience as coming from neoliberalism, posits that that culture was put there by the state/elites in order to prevent the population from ever rising up, or questioning their status in life, because they are always too focused on themselves.

So as much as I can try to make a post about resiliency in order to bring attention to it, there’s always the chance that I will spin it in a positive way, because that’s how the system works. So, we are the ones reinforcing the system ourselves. We have convinced ourselves of the neoliberal philosophy, doing their bidding, and in fact not being individual active agents at all, but rather reinforcing cogs in the capitalist machine.

In summary, the research I have found gives me a more insidious view on the concept of resilience, based in an economic and political system that exploits individuals and pits them against each other in a futile competition with no end. Citizens have the “freedom” to take responsibility for their action and to take care of themselves, but they also have to abide by a very competitive, particular capitalistic economy/society. Resiliency plays a role in this by focusing on “heightened self-awareness, reflexivity and responsibility”. Citizens are encouraged to be active in their own well-being, rather than rely on the state, in order to fulfill social and economic needs. The risk of the environment is not ignored, citizens are made aware of how complex the world is, which heightens citizens sense of scarcity, and makes them be prepared at all times. Resiliency as a concept supposedly addresses the systems and environment, but in actuality wants the individual to act as a single unit, and reinforces the importance of the awareness of themselves as an individual. This is why individualism is so pervasive in our culture. It’s an intentional means of controlling the population by a state government through programming that is reinforced and upheld by the people themselves, to our detriment.

I don’t want to necessarily say that the government is an evil overlord that is manipulating us with resiliency and other propaganda, that has been orchestrated for decades to dupe the entire American population. But I do think that capitalism and neoliberalism are systems that guide our political, economic and social worlds in the United States and beyond, and that mechanisms of these systems are embedded into our culture in a way that mutates our needs and desires in ways that do, ultimately, benefit the State and the economy. And that it’s very hard to constantly remain self-aware enough in order to exist separate from it. It’s impossible. It may not have been “designed” that way completely intentionally, but that is where we have ended up.

There’s a lot of other components that could be unpacked and connected to these ideas, but I’m not looking to write a book today. The focus is to see how resiliency, personal development and individualized action are, at times, mechanisms of a culture that looks to reinforce an incredibly unequal society. And that that society has had a façade of equality and freedom covering up the truth, for a very long time.