One of the ideologies that has erased the ethical moralities and killed a variety of values across cultures is neoliberalist philosophy, which determines the share and quality of a person on the competitive market behaviour as compared to the personal capabilities and experience.
The more a person becomes marketable, the more he is worth hiring. On the other hand, the meritocracy mindset demands that personal capabilities, developed with learning and experience, may be preferred over any other values. The more a person is capable, regardless of their marketable value, the more they qualify for hiring. But the rapid influx of market-ism and desire to earn profit under capitalistic absolutism has killed this spirit.
When the market decides the value and worth of a person, he is immediately commodified and becomes less of a human being to give consideration to human values. The world, therefore, is more filled with isolation, hyperreality, hate, violence and deployment of power instead of dialogue. Market generates competition, no doubt, but it may kill human values and ethics also; consequently, the world is witnessing more of the atrocities in the name of economic development than ever.
The wealth of the world is already concentrated in a few hands and is flowing more from the poor to the even richer; the neo liberalist agenda would only accelerate it beyond limits.
Neoliberalism, a brainchild of Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, advocated for free-market capitalism, monetarism, and minimal government interference in the economy, which impacted the world on a large scale. One of the major impacts has landed on the educational sector, where quality is neglected, and quantity is being focused on to remain in the winning position.
The learners are getting grades and degrees, but are devoid of any marketable skills and human values. So much so that the merit is injured and ignored while appointing the leaders in the universities. Recent developments reflect a tendency to appoint Business and Trade companies’ CEOs instead of choosing from the seasoned academia to run the most prestigious educational institutions.
The universities were established as centres of genuine learning and research, and help the society formulate policies along with positive strategies to move forward as an egalitarian society. But the recent developments have put this idea behind the scenes, and more is being done to introduce capital absolutism to these otherwise centres of excellence.
Resultantly, even the most developed, cultured and civilised societies have started to not only possess power but also to exercise power to flex their muscles. Instead of utilising precious resources for the elimination of poverty, hunger and developing education and health, most of the nations are preferring the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Some nations, like America, India and Israel, have become so obsessed with power that they would attack a less powerful nation to exhibit their power and even would go for preemptive strikes if they deem themselves endangered even from a destitute nation.
On the other hand, the world has witnessed throughout its history, and especially in the 20th century, that weapons and wars did not solve any issues, and ultimately it was the dialogue which brought some solutions. The weapons to determine power have always killed humanity and created more issues rather than solving a few.
The advent of artificial intelligence is pushing limits forward with regard to human efforts to succeed on merit, when more machine-motivated profit generation is preferred instead of human skill.
And the same liberalist attitude is about to make a large mass of humans become jobless and so penniless because of the modern automating technologies, which stress the role of machines in earning more and more profit and incurring as few expenditures as possible, and not the human one for the same purpose. The neoliberalist agenda and the capitalist absolutism are making it fast possible. The wealth of the world is already concentrated in a few hands and is flowing more from the poor to the even richer; the neo liberalist agenda would only accelerate it beyond limits.
Consequently, the world would be divided into only two classes: one elitist and the other economic slaves, washing away entirely the concept of the middle class. In such a scenario, success will be the name of amassing as much wealth as possible by any means, even if these result in the destruction of humanity. We are already witnessing the signs of the same in the youth of the 21st century, who believe amassing money is the sole purpose of life and that they would be successful only if they have material possessions and a lot of money at their disposal.
In this scenario, more damage has come to the states based on ethical and social values, where people are finding it very difficult to absorb new and shifting economic realities around them because a shift like this means an entire shift of their cultural values, and so they will have to struggle for a long time to readjust and reconfigure under this new system.
The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson University, Multan. He can be reached at zeadogar@ hotmail.com and Tweets @Profzee