What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

Meanwhile, educational and economic meritocracy have merged, to the extent that intellectual achievements without economic added value are regarded as largely worthless.

So, instead of consumers, we need once more to become citizens. If we want politics to be governed by the public interest — and that is more necessary than ever — we ourselves must promote that public interest, rather than private concerns.

Efficiency is the new norm, material profit the new goal, and greed the new virtue.

Crucially, social Darwinism also discounted factors such as upbringing, social class, and, more broadly, environmental influences. Only factors determined by heredity were deemed important.5 If you replace genes with talent, the similarity is clear: it’s all down to the individual; effort and innate characteristics will allow him or her to succeed.

People are competitive beings focused on their own profit. This benefits society as a whole because competition entails everyone doing their best to come out on top. As a result, we get better and cheaper products and more efficient services within a single free market, unhampered by government intervention. This is ethically right because success

From a psychological perspective it makes more sense to attribute the current sense of entitlement and the rise of individualism to a society that teaches people to pursue their own advantage, irrespective of and, if needs be, at the expense of, the other. ‘You only live once.’

Depending on what you were told when you were assembling your identity, you are either certain of yourself, confident in your dealings with others, and sure of your own superiority; or, conversely, you are timid, ashamed of yourself, and shrink from interaction with others, convinced that they think you worthless. To use psychiatric jargon, people

In the process, we lose sight of a fundamental truth: we have gradually all become neo-liberal, in both thought and deed.

Identity is not the abstract quality we vaguely assume it to be: we determine our identity by placing it alongside and, increasingly, contrasting it with other possible identities.