#john bone

For many further down the pecking order, with little confidence in the future, occupational income or job stability – and bombarded by media images of swift financial success as the sole route to distinction, status and security – the only avenue to finding some balance of emotional arousal appears to be to attempt to emulate those at the top of the tree and acquire the financial means to gain status and a modicum of control through wheeling, dealing and, often, exploiting others. For some this has encouraged dabbling in the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, as day traders in the stocks boom and real estate flippers, property investors and landlords in housing booms.

As to the role of critical rationality in [the neoliberal] new world order, the new mindset of stunted systemic rationality, or unreason, appears to have increasingly eclipsed any form of wider human vision or values. Thus, scientific thought, planning, imagination, creativity, dis- covery and, to a great extent, human well-being and progress – key touchstones of the Enlightenment vision – have been largely subordinated to the organizational and finan- cial imperative, as all effort and thought are applied to the narrow goal of commercial profit, or in support of it, while those who are other directed are considered out of touch with the ‘real world’. Through the power of corporate and financial sector interests, and the media moguls that have extended this credo – as well as the politicians of all hues who have conceded to their doctrines – a hegemonic and monolithic culture of finance, business and consumerism has constituted an all-encompassing reality of acquisition and financial status as the keystones of human existence, while the starkness and ‘real’ proper- ties of this contemporary lifeworld have been concealed from the public behind an enchanted Disneyfied veneer. This is installed in the consciousness of the masses as they are subjected to a mediated ‘loop tape’ reinforcing the ‘normalcy’ of the neoliberal consumer society and the alleged accessibility and attrac- tiveness of its emotionally charged ‘prizes’.