It’s one of the most absurd ironies of our neoliberal age. Having looted the public realm over the last half century in the name of the free-market, we are suddenly discovering that the last refuge of public virtue is—yes, you guessed it—the private company. The only thing we “trust,” these days, we are told, are supposedly public-spirited corporations like Microsoft.
This moral ponzi scheme, then, is repackaging private enterprise as public virtue. It’s a fittingly tragicomic final act to the twilight years of our neoliberal age.
Business schools, the seminaries of neoliberalism, have been teaching this nonsense for years. And it’s the seminarians of these organizations—the writers of self-help books about “leadership,” “trust,” “empathy,” and “authenticity” which, of course, are consumed by the millions of us with bullshit jobs—who are now marketing this ponzi scheme to the broader public. Sure, these people sometimes mean well. But I suspect they are mostly unaware of the ironic absurdity of their message.
My Keen On Lit Hub Radio podcast certainly isn’t immune from this virus. Last week, the bestselling writer Stephen M.R. Covey, appeared on Keen On to talk about his new book Trust and Inspire. For all Covey’s profound personal decency, his message was profoundly indecent. Trust is in crisis, he told me, particularly in terms of the crisis of trust in political parties and institutions. But we do still trust businesses,…
