Dying myths of neoliberalism: Reflections on socialisation in the age of precarity

It takes courage to promise an overarching psychosocial account of our world, where change is happening at a breathtaking pace. We know that any account of the present must look into material, institutional, and cultural changes associated with the ‘neoliberal’ revolution that began politically in the late 1970s. We also know that, under Thatcher's project of ‘changing the soul’, the effects of neoliberal reforms go deep into people's psyches. People are more distressed and more ‘sick’, our politics more confused. Yet, how we transitioned from Thatcher and Reagan to the psychopolitical chaos of the present day remains unclear. Observations and hypotheses about neoliberal culture and psyches abound, but are confusingly diverse.

The chaos puzzled many, but not philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In his defining aphoristic and prophetic style, reminiscent of 20th-century critical theorists, Han audaciously attempted to weave diverse trends into a unified narrative, uncovering the essence of neoliberal governmentality while offering diagnoses of psychosocial symptoms. From depression and burnouts to mob rage and overconsumption, from the pornographisation of art to the waning of emancipatory forces, all psychosocial phenomena can be traced back to a unitary ‘psychopolitical’ logic: a logic that markets its norms as ideals and entices individuals with the false promise of endless self-optimisation and infinite positivity.

In this paper, I argue that Han's attempt at a unified account of neoliberal subjectivation is overgeneralised. Han is, at best, read as diagnosing the high neoliberal moment of middle-class integration roughly between the 1990s and the 2000s, and he completely misses the plight of many when the effects of precarisation grow in the late neoliberal epoch post-2008. Indeed, by overemphasising the ‘soft’ and ‘positive’ side of neoliberal socialisation, Han overlooks how repressive discipline and disidentification have persisted under neoliberalism in the form of ongoing class-based exclusions and extractive dynamics. Such dynamics are common to all capitalist formations, although they have been partly obfuscated by debt-fuelled achievement integration during the high neoliberal era.

In the following sections, I first reconstruct Han's remarks on neoliberal socialisation in his 2010–2020 writings and propose that Han's picture fails to address people's growing dissatisfaction with achievement ideals and the ongoing disciplinarisation of abjected social groups during the high neoliberal decades. In the second half, I rectify Han's errors by discussing neoliberalism's roots in capitalist class dynamics, reframing the issue of neoliberal socialisation as ‘precarisation’ alongside ‘achievement’, focusing, in particular, on the recent rise of cynical coping, defensive autonomy, and paranoid survivalism. This new model hopefully enhances our understanding of the complex landscape of late-neoliberal subjectivation, adding to existing accounts of neoliberal socialisation.

Han's Account of Neoliberal Subjectivation

While Han's philosophical system includes various discussions of digital cultures and art and contains an ethical ontology of experience based on a concept of ‘negativity’, this paper will focus on his characterisation of neoliberal ‘psychopolitics’. We can summarise Han's account in three conceptual steps: first, the transition from ‘disciplinary society’ to ‘achievement society’; second, the rise of the ‘autoexploiting’, self-alienating, entrepreneurial subject; and third, the descent of the auto-exploiting entrepreneur into burnout and depression.

Reconsidering Han

The Growing Unattainability of Middle-Class Dreams

What went wrong in Han's argument? On one level, the problem is conceptual. Han could have well avoided the charges of overgeneralisation had he not oversold his case for auto-exploitation and positive achievement culture. In this regard, Foucault and Foucaultians, with more nuanced understandings of neoliberal governmentality, give more clear-sighted models of neoliberal subjectivation, proposing neoliberalism as a normative ‘regime of truth’ imposed upon states and subjects, while leaving open how subjects may come to identify with these imperatives. ¹¹

But on a deeper level, Han's overgeneralised account of the autoexploiting subject is symptomatic of the era of middle-class integration into the neoliberal cosmopolitan agenda during the more hopeful, less austere, and less disciplinary era of debt-fuelled high neoliberalism in the 1990s to 2000s. During that era, the colonisation of the symbolic space by consumerist and individualist entrepreneurial ideals may have made class divisions and economic downturns appear obsolete, and the cannibalistic dynamics of capital have been remade as an invisible pretext to a powerfully integrative neoliberal culture for many.

Yet, even in those decades, Bauman (2000, ch. 1) remarked that a ‘wide and growing gap’ was already appearing between ‘de jure’ aspirations, ideals of individual freedom, and people's chances to attain such aspirations ‘de facto’. With greater hindsight, we ought now to realise the preconditions of integration under positive achievement. The aftermath of the Great Recession saw Bauman's de jure/de facto gap surface in working-class despair and heightening middle-class fears of falling. What Han generalises as the auto-exploiting achievement subject is better conceptualised as a prerogative reserved for the ‘middle-class’ whose hegemonic status has made it the poster-child of neoliberal culture (Lamont, 2019, p. 667). Somehow echoing Han's ideal of the auto-exploiting labourer, Wolfgang Streeck describes middle-class integration as involving people:

willing to seek social integration through the labour market, accepting as a matter of course expectations of employers for full identification with whatever jobs they may be assigned. (Streeck, 2016, p. 45)

For Streeck, this group is also one whose social integration is sustained by ‘coping’ (adapting to changing markets), ‘hoping’ (dreaming the dreams of upward mobility and achievement), ‘doping’ (use of medications for activation and sedation), and ‘shopping’ (Streeck, 2016, pp. 41–45). But where Streeck differs from Han is his awareness of the fragility of such integration within continuing dynamics of the neoliberal economy.

The anomalous two decades before the crash witnessed the extension of achievement dreams to many through the provision of private credit to the masses (some of which are subprime) (Crouch, 2011; Gerstle, 2022). But as the bubble burst, populations who qualified for middle-class hopes and aspirations of unproblematic integration through work, consumption, and activation shrank (especially among its younger and poorer members). While the long-term erosion of opportunities have long been driving working-class populations to suicidal and nihilistic despair (see Case & Deaton, 2020; Silva, 2023), the middle and ‘professional’ classes are also falling post-2008 and have since then beginning to experience ‘[what] has long since happened to the blue-collar working class’ in the early neoliberal decades (Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 2013, p. 11; see also, Hacker, 2008; Parikh, 2025). As Streeck (2024, p. 119f) observes, intensifying competition and precarisation are now pressuring even those who want to live a life of peaceful subsistence to work harder to stay afloat. Instead of hopefully striving for achievement, many are now driven by a desperate need to not fall behind and survive. ¹²

Today, more than ever, any account of subjectivation must pay attention to the dynamics of the capitalist economy, and its tendency to reduce growing populations to precarity and material destitution. Understanding the capitalist logic of neoliberalism reveals that the positively seductive grip of achievement culture on ‘auto-exploiting’ individuals was dependent on class-specific socialisations, and that the economic basis supporting this class is fast eroding. This implies that Han's theory of neoliberal subjects must be significantly revised especially to capture the dynamics of subjectivation in our late neoliberal present.

The Economic Understory of Han's Account

Can the disciplinary and punitive undersides of neoliberal capitalism be accidental? Was the collapse of middle-class integration really unanticipated? There might be different ways of answering these questions, ¹³ and one is to examine how repression, discipline, and dissatisfaction fit within capitalist dynamics that were a vital motor of neoliberalisation.

When I speak of capitalism, I refer to the existing world system in which the accumulation of capital regularly takes precedence over alternative social aims (Wallerstein, 1983). This is a system where the maintenance of social conditions for capital's profit-making is structurally upheld, including: (i) the defence of private ownership of capitalist classes against theft, expropriation and disaccumulation, and (ii) the maintenance of commodity chains, financial flows and socially reproductive circuits that ensure that investments generally and predictably produces a positive rate of return (Fraser, 2022). Central to the operations of this system is the unequal logic of extraction and discipline, where a capitalist ‘core’ extracts value from its ‘peripheries’ and forces the latter to bear the price of social, economic, and environmental ‘externalities’/waste generated by such extractive operations. ¹⁴ Those on the periphery can be cajoled into acquiescence, but in times of crisis and conflict, states, as proxies of the capitalist world order, have also proven willing to discipline and violently repress actors that obstruct the logics of extraction and disposal.

Historically, during the post-war decades, state-managed social democracy, characterised by more equitable distribution, and stronger labour protections shielded many in the capitalist core from capital's extraction and disposal operations (Monbiot & Hutchison, 2024, ch. 8). Yet, occasioned by the crises of the 1970s, states have since surreptitiously re-intensified the extraction in previously shielded segments of the protected core by crushing labour power, globalising capital, and pursuing privatisation and deregulation drives that favour continued value extraction and accumulation by the oligarchic classes (Crouch, 2011; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018, ch. 2; Harvey, 2005; Kotz, 2015; Streeck, 2014). The result of such neoliberal policies is the staggering rise of inequalities, where the ultra-rich accumulate inordinate gains at the cost of precarising ever-greater stretches of the population. ¹⁵ As social protections decline across the social spectrum from the underclasses up to the middle class, the masses now find themselves engaged in a zero-sum, survival-based fight for a declining share of the pie, even as the wealth and income of hyper-elites soar to astronomical levels.

It is the genius of neoliberal culture, as Han and others showed, that de jure ideals of freedom and self-realisation in the turbulent 60s were coopted to obfuscate capital's extractive operations in the name of liberating the ‘individual’ from social and bureaucratic ‘restraints’. ¹⁶ But it should also be remembered that behind the so-called ‘emancipation’ is the collapse of material safeguards for the masses. In the neoliberal economy, de facto freedom is cast in a ‘free’ market characterised by intensifying competition for a declining share of economic growth, where ‘losing’ actually means ‘falling’ down the class ladder, exposing one to disciplinary sanctions, and potentially shamed, sedated, punished, and coerced. In the early decades of neoliberalisation, the brutal, precarising nature of neoliberal individualism had perhaps been kept hidden by the easy availability of credit under ‘privatised Keynesianism’, which concealed the precarious effects of extraction and the erosion of social protections (Crouch, 2011). During this time, neoliberal dreams and ideals were unsustainably financed by state and household borrowing, setting the stage for a subsequent economic meltdown while funnelling inordinate wealth and power to financial elites that they get to keep post-crisis.

As the credit system collapsed in 2008, austerity regimes followed, and ever-larger segments of the population felt the sharp sting of precariousness. Here, the collapse of ‘everything is possible’ into ‘nothing is possible’, that Han so emphatically reconstructs as the logic of burnout and depressions (Han, 2015, pp. 10–11), is not (simply) a psychic logic, but a hard, disciplinary logic of capital, debt, finance, and austerity enforced by governments and institutions serving capitalist extraction. Under this logic, what is owed to private bondholders must be paid in full, while states and the general public bear the financial, social, and psychic costs for the former's financial hubris.

Powerfully shaped by capitalist interests and states thoroughly identified with market logics, ¹⁷ the various facets of the neoliberal state's use of disciplinary coercion should well be read as the upshot of capital's socio-economic logic of extraction being re-intensified in the core. Seen this way, as long as capital remains the chief orchestrator of our socio-economic realities, Han's observations on (middle-class) achievement may be little more than an unsustainable sideshow, as a politics of discipline and survivalist competition is taking its place when the middle classes are now hollowed out. ¹⁸

Real Dilemmas of Contemporary Neoliberal Socialisation: Subjectivation under Precarity

I introduced capitalist dynamics in the previous section, neither to propose that Han's observations on ‘psychopolitics’ are irrelevant nor to suggest that we can reduce the cultural aspects of neoliberalism to merely a ‘superstructure’ of a capitalist ‘base’. ¹⁹ In a Foucaultian spirit, we can say that institutional and cultural foundations of seduction and discipline evolve in ways that depend on shifts in how issues are problematised, how techniques of control are invented and experimented with, and how they interact with struggles and challenges during their application. Consciousness is shaped by socialisation, but, especially on the individual and local levels, imaginations and fantasies do explode the socialising frames imposed (see Negt & Kluge, 1993). Neither institutions nor consciousness are determined by economic logics. Yet, capitalist forces still play important roles in shaping institutions and consciousness, especially at the macro-sociological level. Social practices which find functional niches in the logic of capital accumulation are more likely to be enhanced (financially and otherwise) than those that do not, while forms of consciousness that are too incongruent with prevailing forms of capitalist practices are more likely to wither away due to the lack of space for development and the psychic dissonance that may come from holding them. This is why we can expect the maintenance of the promised possibilities/dreams of the achievement-subject to become more difficult and conflict-ridden when the material supports for achievement dreams are so severely eroded.

To supplement Han's unitary view, I suggest that the neoliberal order subjectivates not only by marketising ideals of aspirational achievement and positive activation but also constitutively and increasingly by disciplinary socialisation through precarisation. Following Bauman's de-jure/de-facto distinction, the neoliberal ‘everything is possible’ has never been for everyone a road to endless ego-compulsive auto-exploitation through seduction and stimulation alone, but one backed by ‘fears of falling’ ²⁰ even for those who were well-socialised into achievement culture. Social psychoanalyst Lynne Layton borrows the formulation from her middle-class patient in describing the psychosocial condition befalling neoliberal subjects as ‘Yale, Fail, Jail’ (Layton, 2020) – reminding us that the optimistic dreams of meritocratic achievement are backed by deep fears of shameful failure in a highly competitive environment and the risk of sliding down the class hierarchy. This abject underside of neoliberal socialisation could be kept at bay when people are busy enough achieving, but that may not be possible under worsening socio-economic circumstances.

For those without the material, cultural, and symbolic means to strive for ‘achievements’, the middle-class culture of achievement is more likely to manifest as ego-dystonic impositions – as ideologies that hardly capture the struggles with the worsening disciplinary undersides of neoliberal capitalism. In this sense, the despair and disillusionment that came to public attention in the recent decade afflicting the deindustrialised working class may well hold the key to cracking what (post-)neoliberal socialisation will be like. As fissures are increasingly evident in the post-2008 neoliberal economic and political fabric, we can expect responsibilisation, backed by disciplinary threats of social shaming and material precarity, to play a greater conscious role in capitalist subjectivation. Here, I explore three elements of the puzzle that might reveal how subjectivation occurs under intensifying precarisation:

First, the recent rise in cynicism, as we have glimpsed in early sections, might be one way tensions in neoliberal socialisation play out. Cynical workers, in contrast with Han's auto-exploiting achiever, relate to neoliberal institutions, expectations, and ideals with a tint of conscious disillusionment and doubt. The ironically critical distance may well function to keep one's conscious dissonance at bay while preserving the enjoyments we reap from participating in the neoliberal game, ²¹ but it may also be a way of maintaining one's sanity in a suffocating world. By enacting ironic distance from performance demands, one may better cope with heightening disciplinary institutional demands in the absence of subjectively meaningful aspirations. In any case, cynicism stands in an ambivalent relation to resistance and struggles for emancipation, for while the cynic's self-conscious distance from ideals can be tapped for critical radicalisation, the solidification of the otherwise critical attitude into mundane complaints and rants also diffuses the urgency of change and supports compliance with system demands. The FT article surveyed above on ‘embracing’ and ‘injecting humour’ into the absurdities of work demands well testifies to the latter (Berwick, 2025). As such, cynicism can be one way to explain the absence of collective struggles without appealing to Han's thesis of full seduction.

Second, the accumulation of tensions in the socialisation of neoliberal subjects does not altogether render obsolete ideals of neoliberal individualism that remake people as decollectivised, self-responsible, and self-providing individuals. Individualist values, ideals, and theories have enduring and organising effects on people's self- and social understanding to this day. However, going beyond Han, individualism figures in neoliberal culture not merely as positive aspirations, but as modes of coping involving defensive hardening against forces of precarisation and threats of disciplinarisation.

What Layton calls ‘defensive autonomy’ and ‘amoral familialism’ typify how the neoliberal middle class repudiate their dependency needs under demanding socialising environments and project a world of competing agents marked by mutual hostility and class hierarchy (Layton, 2020). But perhaps the most illustrative examples of how threats of precarity connect to defensive individualism are working-class members who have been punished by precarisation throughout the neoliberal decades. Even before the financial fallout, studies describe how American non-college workers uphold ideals of individualism to harden themselves against hostile environments. Individualised, working-class subjects seek private solutions to adapt to changing (and worsening) circumstances, prizing responsibility, resilience and self-sufficiency as moral virtues. Despising ‘dependency’, they also form strong moral(-ised) boundaries that cast their deserving selves against undeserving racialised, underclass abjects (Lamont, 2000; See also, Stephens et al., 2014).

In the post-2008 era, this group becomes more disenchanted with ‘meritocratic’ social achievement, and threats of falling victim to the state's punitive targeting of the ‘underclasses’ become more tangible – although a similar individualistic ethics remains, if not hardened, under adversity (Lamont, 2019). The post-2008 studies by Jennifer Silva on working-class young adults in rural America detailed how dissonant disenchantment from conventional ideals of achievement co-occurs with a strong attachment to ideals of self-responsibility in areas such as intimacy and therapeutic self-help. Experiencing decades of deprivation, disciplinarisation, and (perceived) betrayal, Silva's working-class interviewees re-anchor their lives in individualist ‘narratives of self-transformation’ in which troubled pasts are seen as overcome by individual resilience and triumph (Silva, 2013). Such a self-responsibilising ethic is quite remarkably compatible with ‘unyielding disengagement’ and nihilistic beliefs in doom and apocalypse (Silva, 2023).

Third, and strongly connected to defensive individualism, is the link between neoliberalisation and recent right-wing mobilisations which have gained substantial support among rural working-class voters and young adults (especially those identifying as white) (Chazan, 2024; Hochschild, 2024; McQuarrie, 2017; Silva, 2019). While many factors that precipitated the rise of right-wing populism, increased competition for economic survival and defensively individualist hardening under neoliberalism likely favour support for populist ideologies that are aggressively exclusionary and paranoid (Yeung, 2025, ch. 6). As an explanation for this, Jessica Benjamin (2017) powerfully argued that inequalities and failures of progressive challenges to the precarizing order predispose people towards symbolic worldviews of ‘only-one-can-live’, where society is reimagined as a zero-sum game between triumph and triumphed, predator and prey. Such worldviews, continuous with the defensive frames of mind many already cultivated under precarising environments, enable right-wing movements to easily capture people's (rightful) feelings of frustration and despair with capitalism towards incendiary and paranoid directions.

Although paranoid survivalism has moved far beyond the ideologies of the globalist-cosmopolitan era of neoliberalism, it is remarkable how existing populisms are continuous with and retain many elements of earlier neoliberal socialisation. For instance, by placing precarisation in incendiary frames of ‘culture wars’, such movements mount little effective challenge to economic interests behind neoliberalisation (Indeed, paranoid ideologues are allied with and supported by large capital.) (Cooper, 2021; Monbiot & Hutchison, 2024, ch. 16; Slobodian, 2019). Besides, ideologically, to sustain fantasies of hope and triumph for the in-group, paranoid worldviews only antagonised ‘culturally-progressive’ neoliberal elites and scapegoated the more vulnerable – the latter of whom have long been victimised and stigmatised as the ‘underclasses’ Wacquant described (Fraser, 2017; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018, pp. 193–215; Yeung, 2024). The neoliberal hatred of government, the disdain for ‘dependency’, and glorification of self-sufficiency and self-responsibility remained alive and well within right-wing mobilisations. Last but not least, there is also evidence that paranoid movements do not undermine, but vindicate neoliberal ideas of ‘competition’ and the ‘competitive entrepreneur’ by translating them into unabashedly neo-Darwinian, xenophobic, racist, sexist, and neo-fascist terms (Finlayson, 2021; Slobodian, 2025).

Conclusion

Moving forward, a proper resolution of our psychopolitical deadlocks can only be achieved by attending to the continuities and ruptures between our present and the wider ideological and economic trends of neoliberalisation. If the above discussion is accurate, then progressive mobilisations must break the spell of cynical coping and the worrying bind between material precarisation and its psychosocial correlates of defensive autonomy and paranoid survivalism. While part of this involves significant challenges to extractive logics of capitalist accumulation, another part of this project may involve recovering psychosocial imaginaries and institutional arrangements that make social coexistence and recognition possible and desirable for all (Benjamin, 2017, Yeung, 2025).

However we conceive of the way forward, Han's unifying diagnosis of neoliberal achievement culture is misleading. Neoliberal individualism is powerfully resilient, persistent even when the neoliberal macroeconomic order is showing signs of fracture (Davies, 2014; Streeck, 2024). Values of individual responsibility and ‘free’ market competition are still operative. Yet, contrary accounts such as Han's, neoliberal subjectivation is not uniformly seductive, but is also produced by heterogeneous practices of coercion, class stratification, and conflictual psychic conditioning. People are depressed and burnt out, not (merely) because they are auto-exploiting, but (also) because the neoliberal order will punish them with shame, unemployment, debt insolvency, and poverty if they do not perform well enough and put up the right pretences of self-motivation. They fail to collectively resist not because everyone fully identifies with neoliberalism's positive promises, but because their complaints and dissatisfactions are channelled through cynicism, defensive individualism, and paranoid survivalism.

One can be agnostic about whether there can be a more unified model of neoliberal subjectivation, but any attempt to reconstitute this unified model must first engage with the heterogeneity and fractures in the terrain of subjectivation. The mere generalisation of middle-class fantasies is no longer sufficient, because such fantasies were never meant for everyone, and now, for those they are meant for, such fantasies are also crumbling.