For our music today we’ll bookend the program with songs by Henry Threadgill coming on the heels of the Reagan era in the United States, and in between offer Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra from the 1960 release Angels and Demons at Play. From an era of collective hope to one of individual despondency.

From the 1960s to the 90s politicians and economists engaged in the projects that would result in what is now widely recognized as Neoliberalism - a totalizing worldview with theological underpinnings that appears inescapable but that our guest, Adam Kotsko, believes is beginning to lose its mystifying grip on us.

We’ll open with Threadgill’s “The Devil Is On the Loose and Dancin’ with a Monkey” from the 1988 release Rag, Bush and All.

Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has reshaped public policy and arguably every area of life on the model of market competition, which it presents as the most authentic expression of human freedom. But Adam Kotsko asserts that such a freedom, the freedom to compete, exists solely to generate blame; when we are given a choice, we are always being set up to fail.

We’ve been joined on Interchange by several scholars to discuss neoliberalism. With Phil Mirowski we tracked its origins and theorists and its dissemination via think tanks; with Melinda Cooper we discovered Nobel Laureates creating policy positions undermining the revolutions of the 1960s by disparaging and defunding any social relation outside of the heteronormative patriarchal family; Wendy Brown showed us the depoliticizing nature of “marketing selves”; Ilana Gershon then showed how ineffectual (and exhausting) the “marketed” self actually is; and Will Davies even showed us how happiness is just another behavioral bludgeon deepening our sense of failure - well Why Aren’t You Happy when you have all this freedom and opportunity?

In this way neoliberalism demonizes the single, solitary, human agent. You only have yourself to blame; indeed you have been made blameworthy.

Today Adam Kotsko tracks this totalizing worldview through the lens of political theology and demonstrates its parallels to Christianity, specifically how it deals with the problem of evil and the concept of free will. As Kotsko tells it, “God has given us free will so that we will freely choose not to use it.” To use free will, though surely the highest form of human agency, is to rebel against the perfect working order of God’s creation. And so too, the great and all-knowing Market renders freedom of choice our greatest power (and duty) while pre-ordaining that choice will lead to failure - ours, not the Market’s and not God’s. It's in this way we are always already Fallen.

GUEST

Adam Kotsko is a theologian, religious scholar, culture critic, and translator, working in the field of political theology. He served as an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago, which was absorbed into North Central College in 2017. He's the author of several books, among them, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, The Prince of This World, and Neoliberalism's Demons.

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