Speaker 1: It's great to be joined on the program today by Neil Valley, who is a lecturer
in sociology and Rutherford Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Otago New Zealand.
I hope Otago is the right pronunciation, Neil. Though the latest book is Utilitarianism Neo
Liberalism and the Production of Uselessness. I really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So maybe to start with utilitarianism, I think many of us could intuit we're talking
about there is something futile about the way we've organized much of our economies
and the world and society and culture. But what what did you what do you mean by the
term? Speaker 2: Yes, So by the term, it really
came to me as in the process of writing the book. The book initially started out as a
series of protests against cuts to the humanities division at my university. I originally started
thinking about it was really like the the kind of futility uselessness of the humanities
within the kind of contemporary university structure, the way that it's constructed as
useless, that if you do humanities or arts, you couldn't get a job, so on and so forth.
But then I started and more I looked into that, the more I started to realize that this
idea of uselessness or futility kind of spread like much further into everyday life in the
21st century. And so I got to a futility idealism, basically, as is many of my many people might
have heard of the word utilitarianism. And on a very basic level, utilitarianism is that
you maximize utility for the greatest good of the greatest number. So each individual
and every decision they make, they maximize their own utility. And this should lead to
a kind of majority happiness. Yeah, basically my argument for utilitarianism is that we
got to a point now where each individual is trying to maximize their utility, not might
be by getting an education and getting further training and getting into debt to start business
or so on and so forth. But in doing so, it actually leads to the greatest unhappiness
of the greatest number because we're entirely individualized, atomized. So it's a kind of
inversion of the utilitarian code. And this is the state that I feel like we live in,
that the more we maximize utility, the more it leads to the kind of deconstruction of
the common common good. Speaker 1: There is an inevitable sort of
interplay here between the concept of utilitarianism, the capitalist systems that, to differing
degrees, most modern what we might call Western countries, although the term Western is maybe
not the right one. Neoliberalism as well, it's hard to get out of including the sort
of media culture and the way in which most people are learning about the world, so to
speak. All of these things seem completely interrelated. And maybe one of the things
that has changed or maybe has become evident is that the preferences and path that one
increasingly takes is less self-directed than we might imagine and really more prescribed
by all of those other systems that I mentioned. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really interesting
point, actually. And it's kind of one of the great kind of contradictions of that kind
of neoliberal period is that everything is about, you know, personal responsibility,
self care, taking your self up by the bootstraps and making the most of your own life. And
yeah, as you make the point is that actually the decisions that we're making supposedly
as kind of free individuals are actually prescribed to us, that there's a certain structure in
place that forces us towards certain decisions. So for instance, as a small example I talked
about in university at the start, there is that the way that universities are constructed,
particularly across the, you know, the global north is is towards kind of getting a degree
that can get you a job. So if that's kind of rhetoric that comes out from, you know,
kind of public discourse and media and so and so forth, most most individuals and looking
at universities through that lens. And so they make decisions of what they study based
on and, you know, kind of get a job at the end of it. That seems on the surface like
an individual decision. Right. And yet it's entirely prescribed within this kind of structure.
And I think this is an effect of neo liberalism. And I think more recent studies of neoliberalism
have started to see the initial studies of neoliberalism are often about the kind of,
you know, the was all about the kind of free market and a rollback of the states. Individuals
are kind of free to do whatever they wanted, free to to operate highly liked in the market.
But more and more we've come to realize of some brilliant studies of neoliberalism is
that actually neoliberalism isn't like the rollback of the state. It's about a very different
form of state intervention. And the role of the state has become to increase the market,
to protect the market from democratic decision making. And then the early neoliberal thinkers
often talked about this at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, where this kind of first
big meeting of the neoliberal intellectuals in Europe, and they talked to by the liberal
thinkers of the 19th century, as opposed to a kind of new a new liberalism, a neoliberalism
for the 19th century, laissez faire kind of free market liberal. They use the analogy
of a road, and they said if if there are no rules on the road, eventually people will
just keep driving each other, no crash and so on and so forth. So what they they saw
neoliberalism as a kind of highway code almost, that you set the rules of the road and people
can drive. When people are driving, they're driving to where they want to go. They're
seemingly making individualized decision. But there's this over arching structure that
guides the way that they drive, and that's how they envisage the market economy and the
neoliberal society as not everyone go for their life, do whatever you want. It's that
there's an overall structure that guides people in a certain way, but people still feel like
they're making individual decisions, but it's actually guided by a certain method, a certain
structure. Speaker 1: When in the book you write about
the useless and repetitive behaviors that can become a trap of neoliberalism. Absent
any context, what I would imagine there would be one sort of story that fits that is you
go to school to get the job and then you take out debt to get the car and the house and
the credit card and you get a slight raise. So you take on a little bit more debt and
it's sort of like this endless rinse, repeat. And by the way, you're basically buying the
stuff that media messages tell you you want or you should want or whatever the case may
be. Is that one of the mechanisms that you're talking about, and what else did you mean
by it? Speaker 2: Yeah, very much so. So that's certainly
a good example. And I you know, I work with with lots of students who are kind of increasingly
wondering what is the point what I'm doing here. You know, they they look at their, for
instance, their parents generation, and they might have gone to the university, particularly
say here in New Zealand, they would have gone to university for free and also would have
been given a scholarship. So they would have been paid essentially to go to university.
And now these these students are coming out. They're paying massive fees to go to universities,
all getting into debt to do so. And then they come out the other end in debt to a kind of
depleted job market where a house the house market is absolutely crazy. You know, in New
Zealand, the average cost of the house at the moment is $1,000,000. So, you know, kids
coming out with that much that they're not going be able to afford to buy houses. So
there's this kind of sense that all the things that we're supposed to do, all the things
that we have been kind of told, well, will lead to a kind of good future for us are suddenly
crumbling. You know, if you go to university and get a degree, you're supposed to come
out and get a steady job and be able to kind of live, you know, be able to get a high speed,
able to do all the things that we associate in the kind of Western or global and the global
north as kind of a a good life. Suddenly none of these things are available and so many
people are in that and they get in more debt and so on and so forth. And it's this kind
of endless cycle, and yet we're completely trapped and doing the same things over and
over again. There are no no way. It seems like there's very few ways to get out of of
that trap of thinking, this is what I have to do. I have to go to university, I have
to get through further training, I have to do so on and so forth to live this good life
in the future. And the more we do it, the more it seems like our collective economic
and social conditions get worse. And that's the trap I call the utilitarian condition.
We get stuck in this kind of endless trap. Speaker 1: And there really aren't. I mean,
genuinely, there aren't that many ways to completely get out of that, right? I mean,
when we think about them, there's there's the idea of the total off-grid life where
you essentially leave leave modern society. As the case may be. You have to figure out
a way to meet your basic needs and to really do that without touching the standard kind
of corners of the economy that you're talking about. It's extraordinarily difficult. Another
one would be, well, you do it in a hyper drive way for a short period of time such that you
make enough money that then you could exit in a sort of different way. I don't I mean,
it's genuinely quite difficult to not be part of it at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, very much so. And, you know, in the introduction to the book,
I make a distinction between futility and nihilism and I think. They're like the example
you use of, you know, going off grids and so on and so forth. It's a sense that you're
right, like there are few options. The only options we have are to try and escape from
it. A very few people can. Yeah, you might be able to move off grids, but then you're
kind of outside of society. Yes. You can't. You can't influence. You can shift the way
the world runs. You just. And that, to me, is a form of kind of almost like a passive
nihilism. It's like I'm accepting that this world that we constructed is meaningless,
and I'm going to sit outside of it. Yes. And then there's more kind of active forms of
nihilism. Like you sample, you use is that you you go hard in, you try and invent something,
you do it and so forth. But even even entrepreneurs, I guess they kind of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
are are trying to exit from contemporary capitalism. They're trying to get beyond the kind of mundane
kind of existence that the majority of people have to test to live in. There's two forms
of exit there, but those exits don't actually do anything by changing the kind of fundamentals
of that society that we're mostly stuck in. And the reality for the vast majority of us,
no matter what kind of situation when we have to, we only have the kind of structures of
society that are available to us and we have to somehow make the best of it. And it seems
like that's getting harder and harder and harder. And there is, of course, a kind of
generational politics in that, you know, increasingly we're seeing that I, I kind of knew class
politics emerged in the 21st century of basically people who own property, particularly housing
and people that don't. And that often falls in a generational way. And for a younger and
this book often I do say in the introduction that this book is a kind of is a kind of requiem
for a doomed youth in many ways that for it's for a kind of younger generation of the world
that they're emerging into. Speaker 1: And so it seems that there's the
question of how individuals can choose a different path. But then there's another question of
how can society be changed such that the default path is what changes? And it seems I mean,
are there any actions that can accomplish both or is it really you have to decide I'm
going to be within it completely, but try to change it or I will try to exit personally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like the former is our only real option. And so I make I kind
of I call in the book that we need we need to turn this actually to one another. That
actually, especially on the last, you know, post 1989, post the fall of the Soviet Union,
I kind of there's been a kind of an inherent sort of distrust in the last of collective
ness of collectivity. I think particularly probably up until the 2000, the debt crisis.
And I think since then we've seen the return of, you know, particularly in the U.S. and
the U.K., parts of Europe, of kind of democratic socialism, the idea of all of a kind of collective
subject to a collective political subject. And then in the conclusion of the book, I
construct a kind of I guess it's a theoretical idea, all this collective logic, and I call
it the futility of it. And it's it's it's a kind of recipe for a development of the
precariat. So the precariat kind of describes a whole group of people who exist in kind
of precarious lives, whether or not they're working conditions or even just their living
conditions. And there's also these people are, you know, the traditional idea of a union,
which I think is also extremely important. And there is a resurgence of a union, that
there's something, you know, people at work in the same conditions and they share the
same lives in many ways, certainly the same working life, the precariat, that's a more
desperate collective subject. It can be people working in Uber drivers, but it can also include,
you know, casual lecturers, university people who who don't who are living in kind of precarious
conditions. And for me, the futility, it is like an extension of that. It includes the
people who live in precarious lives, are a precarious situation, but also so many of
us who actually on the surface look like we're in quite secure conditions still experience
this deep sense of futility of what we're doing. And I feel like actually this shared
experience of futility across different scopes of social life can actually be the thing that
can if we recognize it in one another, we can use it as a way to to build a kind of
political, a collective political subject that can actually confront the kind of the
way the world works. If, if, if we accept, if we see our if we see futility in one another
and we go, actually, I experience this form of futility. And of course, some people experience
much more extreme forms of utility than others in the same way that some people experience
much more extreme forms of precariousness. But that doesn't necessarily mean we can somehow
recognize it in one another and try and realize and I think part of the problem of contemporary
capitalism, and particularly its neoliberal mutation, is that where we are expected to
see everything as a reflection of our failures. Essentially, anything that doesn't work, anything
we end up in that we can't get a job because we in some way are broken. We somehow we haven't
and haven't done the right thing and we really want one kind of pleading really in the book
is to see that actually these experiences of futility are not personal defects. They're
completely logical experiences of the kind of capitalist system in which in which we
live today. Speaker 1: The book is fascinating and slightly
depressing, but only in the way that gets you to really think about things. The book
is Utilitarianism Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness. We've been speaking with the
book's author, Neal Valley lecturer in Sociology and Rutherford Foundation Research Fellow
at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Really appreciate your time and your insights today.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much, David.