Contemporary Western culture strongly prefers locating the problems that bring people to psychotherapy within the individual. When we conceptualize mental health as an individual problem without adequately considering the social and cultural components, it becomes easy to reduce mental health to a product that can be marketed and sold. This simplified version of mental health becomes a commodity of neoliberalism, a philosophy that emphasizes capitalism, free markets, individual rights, and private property rights, amongst other values (Harvey, 2005).
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by U.S. President Donald Trump is the most sweeping legislation in modern U.S. history, implementing huge tax cuts for the rich and massive cuts to the social safety net.
Many foundations preaching democracy externally are practicing anti-democratic ideology internally by enforcing top-down decision-making and power consolidation. Funders must shift power to communities.
The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse suggests an internalisation of the neoliberal view, reducing identities to consumer preferences.
We should not let the follies of Trump's tariffs overshadow the follies of the gung-ho globalization that preceded them. So said the award-winning economist James K. Boyce in a recent interview. In 2022, the most recent year that data is available, the US trade deficit totaled $971 billion or 3.77 percent of the GDP. The last US trade surplus was in 1975.
Liberalism must focus on dispersing and controlling power, creating a countervailing force against the rise of nationalist populism and the authoritarian assertions of major powers.