PRESUME THE ECONOMIC case for free markets is true: that capitalism makes us freer and richer, creates better jobs and greater opportunities, and helps us solve environmental problems. Does it make us happier too?
The American conservative Patrick Deneen believes liberal capitalism makes us “increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Under the exhaustive headline “Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems,” the British leftist George Monbiot claims that these problems include (but are by no means limited to) “epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia.”
Freedom “doesn’t make us free, it makes us lonely,” adds Christian conservative Joel Halldorf. “Increasing mental illness, isolation and populism are signs that liberalism cannot sustain itself.” The leftist economist Noreena Hertz argues that “neoliberalism has made us see ourselves as competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers, hustlers not helpers.”
Such sweeping statements are only very rarely followed by attempts to document any causal link or even a correlation. Surprisingly often, a quick misreading of classical liberals is supposed to be enough to prove the connection between liberalism and greed and loneliness, as if the resistance to forced relationships was based on a resistance to relationships themselves.
Yet classical liberalism does not deny man’s need for belonging; it just denies that an outside authority knows which collectives anyone else should belong to. Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper and that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals. Do we need something more than our lonely, individual lives? Of course we do, but what? Can we even find a single collective project that would make Deneen, Hertz, and Halldorf cuddle together in communitarian hygge?
Even then we are still only talking about a small homogeneous group of Western intellectuals who demand a collective political project. What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins,
