Trump's day-one Executive Order blitz contained a *lot* of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word "systemic":
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple
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Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to so. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still "localized" - and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become "systemic" - I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.
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But of course, Trump wasn't intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his *real* target, which is killing systemic explanations for *social* phenomena.
This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no such thing as society."
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In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of *homo economicus*, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way.
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You donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.
This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It's only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market - a giant, distributed computer - to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us.
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When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism's sword out of the market's stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.
The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a "hard science" grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs.
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Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can't be readily quantized and represented in a model:
https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/
It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories.
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If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone *feels* "powerful" or "desperate"?
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This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use.
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It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."
It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them.
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If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism
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Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again
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President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit...
It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham
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This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It *must* reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it *is* an ideology.
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Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:
> Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?
> Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
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A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.
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In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-full-statement-uk-riots
"Criminality, pure and simple" has *zero* explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away?
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Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?
How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.
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It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.
It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.
Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder
Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators.
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As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes - not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it - bragged about it, even!
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But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with *imaginary* abusers - Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy
This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's *Doppelganger*:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
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Cory Doctorow
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