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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Cory Doctorow
mkb