The long arc from Renaissance to ruin
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were among humanity’s greatest breakthroughs.
For most of human history, people lived in small groups – free, interdependent, and equal in the ways that mattered. They cared for each other – for the young, the old, the sick, the disabled. Everyone had a place. Everyone was given a role according to their abilities, so that each person could be a valuable member of the whole. This was the original social contract – unwritten, unspoken, but understood by all. An arrangement that benefited everyone.
It was the shift to sedentary life, to agriculture and property, that broke this balance. Hierarchies emerged. Rulers and ruled. Centuries of feudal oppression and religious authority followed.
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment broke that chain. Science replaced dogma. Reason replaced obedience. People reclaimed the freedom to observe, to question, to think for themselves – a freedom that had been buried for millennia.
Kant gave this a name: Mündigkeit – the courage to use your own understanding without the guidance of another. “Sapere aude!” – dare to know. Or, in Kant’s own words: „Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!” – Have the courage to use your own mind.
This was a liberation of immense consequence.
Yet Kant never imagined the individual as an island. His categorical imperative demands that we always consider others – that we act only according to principles we could will to be universal law. Autonomy and responsibility were inseparable.
What happened over the following centuries was a quiet betrayal of that balance. The autonomy was kept. The responsibility towards others was dropped. What remained was not Enlightenment – it was individualism as ideology. An ideology that subordinated everything else: community, solidarity, the common good. The state was no longer seen as the guardian of the collective interest. Instead, it was supposed to make itself obsolete by handing its responsibilities to the market.
The market would solve everything. Education, healthcare, infrastructure, housing – all of it would be better, cheaper, more efficient if only we let the market do its work. Many still believe this today.
This was the promise.
Thatcher, Reagan, and the breaking of a contract
The neoliberal turn of the 1980s did not come from nowhere. After the post-war reconstruction boom faded, the economies of the West were struggling. Inflation was high, growth was stagnant, and the old Keynesian model – the idea that governments should actively steer the economy through public spending in bad times and restraint in good times – seemed to have run out of answers. It had worked well for three decades of post-war prosperity, but stagflation in the 1970s made it look like a relic.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan offered a new one: Deregulate. Privatize. Cut taxes. Shrink the state. Let individuals compete, and the best will rise.
It worked – at least on the surface, at least for a while, at least for some.
And the rest of the world could hardly wait to follow. Country after country adopted the model – deregulation, privatization, austerity – as if it were a new religion. They followed the supposed saviour with the fervour of the newly converted.
What it also did, quietly and gradually, was break the social contract – that ancient, unwritten agreement from the very beginning of human history. The understanding that we are social beings. That we depend on each other. That we are not just less without others – we are nothing without others.
This is not sentimentalism. It is anthropology.
Everyone is the architect of their own fortune
Neoliberalism broke that contract.
The most radical champions of individualism are already in power. And not just overseas – right here, in the heart of Europe, heads of government continue to attribute success to the individual and dismantle the social safety net with remarkable determination. They do not see this as a failure of policy. They see it as the policy itself.
Under the new paradigm, both success and failure were assigned to the individual.
If you succeeded, it was your merit. If you failed, it was your fault.
Society was no longer part of the equation. The successful were absolved of any responsibility for those who had fallen behind. And those who had fallen behind were left to carry the full weight of their misfortune – alone.
Over time, this created an enormous pressure on the individual. A pressure to perform, to optimize, to brand yourself, to never stop hustling. A pressure that turned loneliness from a temporary condition into a chronic disease.
Even the populist parties that define themselves through the opposition of “us” and “them” are, at their core, neoliberal. Behind the nationalist rhetoric, their actual economic policy is the same old playbook: deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, dismantling of social systems. Their rhetoric sounds like solidarity – but it is solidarity with a fence around it. Inside: those who deserve. Outside: those who don’t. The logic of individual merit remains intact. It is simply wrapped in a flag.
The bitter irony: once these policies are actually implemented, their own voters will be among the first to suffer the consequences.
The privatization of money itself
One of the most consequential steps happened during the deregulation wave of the 1980s, and most people are not even aware of it.
In many countries, central banks were forced to give up their monopoly on money creation. Commercial banks – private companies, driven by profit – were allowed to create money on their own.
The justification was familiar: the market will regulate itself.
The conflicts of interest were ignored. Banks that own companies, or hold stakes in companies – for whom will they create money? For the businesses they profit from? Or for the common good?
The answer was predictable. What began with this deregulation in the 1980s set off a chain of consequences we still suffer from today.
Through the private creation of money – a resource that belongs to the community – fantasticatillions were diverted from public use. First from the social safety net. Then from unemployment support. And eventually from the most fundamental institutions of a functioning society: infrastructure, education, public services.
The crumbling schools you see everywhere are not an accident. They are the direct result of a system that allowed private interests to capture a public resource.
And here lies the deepest hypocrisy of neoliberalism: Profits are privatized, but losses are socialized.
When things go well, the gains flow to shareholders and executives. When things go wrong – a bank collapses, a market crashes, a pandemic hits – it is society that pays the bill. Taxpayers bail out the banks. Public budgets absorb the damage. The individual entrepreneur takes the risk – so we are told – but when the risk materializes, it is the community that bears the cost.
This stands in stark contradiction to the very ideology that created it. If everyone is truly the architect of their own fortune, then failure should be private too. But for the wealthy and powerful, it never is. The doctrine of individual responsibility applies only on the way up – never on the way down.
The contradiction is not hidden. It happens in plain sight, and yet we have grown so accustomed to it that we barely notice.
Wealth begets wealth
We have reached a new stage.
Entire nations are now openly governed by narcissistic, self-absorbed leaders who are convinced that their wealth is rightfully theirs.
But ask one simple question and the illusion crumbles: Where does all this money come from? This incomprehensible wealth – who was it taken from?
The answer is: from society.
Everything in the possession of one person was previously in the possession of another. Wealth does not appear from thin air. It is extracted, concentrated, and defended.
Once the gap between rich and poor becomes wide enough, wealth generates more wealth almost on its own. The rich can buy influence. They can shape laws. Justice becomes a commodity.
It is no longer the idea of equality that governs society. It is the rule of the strongest, dressed up in the language of individual freedom.
And so, hand in hand, neoliberalism and unchecked capitalism are leading us back to where we started. A new feudalism is taking shape – not with kings and clergy, but with tech billionaires and hedge fund managers. The titles have changed. The structure has not.
A small class owns the land, the platforms, the data, the money. The rest work on their terms, live in their houses, depend on their goodwill. And no matter how far they dream of escaping – there are no consumers on Mars. The Renaissance fought to break the feudal order. Now the very ideology that claimed to champion individual freedom is rebuilding it.
So what can we do?
When you feel powerless, when the machinery seems too large to fight, when those in power can so easily silence dissent – the answer is deceptively simple.
Stay true to yourself. Show empathy. See the person in front of you as a human being. Not as someone beneath you. Not as a superior being. Just a person – with flaws, weaknesses, and strengths. With dreams and longings.
Empathy is what connects us. The ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes is what makes us human.
If we lose that, we lose our humanity.
We need to remember what unites us, rather than focus on what divides us. We need to be there for each other again, not just for ourselves. We need to listen to each other again. To accept that others may see the world differently – and that this is not a threat, but a gift. To argue not in order to win, but to wrestle with ideas together, in search of truth. To find what we share, despite all our differences, and to live together in peace.
It is time to move beyond individualism and rediscover community.
Because only together can we face the immense challenges that lie ahead. We must – because we depend on each other. Because we only have a future together, on this wondrous blue marble, drifting through the endless void.