MYTHS, PARABLES, AND NEOLIBERALISM

I. The illusion of permanence

At its height in antiquity, the Roman Empire stood unmatched in its splendor, much like the modern West following the Cold War. But cracks in Rome’s foundation appeared long before its eventual collapse. A burgeoning bureaucracy, undue dependency upon mercenary armies, and limitless expansion had slowly worn down the empire from within.

Likewise, the supremacy of the West, founded upon neoliberalism, bears within itself an intrinsic insurmountable flaw—an addiction to profit and growth without end.

Neoliberalism was indeed the steam behind the unstoppable engine that vaulted the West to its unchallenged position after World War II. But just as Icarus flew too close to the sun, so the system risks disintegration from the same ambition which fueled its ascent.

The Greeks warned us about hubris—the notion that one’s success would be immune to the consequences of excess. In neoliberalism, this excess is embodied in its doctrinaire faith in market efficiency, deregulation, and privatization.

II. Neoliberalism’s Faustian bargain

The Faustian bargain between Western economies and their own corporations is stark. In an endless pursuit of profit, corporations have hollowed out domestic industries, giving up long-term stability in favor of ephemeral gains.

It was Friedrich Hayek, a key architect of neoliberal thought, who feared that too much state intervention would lead to tyranny.

“The more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual,” Hayek warned in his work The Road to Serfdom (1944).

But Hayek's warning has come full circle: in avoiding the perceived tyranny of the state, the West has allowed the tyranny of the market.

III. Corporation as sovereigns

Corporations have become the sovereigns of neoliberalism, dictating policy with little regard for the public good. Like the biblical Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold—including his food, rendering it inedible—the corporations of the West, in their greed to turn every venture into profit, have created unsustainable economic structures.

What good is gold, Midas learned too late, if you cannot eat? What good are profits, the West is now realizing, if they erode the very industries that sustain the economy?

Meanwhile, as the West's market-driven decision-making transformed its industrial heartlands into post-industrial wastelands, China to the east has embraced state-led capitalism and strategic planning, steadily building its industrial might and positioning itself as the world's manufacturing powerhouse.

IV. A Greek tragedy

Now, the West faces its own reckoning—the begrudging and inexorable dissolution of power that once lay with it. Worse still, this is not through forces exterior to it but rather by a system it so craftily developed.

The tragedy of neoliberalism is a tragedy of hubris, of excess, and of forgetting history’s lessons. The rise of China and the Global South will leave the West pondering one brutal reality: that it was never invincible, it simply flew too close to the sun.

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