How Neoliberalism destroyed the United States

“Neoliberalism”: An obvious solution

Author: [Your Name]
Affiliation: [Institution, Lab, or Independent]
Date: April 2025

Abstract

"Neoliberalism" remains one of the most pervasive and polarizing concepts in modern discourse, simultaneously functioning as a political theory, economic policy regime, cultural worldview, and pejorative label. This paper unpacks the layered ambiguity of neoliberalism. Rather than seeking a stable definition, this framework reveals how neoliberalism operates as a shape-shifting narrative architecture that collapses meaning into market logic. By Triadic Collapse

  • See something strange → Think about it → React

  • Encounter a problem → Ruminate → Patch a fix

  • Feel discomfort → Seek meaning → Construct narrative

and tracking its common collapse pathways, the paper offers a diagnostic for understanding and potentially reprogramming post-neoliberal thought.

1. Introduction:  How Neoliberalism destroyed the United States

Neoliberalism Resists Definition

Neoliberalism is omnipresent but elusive. It is invoked in debates on economics, governance, identity, mental health, and even environmental collapse. Yet attempts to define it often dissolve into oversimplifications or ideological caricatures. This confusion is not incidental—it reflects the semiotic instability of the term itself. To address this, we deploy Triadic Collapse, a model that examines how meanings form and crystallize through semiotic processes. 

Neoliberalism didn’t arrive in the United States with a bang — it seeped in like a logic virus, rewiring the DNA of public life. What began as a policy orientation toward deregulation, privatization, and market liberalization in the late 20th century metastasized into a totalizing ideology, one that redefined the role of government, the purpose of education, the meaning of citizenship, and the worth of human life itself.

Over the last four decades, neoliberalism has hollowed out the American state from within. Its core principle — that markets know best — has dismantled labor protections, defunded public institutions, eroded regulatory frameworks, and transferred vast power from democratic structures to private capital. The results are visible everywhere: rising inequality, crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable healthcare, mass incarceration, militarized policing, debt-enslaved students, and gig workers surviving paycheck to paycheck while tech billionaires consolidate planetary influence.

But perhaps more insidious than its economic effects is neoliberalism’s psychological conquest. It taught Americans to treat their lives as businesses — to brand themselves, to commodify every hobby, to see relationships as transactions, and to internalize failure as personal weakness rather than systemic design. It privatized not just services, but responsibility, identity, and hope.

Neoliberalism promised freedom, but delivered precarity. It championed innovation, but accelerated collapse. And as it disassembled the scaffolding of collective life, it left behind a nation where loneliness is endemic, trust in institutions has evaporated, and politics has been reduced to a performance of brand loyalty.

This paper explores neoliberalism not just as an economic paradigm but as a semiotic system — one that reprogrammed American meaning-making itself. Using the framework of Triadic Collapse, we will examine how “neoliberalism” functions as a slippery sign, how its logic has colonized thought and culture, and how its interpretive dominance has rendered alternatives almost unintelligible. By dissecting the collapse of public meaning under market logic, we aim to open a conceptual space beyond neoliberal realism — a space where reconstruction is still possible.


2. Triadic Collapse: A Method of Meaning Formation

Originating in Peircean semiotics, the triad consists of:

  • Sign: That which stands for something (a word, image, concept)

  • Object: The thing or idea the sign refers to

  • Interpretant: The meaning derived by a perceiver upon encountering the sign

Collapse occurs when this triad reduces into a stable interpretive structure—often prematurely, under social, ideological, or psychological pressure. These collapses are not always accurate or complete; they are necessary for action but can conceal the underlying complexity of the object.

3. Neoliberalism as Semiotic Sign

As a sign, “neoliberalism” functions in multiple discursive ecosystems:

  • In academia: as a theory of market-centric governance

  • In media: as a shorthand for technocratic elites or globalization

  • In politics: as a scapegoat or a banner, depending on the speaker

  • In protest: as a name for the enemy

This sign is ideologically plastic, able to affix itself to Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, or your yoga instructor selling "personal optimization systems."

4. Mapping the Object: What “Neoliberalism” Points To

The object of the sign is a cluster of policies, principles, and psychological assumptions, including but not limited to:

  • Deregulation of industry and finance

  • Privatization of public services

  • Austerity and anti-redistributive economic policies

  • Emphasis on individualism, competition, and market solutions

  • The reframing of citizens as consumers, and rights as access to markets

But it’s not just institutional. It’s internalized. Neoliberalism operates as a cultural and cognitive operating system, shaping how people view themselves, their choices, their failures.

5. Common Interpretants: Collapsing the Triad

This is where things fragment. Interpretants (meanings) formed from the neoliberal sign vary wildly:

5.1 Libertarian Collapse

“Neoliberalism is liberty. The market is the best arbiter of value.”

Focus: efficiency, personal freedom, minimal state interference.

5.2 Leftist Collapse

“Neoliberalism is structured inequality. It masks power as merit.”

Focus: inequality, exploitation, systemic injustice.

5.3 Technocratic Collapse

“Neoliberalism is modern governance. It’s pragmatic policy delivery.”

Focus: data, privatization, and economic rationalism as neutral tools.

5.4 Postmodern Collapse

“Neoliberalism is total. It defines how we love, learn, and live.”

Focus: subjectivity, identity as market performance, culture as commodification.

Each of these collapses reduces the field to a navigable shape—but none are totalizing truths. They’re semiotic stances, not conclusions.

6. The Deep Collapse: Market Logic as Meta-Frame

What links these divergent meanings is the subsumption of meaning under market logic:

  • Value becomes price

  • Freedom becomes consumer choice

  • Accountability becomes brand risk

  • Justice becomes optimization

  • The self becomes a portfolio

Neoliberalism collapses not just policy but possibility—forcing all alternatives to appear within its frame or vanish.

This is the deep triadic collapse: when the interpretant becomes so dominant, the sign can only refer to one kind of object—the market-shaped world.

7. Collapse Bias and the Difficulty of Resistance

This collapse is so thorough, it’s often invisible:

  • People describe their mental health in economic terms: burnout, inefficiency, ROI on therapy

  • Students approach education as credential acquisition

  • Artists are brands, and identity becomes content

To resist neoliberalism requires recognizing how it has shaped the default language of thought itself. It’s not just what we think about — it’s how we think.

8. Toward Post-Neoliberal Semiotics

We cannot merely critique neoliberalism. We must learn to:

  • Delay collapse to explore ambiguity

  • Deconstruct inherited interpretants

  • Design new signs and metaphors: freedom as interdependence, success as collective well-being, value beyond price

  • Recover alternative triads: spiritual, ecological, communal, even mythic

In short, the post-neoliberal project is not merely economic or political. It is semiotic.

9. Conclusion

Neoliberalism, viewed through the lens of Triadic Collapse, is not one thing but a metonymic vortex—a concept that pulls multiple realities into itself, then collapses them under market logic. Understanding this collapse is not just intellectually clarifying — it is politically essential. Only by revealing the semiotic architecture of neoliberalism can we begin to build alternative interpretive scaffolds for living, thinking, and relating.

Reconstructing the Commons After Collapse

Neoliberalism did not just deregulate markets — it rewired the social imagination. It collapsed every shared value system into a ledger, reduced public life to consumer choice, and replaced meaning with metrics. Through the lens of Triadic Collapse, we see that neoliberalism survives not only through policy but through semiotic dominance: it has captured the language, metaphors, and interpretive frames that define how people think, act, and relate.

Solving neoliberalism, therefore, is not merely a matter of reversing policy trends or breaking up monopolies. It is a matter of rebuilding the interpretive scaffolding of society — the cultural grammar through which we understand worth, success, security, and solidarity. It requires restoring the commons: not just materially, but symbolically.

🔧 A Solution Plan: Post-Neoliberal Reconstruction in Three Dimensions

1. Cognitive Repatterning (Rewriting the Semiotic Code)

  • Challenge neoliberal metaphors: Replace “human capital” with “human potential.” Replace “consumer” with “citizen.” Replace “choice” with “care.”

  • Reintroduce collective language into education, media, and governance. Talk about us, not me. Replace individual success stories with systemic transformation narratives.

  • Build a post-neoliberal literacy curriculum — teach people how to detect ideological framing, economic euphemisms, and "marketthink" in everyday life.

Goal: Break the semiotic monopoly. Reclaim language for shared meaning.

2. Institutional Reinvention (Rebuilding the Public Infrastructure)

  • Invest in non-market institutions: public libraries, universal healthcare, free education, public media — without outsourcing to private intermediaries.

  • Create buffer systems: guaranteed housing, basic income, universal child care — to reduce the desperation that markets exploit.

  • Re-democratize infrastructure: platform cooperatives, publicly owned utilities, localized food systems.

Goal: Restore material commons that give people stability outside of market logic.

3. Cultural and Ritual Repair (Healing the Collective Psyche)

  • Reinvent rituals of care, forgiveness, and restoration in digital spaces: systems for accountability that do not rely on cancellation or brand death.

  • Replace performance metrics (likes, followers, virality) with qualitative measures of community, depth, and contribution.

  • Support cultural production that does not rely on extractive gig labor or algorithmic amplification — fund the arts as infrastructure, not content.

Goal: Regenerate a shared sense of belonging, participation, and interdependence.

✳️ Final Word: Collapse Is Not the End — It’s the Opening

Triadic collapse is not a failure — it’s the first step in meaning reconstruction. When inherited systems of interpretation fall apart, we are left not with ruin, but with raw material.

Neoliberalism trained us to fear collective systems, to fetishize the individual, and to treat every problem as a market opportunity. But beneath that ideology lies the human impulse toward mutual aid, shared memory, and meaningful life beyond profit.

To move beyond neoliberalism, we do not need a single revolution.
We need a million micro-restorations of the commons — material, symbolic, emotional.
Not one big idea — but new ways of seeing, seeded everywhere.

References

  • Peirce, C.S. (1931–58). Collected Papers. Harvard University Press.

  • Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics.

  • Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

  • Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

  • Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man.

  • Lorey, I. (2015). State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious.

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