How did we stop seeing society? Was it, as Thatcher quipped, because society never existed?
No. We simply learned to see markets instead. Every day, millions wake up and instinctively size the world up in market terms: checking stock prices, weighing career moves, calculating the return on their relationships, and wondering why their children now feel more like investment portfolios than human beings.
This isn’t delusion. It’s the world we built.
The market isn’t a place, a thing, or even just a metaphor—it’s the foundational blueprint of our social reality. Over forty years, we have systematically reorganized human relationships around commodification, competitive individualism, and instrumental rationality. Care is now "human capital." Solidarity is "networking." Trust has become a tradeable asset, optimized for competitive advantage.
The transformation goes deeper than policy. We have rewritten the very institutions that shape who we are. Corporate executives discuss "human resources”, not colleagues; universities sell placement rates, not education, hospitals chase "patient throughput", not healing. Even marriage becomes a contract optimized for mutual advantage, not a covenant rooted in love.
The psychological architecture is brutally efficient. Success signals worthiness; failure proves inadequacy. Need becomes market demand—if you can pay. Suffering is repackaged as business opportunity. We police ourselves with internalized market logic: "Am I productive? Am I winning?" Where we once asked what makes a good life, or how we should live together, we now run optimization algorithms inside our head.
Consider what we have lost. The common good—those conditions that enable everyone to flourish—has collapsed into GDP and the sum of our bank accounts. Justice has been reduced from “what we owe each other” to “what we can get away with, so long as we don’t break the law.” Relationships are now measured by return on investment, not mutuality or shared purpose.
The strength of the common good can be traced through the Greek forms of love. Eros is appetitive and possessive—the selfish engine of market exchange, always hungry to consume more. Philia runs deeper: once the bond of civic friendship, the solidarity that held republican citizens together in the shared polis, in koinonia. Agape goes further still: self-giving, gratuitous, oriented to the good itself. Today, neoliberalism has crowded out all higher loves and prostituted even eros—hawking life as labour, nature as real estate, and time as money. The market tolerates only what it can price.
The cost is civilizational. We now inhabit communities that are formally inclusive, procedurally fair —and substantively hollow. Networks of contracts have replaced the fabric of care. Perhaps one day we will wake up and see: in a world where love is for sale, humanity inevitably drowns.
#Leadership #Transformation #GoodLeadership #Neoliberalism #CommonGood
Two clarifications
Christianism – The term is often used critically to describe a political ideology that elevates religious authority above genuine faith, conflating spiritual and governmental power. That is not the sense intended here. I am instead drawing on Stefano Zamagni’s nuanced distinction between Cristianesimo and cristianità (see: Avvenire article)
Relationships – This post illustrates the fundamental qualities embedded in our societal relationships as expressions of the common good, framed by the classical notions of eros, philia, and agape. The various “-isms” serve only as examples; the ladder does not claim that these societal forms alone “save the world.” Rather, it symbolizes the implicit theories of personal and communal moral development—whether instrumental, relational, or indeed eschatological.