"One of the things that neoliberalism has done is it has taken notions that are really powerful and turned them around, basically hijacking them in ways that produce misery and suffering. Freedom doesn’t simply mean ‘freedom from’ in the traditional sense of the word, it also means the ‘freedom to’ do more than just survive or wallow in your own orbits of privatization. It means that you not only have political freedoms and individual freedoms — you have economic freedoms, and social freedoms. You cannot live in a society and believe in elections (if you believe in that myth), or believe in being an agent, or believe that you can have power, or believe that you can influence events, if you’re hungry all of the time, if you have to make a choice between medicine and food, if time is no longer a luxury but it basically incapacitates you by virtue of not having the time to do anything to develop the capacities that would allow us to be political, social, and economic agents. Freedom has been utterly distorted under this authoritarian neoliberal machine because it is a notion of freedom that has been regressively individualized and refuses to acknowledge that you cannot talk about choices without at the same time talking about constraints, whether they be economic, political, or social."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Henry Giroux
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Henry Giroux →
Related Quotes
"Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric, he also provides legitimation to a number of white …"
"Schools are increasingly either engaged in massive forms of pedagogical oppression and discipline or they’re basicall…"
"Today freedom also means the freedom to hate, it means the freedom to say anything, it means the freedom to disparage…"
"Fascism first begins with language, and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitim…"
"[W]hen people can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, they can’t tell the difference between good and evi…"
"As public discourses... cultural texts can be addressed in terms of how they are constituted as objects that gain the…"
"Given the current assault on critical education by various right-wing groups, the increasing corporatization of the u…"
"Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corpora…"
"The language of critique, compassion and hope must be collective, embracing our connections as human beings and respe…"
"Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicat…"