Three children die, because they don’t get the medicine they need. Three children die, but not because there is no medicine and their illness can’t be cured. Three children die in vain, because their father, a religious pastor, chooses not to bring his children to the doctor but to stay at home and pray.
“Prayer is,” Swedish blogger Lisa Magnusson writes, “humility, submission. But its consequence is that all suffering is, if not self-inflicted, at least something that can be rectified by believing enough and praying sincerely enough” [my translation].
Reading this, it hit me: absurd as this situation seems to many of us, it is all too familiar to a system in which we, as consumers, are ourselves omnipotent, and we, as consumers, have only ourselves to blame when the suffering strikes. Because with choice as the all-pervasive solution to all problems, who can we blame other than the person who chose wrongly?
Zygmunt Bauman writes that our fears have been privatised: in the neo-liberal world, individual problems and risks never add up to collective matters. We stop asking for help, start feeling insecure, and assume responsibility for our misery. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said.
Perhaps neo-liberalism isn’t all that different from older forms of Christianity, lingering still today in some parts of the world, which preach about original sin and forgiveness. Perhaps, in an increasingly secular world, neo-liberalism is our new religion, an opium for the masses, the fear of a strict, condemning god replaced by the fear of individual failure.
We laugh at the thought of prayer as a substitute for scientifically-proven medication. Why is no one laughing at the idea of the hero-like, omnipotent, self-sufficient consumer in place of community and solidarity?
