Indeed, this double discourse which, although founded on belief, mimics science by superimposing the appearance of reason - and especially economic or politological reason - on the social fantasies of the dominant, is endowed with the performative power to bring into being the very realities it claims to describe, according to the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy: lodged in the minds of political or economic decision-makers and their publics, it is used as an instrument of construction of public and private policies and at the same time to evaluate those very policies. Like the mythologies of the age of science, the new planetary vulgate rests on a series of oppositions and equivalences which support and reinforce one another to depict the contemporary transformations advanced societies are undergoing - economic disinvestment by the state and reinforcement of its police and penal components, deregulation of financial flows and relaxation of administrative controls on the employment market, reduction of social protection and moralizing celebration of `individual responsibility' - as in turn benign, necessary, ineluctable or desirable, according to the oppositions set out in the following ideological schema:
Neonewspeak Bordieu
Summary table of Neoliberal thought
Neonewspeak Bordieu
Summary table of Neoliberal thought
| state [globalization] | market |
| constraint | freedom |
| closed | open |
| rigid | flexible |
| immobile, fossilized | dynamic, moving, self-transforming |
| past, outdated | future, novelty |
| stasis | growth |
| group, lobby, holism, collectivism | individual, individualism |
| uniformity, artificiality | diversity, authenticity |
| autocratic (`totalitarian') | democratic |
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