Liberalism under industrialism is wilful blindness

From "Learning to Need Each Other" (March 2026, https://departurein.place/learning-to-need-each-other/).

Left and right are both conservative now, each preserving its preferred features of the order; liberalism's conservatism may be the more dangerous "because it wears the costume of progress". Its story is that emancipation, reason and efficiency built something good (democratic institutions, rights, rising living standards, education, health) and the task is to defend it. But the gains were never separable from the harms: institutions run on colonial and neo-colonial oppression; living standards are bought with a one-time fossil endowment treated as income; education produces the credentials that reproduce class hierarchy "and calls it meritocracy"; health depends on food and pharmaceutical systems that externalise costs. "The dysfunction is not a flaw in the machine ... It is the very mechanism by which the machine produces its gains."

So liberalism keeps a selective blindness: good outcomes are the system's essence, bad ones aberrations fixable by policy (climate change as market failure, inequality as distortion, colonial extraction as a past failing). Those who have lived the dysfunction see through this at once; he quotes Baldwin: "it is the innocence which constitutes the crime." The professional classes were born into that innocence. Who maintains it: professional-class-misrecognition.

Provenance: James's post "Learning to Need Each Other" (2026-03-05, https://departurein.place/learning-to-need-each-other/), read in full 2026-10-26; saved in raw/notes/departurein-place-2026-10-26.md. His statement of his own position; not a sourced claim about the world. Disposition: stated.

Related: the-machine-not-its-management, professional-class-misrecognition, pmc-dependency-chains, departure-in-place