What is significant about these brushes with neoliberalism on a granular scale is that one need not be affluent, nor have a college degree or be an autodidact, to become infused with a vision of the self that is besotted with the narcissism of a thoroughly unmoored personality, unhinged aspirations oblivious to layers of social determination. Indeed, the modern conception of agency bequeathed by the Neoliberal Thought Collective has become so intently self-centered that it has a tenuous grasp upon the very existence of something called “the economy,” which assumes the divine attribute of being simultaneously everywhere yet, in practice, nowhere. We are encouraged to believe we are so “free” that no one can really control our lives, and yet the terminus of this freedom is a peculiar sort of solipsism.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 431