Neoliberalism implodes in a crisis of truth and trust
Since the Enlightenment, liberalism has aimed to remove politics from the political. Given that human history is largely defined by clashing worldviews and violent conflict, the impulse to tame this dynamic is understandable. Liberalism, grounded in secular neutrality and rule of law, sought to suppress the passions that drive men to war. Its answer was to distribute power widely enough so that no single leader’s rage or charisma could lead a nation into chaos.
This project has reached its apex in today’s managerial neoliberal regime, where secular humanism serves as the ruling creed and experts, housed in supposedly impartial institutions, are tasked with determining truth. But the cracks in this foundation began forming long ago.
Our ruling class members have willingly torched the credibility of the very institutions they rely on for legitimacy — all in pursuit of temporary political advantage. That destruction has accelerated a collapse that now feels inevitable. Liberalism faced an epistemological crisis and failed to meet the challenge. Like every tradition that cannot defend its intellectual ground, it is watching its authority erode into dust.
Neutral governance comes with clear benefits. It claims to free society from bitter conflicts over religion and identity. It promises a greater scale of cooperation by stripping away regional particularities — traditions, customs, prejudices — that make governing diverse populations difficult.
Even technical differences tied to nationhood, like currency, units of measurement, or contract law, obstruct trade. But by creating institutions that claim neutrality in matters of faith, culture, and commerce, liberalism increased the scale of possible coordination. It built what amounts to a “minimum viable morality,” a lowest common denominator that allowed incompatible systems to function together.
The problem? That same minimum morality now appears insufficient to hold anything together.
Instead of serving specific peoples with particular needs, modern institutions — staffed by credentialed experts — aim to impose rational, universal standards on everyone. The promise is simple: equal treatment under a neutral system. The administrators of this system are chosen not for their biases, but for their supposed objectivity.
These institutions soon become more than arbiters — they become the final authority on truth. In the liberal order, they are the only legitimate source of knowledge. If it isn’t institutional, it isn’t real.
The economic benefits of this arrangement are obvious. Large-scale cooperation yields immense material gains. Yes, traditions and religious customs may erode in the process, but who can argue with abundance? Prosperity silences most dissent.
As long as the ruling class preserves the credibility of the institutions, the system works. Managerial liberalism turned experts into a new priestly caste — with one crucial difference: This priesthood could actually make it rain. As long as the economy grew and the promises were kept, no one questioned the myth of neutral expertise. All the boats were rising. Why complain?
Unfortunately for the liberal order, human beings are predictably flawed. The institutions were never truly neutral, and the experts were never infallible. Over time, the ruling class got greedy. They stretched their credibility to justify wars and push social engineering — even when it clearly wasn’t in the public interest.
As their grip on power tightened, they grew bolder. Those who ran the system began treating institutional trust as a political currency to be spent. They traded legitimacy for short-term advantage, eroding the very foundation that kept their authority intact.
This trend hit its apex during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Across the board — from the World Health Organization to local physicians — experts promoted obvious falsehoods to maintain power. The betrayal was staggering.
After watching that coordinated institutional collapse, the public started asking uncomfortable questions. If medical professionals — the most trusted experts in life-and-death matters — could lie, what else has the system lied about? Elections? Wars? Economics? History? Suddenly, everything is up for re-examination.
This moment terrifies the ruling class. Its members' entire strategy relied on institutional consensus to shape truth and steer public opinion. This is why disillusioned liberal voices like Sam Harris or Douglas Murray, once celebrated for challenging orthodoxy, now beg the public to get back in the box and stop asking questions.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with how we know what we know. Under managerial neoliberalism, experts — and the institutions they populate — became the foundation of knowledge itself. Truth was whatever the expert consensus declared it to be.
Great post and extremely accurate. Neo- liberalism is in fact in a state of crisis, and if left to its own devices it’s on the path toward collapse, at least in the US, it should crumble and collapse and be replaced by something more robust and more closely oriented to the federal republic America was built on. The danger here is that the neoliberals will not give up power without a fight, and they are extraordinarily vicious because they have no core principles that would cause them to exercise any sort of restraint. They are at their core totalitarians and utopians. And inside any utopian and or totalitarian is a mass murderer, struggling to get out.
Insightful as always, thank you.
We have good reason to be skeptical of expert consensus—ideological bias, government overreach, media manipulation, and corporate collusion have all made it clear that "expert opinion" isn't neutral or trustworthy.
Douglas Murray’s position is interesting because he’s always been anti-woke and highly critical of institutional capture, but he also has a certain old-school respect for expertise and tradition—especially when it comes to Western civilization, classical liberal values, and the Enlightenment ideals that gave rise to the scientific method in the first place.
So when Murray was arguing for ‘following the experts’ on Rogan the other day, I think what he might have meant was: “don’t throw out the concept of expertise altogether”. He probably wants to recover a vision of science and academia ‘as they were meant to be’—rigorous, independent, grounded in truth-seeking—rather than reject them entirely because they’ve been captured by secular humanists.
The key, then, is to distinguish the ideal of expert knowledge from the present reality of compromised institutions. As you’ve pointed out, that distinction is only possible if we return to strong moral foundations. Murray may be trying to preserve the ideal, but when the foundations have decayed, and the rot just goes too deep, it becomes wiser to trust one’s own discernment of truth rather than defer to a corrupted credentialed consensus.