LIBERALISM, INEQUALITY AND ACCESS TO EDUCATIONAL SPACES
N.B. This is the transcript of my introductory speech at the first Community Learning Day held by Educational Psychologists for Material Change, on Inequality and Psychology. I try to explore the way liberal ideology blinds liberals to their own perpetuation of inequality, as exemplified by the 2026 DECP Conference.
Liberalism is undergoing a collapse into authoritarianism and fascism at the moment and, psychologically speaking, it's interesting to see how liberals respond to the current conjuncture. I'm hoping to explore these themes further in a post on 'liberal melancholia' in the coming weeks.
It's no co-incidence that today’s Community Learning Day is being held on the second day of another conference on Inequality and Psychology, held by the DECP, a sub-division of the British Psychological Society that is supposed to represent EPs. Indeed, the very decision to hold our own event was born out of a desire to highlight the ways in which inequality is entrenched in how the DECP event was programmed.
My aspiration for 2026 is to adhere to Rosa Luxemburg’s advice when she states that ‘the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” In that vein, I’d like to loudly proclaim the following:
For a BPS member to attend their conference on inequality, it would cost £316 for a ticket, plus £119 for accommodation and £61.50 for the gala dinner held in the regal backdrop of the Roman Baths and Pump Room in the city of Bath. By my calculations you’d require a budget of approximately £500 to attend. What’s even more galling is that, for the privilege of speaking at this illustrious event, a speaker still has to pay the DECP £243 to attend the conference on top of accommodation and dinner and everything else.
The result is obvious but is worth emphasising: anyone who is suffering the effects of inequality is shut out from attending or speaking at a conference *on* inequality.
So, I wanted to set the tone for today by asking the question – how could this happen? How could the most historic of the Western liberal psychology institutions – the BPS - be so blind to actually existing inequality that they could devise such a programme?
I think the answer lies in our profession’s adherence to the crumbling, yet still dominant ideology of our time – liberalism. The lie that liberals tell themselves is that ‘liberalism’ means freedom. Under liberal democracies we have the individual freedom to vote for who we want, we are free to choose where we work, we’re free to buy what we want, free to spend our leisure time pursuing our own interests and so on. But, as anyone who has read Losurdo knows, the unacknowledged truth of liberalism is that, from its inception, the individual freedom of one group has relied on the oppression and unfreedom of others.
This plays out both internationally and domestically. Without the international imperialism of slavery, colonialism, racism and other forms of violence and oppression, Western liberals would never have been able to accumulate the material wealth needed for their own individual liberty in the first place. From the very start, the relative freedom of one person under liberalism, relied on the relative unfreedom of another.
This is not a historical artifact. This still exists today. From the slave owner’s families who were still receiving government reparations for ‘loss of property’ until 2015, to the decrepit set of public services we still just about benefit from because of colonial extraction in the post war period…yes the vast majority are being squeezed in this country at the moment, but we still enjoy a relative freedom that is only maintained by the murder of Palestinians, the cobalt mining of children in the Congo and extra-judicial interventions in Venezuela, protecting the oil that fuels capital, to name but a few.
Liberal inequalities also play out internally, in Western societies. If total freedom is being able to access the things we need to flourish (physical nourishment, autonomy, relationality, belonging, safety and so on), UK citizens are all unfree to some degree, but some are more unfree than others. A middle-class white boy attending a school with a heavy police presence may be able to access a sense of safety more easily than a global majority child from an overpoliced area. The privately educated person may find it easier to access a sense of belonging on a psychology training course than the working-class person who went to the local comp.
Both domestically and internationally, we should understand inequality under liberalism as a sliding intersectional scale with freedom at one end and unfreedom at the other. And whilst the mechanisms through which freedom is distributed are complex and multifaceted, the essential fact is that this distribution is fundamentally unequal.
And therefore, the dirty secret of liberalism is…to be a liberal is to be a tacit supporter of inequality, engaging in psychological repression of that fact through the proclamation that liberalism is instead about freedom. For liberals, acknowledging that their whole political project is foundationally propped up by inequality for a single second, is to cause the whole deck of cards to come crumbling down. It’s ego-death. It’s annihilation. Because…liberals are the good guys that have reduced inequality, right? Not the bad guys that maintain it!
Why then, do liberals stick with the ‘freedom-lie’, maintaining their goodness, often so blind to inequality? The fact is that liberalism goes hand in hand with capitalism and its prime motive is capital accumulation. When the line goes up and profits are easy to make, liberalism can afford to do some nice things for the domestic population (though these nice things are still produced through exploitation of those overseas). And it can be said that liberalism was doing pretty well in the latter half of the 20th century and out of that came increases in freedom for some (think student grants for working class young people, unemployment benefits, short NHS waiting times, Sure Start centres…that kind of thing). This is the epoch from which our current professional leaders emerge, and they desperately want to believe that it still exists.
Ultimately though, capital is liberalism’s priority over all else. And in times like these when profits are hard to come by, liberalism starts to remove the freedoms it bestowed previously, and inequality starts to present itself more sharply and viciously than before. The contradictions, confusions and illogicality, which have always been hiding in plain sight, emerge and become apparent for all to see.
Yes, we still just about live in a liberal democracy. But do you feel free? Do you feel free to support Palestine? Are trans people free to enter spaces which correlate to their gender? Are people of colour free to go about their day without the chance of racist abuse? Are any of us able to engage in free time or are we all working every hour god gives to pay the rent, or raise enough money to attend a psychology conference?
To paraphrase Marx, under liberal democracy and capitalism, working class people are only free to sell their own labour. If they don’t, they starve. And this system is maintained so others can be richer than Roman emperors, can own yachts, and never have to work. Because the truth is, the core tenet of liberalism is not freedom. It’s inequality.
And what’s particularly important to acknowledge is how Western Psychology is so central to the maintenance of the ‘freedom’ lie. Historically, the freedom of one, over the unfreedom of another was justified via psychology – the white man used psychological tools to justify the lie that he was more civilised, intelligent and of better character - and therefore deserved the freedom he denied to others.
In our present moment, psychology has successfully separated discourse from material wealth to such a point that *everyone* living under capitalism is told they are free, despite the old oppressive hierarchies remaining.
As Byung Chul-Han argues, now all of us live under the tyranny of the freedom-lie. It’s gotten into our bones and our minds. It constantly tells us we *can do anything*. Our imperative is to constantly *achieve*. This is the relentless buzzing refrain of psychology. Stop sitting about! Get off the sofa! Every day needs to be spent attending to the all-encompassing task of self-actualisation!
And when we start to see that the game is rigged – that the systemic barriers we face are enormous and that liberalism is actually about inequality, not freedom…psychology is there to admonish us. No! You didn’t try hard enough! Try again tomorrow! We see a litany of practices and prominent figures telling us to stop blaming the inequalities of the system and start blaming ourselves for not adequately stretching ourselves towards freedom and emancipation. We see idiots like Jordan Peterson telling us to put our own house in order before going out to make change in the world, as if the world wasn’t the thing barging in and destroying our house in the first place.
And so, circling back. To keep this absurd societal clown-car running, it’s imperative that the liberal subject disavows the truth of inequality at the centre of the ideology within which they are submerged, and psychology is one of the primary technologies of disavowal at their disposal.
So – how can the DECP get itself into such an obviously illogical and daft position, perpetuating inequality whilst hosting a conference on the same subject? It’s because liberal ideology blinds its members to their own behaviours. Liberalism allows them buy into the freedom-lie, that they are the good guys, when – materially speaking - the very point of events such as theirs is to engage in a pseudo-recognition of inequality to give the illusion of change – all the while maintaining the actual systems that perpetuate inequality by charging large sums of money to access their event.
So then, the job of our community learning day is to burst that bubble. To face up to the truth of inequality at the heart of liberalism, not only to recognise it, but to go out into our schools, communities and organisations and make material change. Our work needs to focus on the redistribution of wealth, power and representation so that in the future, one person’s freedom won’t rely on the unfreedom of another, and instead we are all free on the Marxian basis of ‘each according to need’.