If you want to actually understand the current state of the world, the reigning ideology and what they really believe, and dont just want to listen to online schizoposters - read Globalists by Quinn Slobodian

(would post pic of book & excerpts but I let my friend borrow it)

It's actually more evil than you probably think. The neoliberals don't believe in the "free market" because they actually believe it creates the conditions for freedom - they know that free markets and freedom in the standard sense are opposed.

They also don't believe in it because they think it generates superior economic growth over centralized planning - it may or may not but this is not the relevant point. They believe in it out of a perverse, almost religious sentiment that it is the only option for the world

Neoliberalism sees itself as the antithesis to "economic nationalism", which includes communism, fascism, the New Deal, democratic socialism, any system in which "the people's will" is allowed to determine the economic policy of the nation

The neoliberals’ feeling was that economic nationalism was to blame for WW2. If the people of a given nation are entitled to demand material things from their government, a politician will come who will give it to the people by plundering some neighboring nation

The founding neoliberal thinkers imagined a system in which the nation-state would remain but have no authority over economic policy, and instead serve a vestigial role over "culture" (whatever that means). So yes, the modern American culture wars were always part of the plan

They saw the horrors of 20th century warfare and imagined that this would go on forever, unless somehow local economic agendas could be abandoned by shifting the world economy into a rationally engineered global system. This would be the end of history, a utopia.

This sounds a lot like communism, and it is, but the difference is that they did not want this to happen via central planning and governance. Contrary to some right-wing narratives, neoliberalism was always very against the idea of global govt (at one point a serious proposal),

because this could be usurped by a demagogue, just like a nation-state. What they wanted was for a rational, ordered system not to be build by human minds, but by the “natural” process of the free market - trade producing division of labor and comparative advantage & so on.

The idea is - once there is maximal division of labor and diffusion of concern in the global economy, this will be the rational, perfect system at the end of history, since there will be no reason for anyone to gain economically by deviating from it.

Perversely, the neoliberals supported this vision of things by claiming that the free market ethos is in accordance with “nature”. However they held this belief while also constructing all the think-tanks, NGOs, intel agencies, etc we have today to enforce it from the shadows.

To create their morbid version of “nature” - of savage competition and destruction of social ties in the “free market”, they needed to construct a demiurge to suppress the human potential for collective action.

In this sense, it is like a twisted, diabolical version of communism (or if you think communism is already twisted - doubly so). While communism promised to save us from the alienation created by division of labor and give us free time for humanistic, community-oriented tasks,

neoliberalism’s goal is to force the entropic vector of division of labor as far as it can possibly go, destroying all other forms that would stand in the way of it, eliminating collective human creativity as the greatest threat to world peace, heat death of the universe.

Fortunately this vision of things could never work, and it’s falling apart in the current moment, but this logic is how we got to where we are today.

Thanks @KBULTRA0 for the rec on this, btw