It is easy enough to imagine one person bopping another person on the head with a club, and then to parse out exactly what is happening there. The person with the club has no interest in anything like a golden rule. The action is entirely asymmetrical: those who use clubs to inflict social or political violence on others have no interest whatsoever in having clubs used on them in turn.
The flow of power, the exercise of the muscles to swing the club and all the like, is not being used to renew and maintain a relationship between two plays of energy, but to diminish one at the behest of the other.
Less simple is imagining and parsing out exactly how this is happening on a societal level, though I think this same basic relationship of one-sidedness can be sketched out if one thinks about it enough.
There are plenty of ways to illustrate this issue, but one useful way consists of taking a hard look at mainstream political individualism and how it functions in the West in particular. It is the actual mechanism in action that provides the tell, and less the content of the ideology.
To further illustrate, the ideological basis for inequality requires the successful individual, who by means of personal fitness, has earned the outsized resources doled out. By the same coin, those who are poor, in debt, and/or have serious unaddressed health problems are incompetent fools who essentially screwed up in some fundamental way.
But curiously enough, the efficacy of the individual stops right about there, at the point of immediate relevance it has to wealth accumulation. Somehow, individual realities melt away when it comes to, say the individual's preference of whether to participate in a market society or not. Even the Libertarian dream of the free individual is predicated on the objective and absolute reality of a market society being the only rational way to organize a society.
Admittedly this is a project that is in development, and will be indefinitely, until it isn't. There are plenty of individuals that can still get by on activity that falls outside of market forces. But capital is always seeking new frontiers for privatization, and can never rest until every unabsorbed individual is accounted for.
Regardless of the reality, the neoliberal ideology contains in it both the idea of the efficacious individual and the negation of the idea of a subjective individual outside the objective reality of the market.
This is an inconsistency that is built in, and is required for the functioning of this social system as a whole, just as the employment of political violence is inconsistent with any sort of golden rule. The point is not to be consistent, it is gain benefit at the expense of another.
