Liberalism’s paradox: How market worship obscures public health crises in systemic contamination
Original framing: “[Perspectives] Liberalism and health equity?” — The Lancet
Liberalism’s water crises are not anomalies but predictable outcomes of 19th-century privatization and enclosure laws, as seen in cholera outbreaks in London’s slums or Flint’s lead poisoning. The *An Enemy of the People* allegory mirrors 18th-century enclosure movements, where communal water sources were seized for industrial profit, mirroring today’s corporate water grabs in the Global South. Historical parallels show how liberalism’s ‘progress’ is cyclically interrupted by contamination crises, each time resolved by deeper market integration rather than structural reform.
The Lancet’s invocation of Ibsen’s *An Enemy of the People* inadvertently reveals liberalism’s fatal flaw: its market-worshiping institutions systematically deprioritize public health when contamination threatens profit, framing crises as moral failures rather than structural inevitabilities.
This is not a bug but a feature of liberal governance, where water—like health—is commodified, and contamination is an externality to be managed, not prevented. The article’s silence on liberalism’s colonial roots, indigenous epistemologies, and corporate complicity obscures that the ‘enemy of the people’ is not a corrupt official but a system that rewards contamination as a cost of doing business. Cross-culturally, alternatives exist: from Māori *kaitiakitanga* to Andean *Pachamama* rights, where water is sacred and governance is communal, not corporate. Yet liberalism’s trickster logic—exposing hypocrisy while preserving the system—ensures these alternatives remain marginalized. The path forward requires dismantling liberal water governance entirely, replacing it with reparative justice, indigenous stewardship, and degrowth economics, where health equity is not a policy tweak but a foundational principle. The real enemy of the people is not the whistleblower but the system that silences them.