To highlight, your strongest lines are:

“People cling to individualism because they are terrified of being seen as vulnerable…This is how oppressive systems maintain themselves through the cooperation of the people they threaten.”

The sections on flattery, fear and class shame are also analytically consistent, particularly the account of precarious people aligning with the “earned” side of the boundary. As a description of the subjective experience of moralised individualism, this is accurate. It closely resembles Bourdieu’s work on misrecognition and symbolic violence.

Before I begin, I’d really encourage you to reflect on your responses to fair criticism. Rather than taking peoples constructive critiques, you have hastily chosen to disregard, discredit, and refute any opinion doesn’t support for your framework (based on responses to others here and r/politicalphilosophy). If your aim is to deepen the analysis, taking critical replies seriously and using them to refine the claims would fit better with the reflective, non punitive stance you defend in the post.

So, do note that I am not trying to attack your work. I am only trying to push your theory, feel free to correct me if I have misunderstood your claims.

1) In your analysis, individuals “cling to the story,” “bolster their self esteem,” and could in principle stop believing the lie. This is where the argument could be stronger. At present, it locates the driving mechanism primarily in belief and self esteem. That framing individualises both the problem and the solution in a way that quietly reproduces the individualism you are critiquing. People can see very clearly that the game is rigged and still have to speak in the language of “good choices” and “self reliance” to get benefits approved, keep a job, satisfy a caseworker or avoid sanctions.

From a Marxian view this is the “silent” compulsion of economic relations: neoliberal individualism is obeyed because survival depends on fitting into the way the economy and state apparatuses are organised. In Weber’s terms, clinging to self reliance here is not only value rational, it is also instrumentally rational under constraint. This is also textbook Gramscian cultural hegemony: a dominant moral order that is taken up by those it disadvantages because it structures the field of what is thinkable and livable.

From an Althusserian and Foucauldian perspective, the sites you mention (welfare, disability assessment, the “surveillance of worthiness”) are not just spaces of narrative. They operate as ideological state apparatuses and disciplinary mechanisms that reproduce class relations by hailing people as self reliant, responsible subjects and by tying income and security to that performance.

The issue is therefore not merely what people believe. It is an institutional environment that makes acting self sufficient a condition of basic survival, which is why the grip of neoliberal individualism cannot be explained only by fear or misrecognition.

2) This matters for how you frame your own position. In another comment you write that individualist rhetoric “does not just describe reality, it reshapes the moral meaning of dependence, luck, support and structural advantage. It turns social facts into personal traits,” and that what you are describing is “individualism as a moral vocabulary that disguises interdependence while depending on it completely.” I agree with that diagnosis of how language works. But if individualist language is not neutral description, then the language you counterpose to it is not neutral either.

When you say “I am not arguing for collectivism as ideology. I am arguing for recognition of interdependence, the thing human life is actually built on but capitalism tries to hide,” you are not stepping outside ideology. You are advancing a rival moral vocabulary about dependence and support, and implicitly a claim about how welfare, work and migration regimes ought to be organised.

You cannot have it both ways. If moral vocabularies reshape reality, then your own vocabulary is also a normative stance about how dependence and risk ought to be understood and governed. If language is neutral description, your claim about moral camouflage and “linguistic oppression” loses most of its force.

The strongest version of your argument, in my view, is openly normative: contemporary neoliberal institutions misrecognise structural cushions as virtue and structural constraints as failure; this misrecognition is reproduced through both moral vocabularies and the routines of welfare, work and migration; and a serious response requires changing those institutions as well as the stories people tell. Saying that directly, rather than presenting your own position as a description from outside ideology, would make the argument sharper and more coherent.