The Invisible Doctrine Review: His Name Is Neo (Liberalism)

Terrible AI animation ruins a good thesis

Do you, like me, have at least a few friends who are so left-leaning that they seem to hate liberals even more than Republicans? The sort of people who believe the Democratic primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders and that it's a “fact” he would have won the national presidential election if they hadn't? If that's the case, you've probably heard the word “neoliberalism” tossed around a lot, usually meaning “Everything I hate” and encompassing everyone to the right of AOC, from Rachel Maddow to L. Brent Bozell. So when a documentary offers to explain the term, that actually sounds, if not “appealing,” at least enlightening.

Different words mean different things to different people, of course, but author and activist George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, has been one of the most prominent writers to use the term and identify it as the source of the world's major problems. The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism is essentially Monbiot's book of the same name -- cowritten with filmmaker Peter Hutchison – presented in a visual essay format. Hutchison and Lucas Sabean are the credit directors, with Sabean tackling many of the visuals.

The film features a rather extraordinary statement upfront, particularly for a movie that's explicitly opposing the exploitation of labor and the environment. It reads thusly:

Beg pardon, but as best I can tell, generative AI is not a neutral tool. This isn't the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine; it's more like protesting nuclear power by dropping an A-bomb. The issue with this sort of AI isn't that it's used by capitalist oppressors, but that its very existence is fueled by creative theft, and the energy it requires is massively wasteful relative to what it puts out. Sabean, who appears to have been the one to animate the AI, could have hired an actual animator, saving some of the environment and somebody's job. Instead, we get hideous moving photos that all have that dead-eye look, and sometimes turns figures in the background into frightening melty-faces. AI doesn't seem to even know what Ronald Reagan looks like – Bryan Cranston, apparently – and even someone as distinctive looking as Donald Trump gets distorted in bizarre ways that any basic cartoonist could have improved upon.

I'll add a caveat: if I'm being honest, the fact that this movie utilizes visuals and animation in this way does make it more “watchable” than documentaries that are just talking heads, especially since this is a doc that interviews only one guy – Monbiot himself. Could it have done so without stealing art and squandering resources? I think so. Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story makes very similar arguments without creepy computer creations attached.

However, what I'm not going to do is dismiss the argument just because this one aspect of the movie is ugly and hypocritical. Ideologies aren't necessarily bad just because people fail to live up to them; the entire premise of Christianity in its most orthodox form, for example, is that you'll never be good enough to live up to it. The same is often true of environmentalism, or any form of anti-capitalism – you cannot exist in society and be perfect on these issues, but you can do your best to mitigate harm.

So what is neoliberalism? As described by Monbiot, it's what I suspect most of us just think of as capitalism: a belief in unregulated free markets, voting with your pocketbook, competition as generator of wealth and prosperity, and government staying as far back as possible, all in the service of (theoretically) holding back totalitarianism and (actually) funneling the wealth to the top while imagining some will trickle down to the poor. It comes with a belief that success is the result of hard work, and poverty the outcome of bad choices.

So what's capitalism, then? According to Monbiot, it's using slave labor (literally in history; figuratively today) to strip resources and turn a profit, leaving barren, ravaged land in your wake and moving on to the next place. Sounds a bit more like colonialism to me, but for the purposes of this documentary, these are the definitions. I should also add that Monbiot is no communist – he calls it “the god that failed,” a category into which he puts neoliberalism as well.

[If that brings the Metallica song to mind, you should know if you don't that their “God That Failed” is Christian Science. Totally unrelated.]

One of the more interesting answers Monbiot provides is why, after years of favoring stuffed-suit politicians, the world seems to be electing lunatic buffoon fascists everywhere – killer clowns, as he puts it. The answer is the same as the one to why said clowns blame everything on immigrants and minorities...misdirection. Blame the moron troll for everything, and you'll ignore the billionaires backing him. The movie doesn't mention it, but Elon Musk undoubtedly messed up the equation slightly by embracing his own killer clown side, as Tesla would probably be doing much better had Musk just STFU and helped Trump in silence. You rarely saw the Koch brothers actively court media appearances. Nor George Soros, if we want to both-sides the argument.

So what's the answer? After scaring us with images of imminent environmental collapse and extinction, Monbiot arrives on a similar solution to Michael Moore's – actual collective ownership, which isn't the same as collectivism. Let everyone have a vote, and let the best ideas win, and the worst have to be actually refuted. He provides some examples of how this works in a microcosm, though it's not clear it necessarily will as a global system. Still, since our current system that was supposed to counter totalitarianism on the left is now leading us to totalitarianism on the right, it's worth a try. What we cannot do is counter narratives and persona with facts and figures – a story, he posits, can only be beaten with a better story, and it shouldn't just be a recycled old one.

I like what he's saying, and I was never bored with it – but I hate the way the message was conveyed. Even if the filmmakers can somehow persuade me that they found a new way to do AI that doesn't waste energy or steal art – and I think it highly unlikely that was the case – it's ugly. A decent visual artist could do better. And if one were to take it all away, what's left is effectively a book on tape. Or sound file. I guess we don't do tapes now.

So by all means buy the book. I can recommend the message, and can honestly say I learned something. But in the form it exists as right now, I cannot recommend the movie.

If I'm wrong about generative AI, let me know in comments.

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism screens at the Doclands 2025 film festival in San Rafael, CA, Sunday, May 4, 2025 at 6:30pm.

All images courtesy of Eat the Moon Films.

Prefer not to subscribe via Substack? You can leave a tip through Buy Me a Coffee instead.