Americans have been convinced that doing anything disruptive will get them killed or get the people they care about killed. And for the most vulnerable in our society that's likely true, as the existing safety nets are already extremely brittle and hold far more weight than they're supposed to. The public's too scared of losing what little they have to actually do anything extreme, and so they have that little stripped away slowly instead. Along with their basic humanity. Inculcation and indoctrination from the moment you can understand language can do irreparable harm to someone's psychology. It takes a more extreme harm to create a new worldview, and that new worldview is often unpredictable. The thinktanks that have crafted corporate and government policy since the 1960s know that and take advantage of it. The gradual stable decay is harder to panic about because it's not an immediate threat. It's all been designed this way ever since the 1970s as a backlash against all the societal progress made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.
Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.
I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.
Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.
I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.
It sucks. I hate it here.