The American populace has become infamous for how divided it is on how it expects its government to operate. However, the country is united almost unanimously on the position that political change is needed. As the country devolves into near civil war over the fringe issues its politicians feed the people to squabble amongst each other over, it’s becoming more and more imperative to understand that practically any political change is unlikely to have any significant long-term effect on the quality of life in America until the standard economic model is revamped.
In order to understand why this is you have to first understand that America’s economic model is more accurately described as “predatory capitalism” as opposed to simply “capitalism.” Predatory capitalism is based on 2 fundamental operating principles:
1. Pay workers as little as possible within the limits of supply and demand.
2. Charge customers as much as possible for goods and services within the limits of supply and demand.
These two simple principles will cause ripple effects that will multiply themselves over time. The first and most obvious effect is the nation’s wealth will trickle upwards, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Once the rich become rich, they’ll be able to reinvest that wealth making them richer and allowing them to expand their control over the economy. Once the poor become poor, it will take longer for them to work their way out of poverty or compete with the rich to establish competitive businesses. The long-term effect of this is exactly what you see in America: major chains, owned by the rich, worked by the poor. It will be almost impossible for all those minimum wage workers to open their own “mom and pop” business much less competitive retail chains. This problem becomes even worse the more land the wealthy own as the poor will not be able to afford their own land to build their businesses on.
Once the rich become rich enough to have millions or billions of dollars of disposable income they will be able to use that money to influence politics through financing the careers of pro-monopoly politicians either directly, through campaign contributions, bribery, lobbying, campaigning against anti-monopoly politicians and funding anti-monopoly, anti-worker propaganda. Again, this is exactly what has happened in America.
Now that America has passed this tipping point where a few wealthy individuals control the majority of the wealth in America, there is little point in political reform. What if a third political party was elected to office? What if abortion were legalized? What if marijuana prohibition was ended? What if net neutrality was secured? What if stricter environmental protection laws were passed? What if the privatization of education was ended? The reality of life for the average American would remain unchanged. As long as the economic model that robs the poor and gives to the rich stays in place, poor people will still spend their lives working 3 jobs just to stay alive. They’ll still be crippled by mortgage and student loan debt for the majority of their lives and pass debt on to their children. And they’ll still be dependent on the major corporations for most of their food, clothing, shelter, and medicine.
As long as the poor have no wealth to leverage their interests, the rich will still retain the economic power to shape the political landscape according to their predatory agenda. The solution to this problem isn’t legislation guaranteeing profit sharing or fair prices. The rich could still simply purchase legislation to rewind progress.
The only way the poor will have the access to a fair share of the nation’s wealth is for business owners to willingly give their workers profit sharing, fair prices and, preferably, on-site housing at their place of work. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this will happen in a predatory economy as business owners will be inclined to try to extort as much money as they can from their workers and customers in order to remain competitive against other ruthless companies.
Existing business owners need to be encouraged to treat the people within their sphere of influence with the dignity and respect due to every human being. Barring that, the poor need to pool their mental and physical resources to open and support businesses that don’t practice predatory capitalism. Barring that, the poor can always exercise the leverage of boycotting and striking, but this is unlikely to happen since the wealthy have already shaped the economic and political landscape so that it’s extremely difficult to unionize or avoid buying from corporations.
So the most productive course of action for the poor at this point is to start and support their own egalitarian businesses. Once they do that, they can begin accumulating their own wealth and thus leverage, reduce dependency on predatory businesses and enjoy a decent quality of life without being treated like slaves.
I keep seeing politicians come on the television and say they’re going to fix the economy, create jobs and raise wages. I’ve been listening to the same promises my entire adulthood while simultaneously staring at a fundamental flaw in the economy that no politician is talking about. If they do talk about it, it’s just long enough to acknowledge a problem exists before changing the conversation back to meaningless talking points.
The problem is that it’s really, really, really, really hard to start a small business. Over half of all small businesses fail within their first year. Politicians have said that much, but they never sink their teeth into why. People don’t fail at businesses because it’s so hard to provide someone else a product or service and then take their money from them. The hardest part about running a small business, the part that trips so many people up, is that the government will send you to jail and fine you into poverty if you can’t flawlessly navigate 10,000 miles of legal bureaucracy.
If you want to succeed in business, you basically need an associate’s degree in economics. If you don’t believe me, go get a tax number, file your small business name, write a business plan, and pick a piece of accounting software to help you organize your taxes. Most people won’t make it that far.
You may be shouting, ” But that’s how business works! If you can’t do that much, then you’re too stupid to be in business!” The thing about that is, it doesn’t have to be so hard to start a business. Our predecessors just went out of their way to make it that hard. I’m sure they had good intentions and reasons that sounded reasonable on paper, but the end result is they’ve created a very narrow bottleneck to owning/operating a small, private business that excludes the poor and uneducated.
I don’t know or care if there’s a conspiracy theory behind this or if it’s just the cumulative effect of millions of stupid decisions. I just care that the deck has been stacked against the poor and uneducated. If all humans are equal then all humans should have an equal chance at an education and owning their own business. Even if a human is stupid…why would we punish them for that? And if all they’re trying to do is sell oranges on the side of the road, why do we need to bring mind-bending bureaucracy into their life at all?
The reason why is because the American tax code assumes every transaction that can possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed. I believe the I.R.S.’s philosophy does more harm than good, and I base that opinion on the fact that every night the news says the economy is terrible. The reason it’s terrible is because we’re doing something terribly wrong. Obviously, the economy has more problems than just this, but I suspect that as long as we keep assuming that every transaction which could possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed then the economy will continue to be terrible, especially for the poorest, most uneducated human beings living on earth.
Other than “Tiger Mom,” I’ve never heard of a book on success or leadership that advocates micromanaging. In fact, everything I’ve ever read said it’s the most stifling, soul-destroying approach you can take to accomplish anything. So… if we apply that same principle to the tax code, it points to the conclusion that maybe we should lighten up there.
If people can make money, they’re going to spend it. It’s going to get caught in the tax net somewhere. If people just didn’t have to file anything or pay any taxes for small businesses that make less than $10,000 per year, then people will have the breathing room to establish their small businesses before leaping into the realm of completely retarded bureaucracy. That wouldn’t threaten big businesses’ effective monopolies. It would just give human beings some breathing room.
If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automatically assign everyone with a business tax id number and generic business license so nobody has to apply for anything when they start operating their small business. They just operate under the codes they were born with.
If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automate their personal income tax system a little better. Maybe the smart folks at N.A.S.A. can help them. If N.A.S.A. can figure out how to land a cyborg on Mars remotely they can probably figure out a way to automate everyone’s yearly income taxes so we don’t all get sent calculus riddles by snail mail that we have to pay a seasonal accountant $300 to solve just so they can tell us a random amount we have to pay on top of that.
You must be very proud of your company. You started it on your own and took it from a garage-sized operation to an award-winning and internationally known brand. Few people in the world ever achieve that much success. Equally impressive is the fact that success doesn’t seem to have gone to your head. The few times anyone has asked me what you’re like I told them you’re a down-to-earth kind of guy, a little shy even. I told them you’re always smiling and friendly and that I can’t even imagine what you’d be like when you’re angry because that would just be so out of character for you. It’s unusual for someone as gentle as you to make it so far in the dog-eat-dog, cut-throat world of business. You should be proud.
I sometimes wonder if you ever imagined your company would grow this large when you first started out. If so, I wonder how you envisioned your company would look. I wonder if you imagined it being a progressive, Utopian(ish) workplace like Google where your employees would almost rather be at work than at home. You certainly seem to be trying to take it in that direction, what with the idealistic company values printed on the giant poster in the front office, the lack of dress code, the free milk and coffee and fruit and the occasional company-sponsored fun-night. Some workers even get a dollar an hour bonus for meeting their “key performance indicators.” I know some of the executives get bonuses for reaching their targets, and their bonuses are so big that nobody ever talks about them. You’ve also set a sales goal, that if we meet, the company will divide up one million dollars between all the employees. We both know you’ve been far more generous with perks than most companies.
I wonder if this is how you envisioned the future of your company when you first started out. I also wonder if sometimes you look down from your corner office and think, “You guys are all suckers. I can’t believe you’re doing this. Thank God I’m not as naive as you.” Let’s be honest for a minute and spell out the math, so to speak. I know this must have crossed your mind before.
You pay your workers as little as possible within the context of the law and supply and demand. Some of us get fifty cents or a dollar fifty over minimum wage, but let’s be honest. If the minimum wage were six dollars you’d be bragging about how you pay some of your workers seven dollars an hour. If the minimum wage were four dollars you’d be bragging about how you pay some of your workers five dollars.
In addition to paying your workers as little as possible to maximize the profits you get to take home you work us as long as the law will allow. You also exploit the loophole that as long as overtime isn’t mandatory you don’t have to pay over time, and despite the fact that we do intense mental and physical work for you, we’re expected to keep up the highest pace humanly possible the entire time, every day. And you guarantee that we’ll exhaust ourselves to that limit by designing the computers we use to monitor, record and report everything we do. So even if our boss doesn’t see us resting the system will show it. If there’s any doubt that we’re pushing ourselves to the limit (which there’s not) you can always play back the video footage from the dozen cameras that keep a constant watchful eye on us.
Even though nobody counts the way you spend every minute of your day and you can take as long of a lunch break as you want and take time off whenever you want I know you’re a busy man. So I’ll get straight to the point. I wonder how fully conscious you are of the fact that your business model is based on exploiting wage slaves, which is just a fancy way of saying, “slavery.” I wonder how fully conscious you are of the fact that every dollar you put in your pocket was earned by us, and every dollar you spend on luxury is a dollar we can’t spend on necessity. I wonder how fully conscious you are of the fact that every day we come to work we’re fighting against your “key performance indicators” for survival. I wonder how fully conscious you are of the fact that the key performance indicators are based on the best worker working at their best speed and doesn’t take into consideration all the little tasks we have to do every day like tidying up, looking for a pen, changing stations, finding a computer that works, waiting for the constant little lags in the system caused by the tragically designed infrastructure, restocking supplies, tying our shoes, going to the bathroom and so on. So in order to reach the ninety-five percent productivity rate that’s expected of us we actually have to work all day at a one hundred to one hundred and ten percent productivity rate.
Granted, all the stress would be worth it to us if we meet that sales target and get that one million dollars… except everyone in the company knows it would take fifty miracles to make that happen. That bar was set low enough to (theoretically) motivate us but high enough that there was never any risk of you having to pay up. So all that “incentive” has accomplished is sending a clear message to everyone who works for you that we’ve made you enough money that you can afford to give away a million dollars but you’re not willing to share that wealth with us. In fact, you’re willing to insult our intelligence and lie to us to try to squeeze as much sweat and irreplaceable time out of our fleeting lives as you can so you can convert it into cash in your pocket to squander on more luxuries for you and your family.
This is why your best workers leave. This is why you have so many immigrants and potheads working for you, because they’re the only ones desperate enough to endure the working conditions you’ve created.
I often wonder if this is how you imagined you’d build your fortune when you started your company. I wonder if you dreamed of wasting the best years of people’s lives slaving away for you for barely enough money to survive. I wonder if you even realize you’re doing it and if you’ve excused it all away by telling yourself things like, “That’s business.” or “If you don’t like it you can get another job.” or “I have to do this to stay competitive.”
I wonder how much thought you’ve put into the value of human life, and by that, I don’t just mean how much one person’s life is worth but how much each minute in a person’s life is worth. Is a minute in one person’s life worth more or less than a minute in another person’s life? If you had to spend five years working in the conditions you’ve created for the pay you allow, would you consider those five years fully lived? If your children had to work in the conditions you’ve created for the pay you allow would you feel like they fully lived their lives? If the answer to either of those questions is “no” then why would you demean and rob other people’s lives that way? Is there really any excuse big enough to justify wasting an equal human being’s potential for money?
Why is it that if you cut a person’s life short it’s called murder but when you cut the best years of their life out in the middle it’s a justified business expense? You might think these questions are overdramatic, but if you play back the video of your workers and you see the dead-eyed, stressed out expressions they wear on their faces all day when your back is turned you’ll realize I’m not exaggerating when I say that the reality is, you’re killing us little by little every day.
I’m positive this isn’t what you envisioned when you started your business, and I’m positive that you’re either completely ignorant of what you’ve become or you’ve made enough short-sighted excuses to justify your actions to yourself, and I’m positive you’ll never realize the true cost your success has come at to the people who run your company. I regret that I’ll never be able to send this letter to you because you’ll fire me, and I need this job because slavery is better than starvation. So I’ll work for you as long as I have to until I’ve saved enough of the crumbs you’ve let fall from your plate and I can start my own business that treats the people I work with as equal human beings fully deserving of equal respect and profits. I, and everyone who has ever worked for you, will always remember you with sadness and regret.
Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, died recently, and the internet has been flooded with eulogies and praises about him. If he had been a member of the Catholic Church, I swear they would have awarded him posthumous sainthood, and I’m not surprised by this at all. When Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Warren Buffet die they’ll get the same treatment. Even Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will get some kind of glowing recommendation letter to Heaven from someone.
I’m not saying all this praise is completely undeserved. Every billionaire puts a lot of mental and physical effort into building companies that provide useful products to humanity. I respect that, but I also recognize it’s only half the truth. It’s misleading and unethical to only acknowledge the high points of any billionaire’s career, and the fact that we praise billionaires so eagerly and consistently, is a sign of a deeper flaw in society which desperately needs to be addressed and rectified.
You can become a millionaire by working hard, but there isn’t enough time, energy or opportunity in one person’s life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way you become a billionaire is by underpaying your workers and over-charging your customers… or by owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and overcharge their customers.
So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it’s still stealing. Steve Jobs may have been a technological visionary, but the cold, hard fact of the matter is he was a thief. I can respect the work he did, but I can’t respect him for the unreasonable, unnecessary mountains of cash he skimmed off the sweatshop slaves who built and sold Apple products.
Why did Steve Jobs deserve eight billion dollars, no limit on his lunch breaks and thousands of heartfelt eulogies, while the people who build iPods apparently don’t even deserve to be treated like human beings? You could ask the same question about any billionaire, but almost nobody ever does. So we keep rewarding robber barons while punishing hard working poor people.
Nobody ever talks about how much money Steve Jobs deserved for each iPod sold. He wouldn’t have died with eight billion dollars if the cost of an iPod reflected its production value. I’m not saying Steve Jobs should have sold his products at-cost. I’m raising the question, how high you can mark up the cost of goods and services before it becomes unethical? If you mark it up high enough to accumulate eight billion dollars without being guilty of price gouging, then how much money do you have to horde before your ethics become questionable? How about sixty-eight billion dollars?
As it stands, the generally accepted answer to this question is that there is no limit; the more money you horde, the bigger of a hero you are. Furthermore, the blame doesn’t lay on the CEO for overcharging for products. The blame lies with the customer for agreeing to pay the advertised price. There is some truth to that, but again, it’s only half the truth.
Steve Jobs knew there was no logical reason for his customers to pay the price he wanted to charge for iPods. So he created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history to frame the iPod as a status symbol first, and an electronic gadget second. In other words, Steve Jobs went down in history as a visionary business leader for orchestrating a propaganda campaign that exploited his customers’ mental weakness to swindle them out of more money. That’s not admirable. That’s dishonest and cruel, but he gets praise for it from so many people because the entire economy operates under the assumption that if you can be swindled, then you should be.
This isn’t how a utopia operates. This philosophy creates poverty, which in turn creates misery and crime. This is part of Steve Job’s legacy, and whatever good things he did, don’t change the fact.
It’s worth noting that Steve Jobs did give some money to charity, but every old granny in the world who puts a dollar in a collection plate at church gives a higher percentage of their income to charity than he did. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or discourage billionaires from giving to charity, but at the same time, I can’t give them too much street credit when they’re giving away money they were never going to spend anyway. They didn’t lose anything by giving to charity, but they got a lot out of it in the form of lucrative tax breaks and a reputation for being generous. At any rate, if you have billions of dollars to give away, why not just cut out the middle man and leave that money with either your workers, customers or both? Does it justify burning your workers and customers if you’re nice to other people?
I haven’t heard any news about Steve Jobs leaving all of his money to charity after his death, but other billionaires have contrived a reputation as saints for making that claim. I don’t believe billionaires deserve praise for this either, because it’s tantamount to cruising down the street in a stretch Hummer limousine drinking a glass of $10,000 wine and shouting at homeless people through the sunroof, “You’ll get my money when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!” I fail to see the honor in that sacrifice, not that Steve Jobs was even that generous.
It’s not uncommon in any country to hear people blame the miserable state of their economy on welfare recipients freeloading off the hard work of the middle and upper classes. While it’s true that welfare queens do exist, they’re not the fundamental problem with the economy. The fundamental problem with the economy is that business owners underpay their workers and overcharge their customers.
That one-two punch is enough to force middle-class workers to have to count their pennies to survive, and it bleeds blue-collar workers straight into nearly inescapable poverty. Surviving, much less saving, is made even more difficult by the fact that landlords have to overcharge for rent because banks (and government taxes) extort everyone who takes out a 30-year mortgage. The only way to get a job that pays enough to afford all the meaningless fees you have to pay to buy a house is to buy a degree from a university, but the cost of a degree is inflated so high that poor people can’t afford it. So they’re stuck working degrading, underpaying jobs for the rest of their lives. Those who can afford a degree are crippled with debt for half a lifetime.
These two factors are enough to force middle-class workers have to count their pennies to survive, and it bleeds the lowest class into nearly inescapable poverty. Surviving, much less saving, is made even more difficult by the fact that landlords have to overcharge for rent because banks and government taxes extort everyone who takes out a 30-year mortgage. The only way to get a job that pays enough to afford all the meaningless fees you have to pay to buy a house, is to buy a degree from a university, but the cost of a degree is inflated so high that poor people can’t afford it. So they’re stuck working degrading, underpaying jobs for the rest of their lives. Those who can afford a degree are crippled with debt for half a lifetime.
The only reason wages are so low and the cost of goods, loans, and education are so high is because the rich get rich by taking as much of everyone else’s money as they can while giving as little back as possible. This hurts everyone, but it hurts the poor the worst. The reason poverty exists in the first place isn’t because poor people are lazy. They’re poor because business owners took all their money.
It is true that a small minority of poor people scam the taxpayers and don’t want to work, but look at the alternative. Their only option in life is to work themselves to death in degrading jobs that don’t pay a living wage to begin with. Why wouldn’t they scam the system? Because it’s irresponsible? They can’t get ahead in life because the rich are scamming them out of all their money. They’re just doing to the system what the system did to them. I’m not saying that’s right, just that it’s inevitable.
Slashing welfare isn’t going to make the middle class richer or help the economy. It’s just going to create more misery and poverty. Increasing welfare isn’t going to help anyone either because business owners are just going to take the poor’s money anyway, and the poor still won’t be able to afford an education. Business owners and investors are going to continue getting richer, and everyone else is going to continue getting poorer (or at least working themselves to death treading water) as long as business owners and investors refuse to share their profits with their employees or charge reasonable prices for their goods and services. Raging against poor people for being lazy, greedy scum bags adds insult their injury and makes undeserving scapegoats out of them while the real robbers continue business as usual.
The world’s problems are your problems. Even if you live in a safe, middle-class suburb, there are still forces creeping into your house that are slowly killing you and threatening the survival of your descendants. If you’re not teaching yourself about the world’s problems and trying to figure out your own solutions, then you’re just waiting to die.
This is serious. There’s a herd of metaphorical bears running straight towards you and your village. Making excuses for why it’s not your responsibility to give your impending demise your full attention is justifying suicide. If you’re not qualified to deal with bears, you need to become qualified, network with someone who is or find a workaround within your abilities.
The world’s problems are so big and complex, it’s dizzying to figure out where to even begin listing them. So I’ll give you some advice that will get you started and save some steps putting everything in perspective. The world’s problems have many seeds, but most of them wouldn’t have grown into towering banyan trees without being thoroughly watered with poverty. If you can fix poverty, then the other evils it creates and exacerbates will wither away.
The root cause of poverty is predatory capitalism. I say “predatory capitalism,” because “capitalism” is just private ownership of a business, which isn’t the issue. The problem is that America’s standard business model takes this concept to its most ruthless extreme. The economy is based on the premise that the purpose of businesses is to make as much profit as possible for the owner/s, which is accomplished primarily by paying workers as little, and charging customers as much, as supply and demand will allow.
This isn’t just a formula for poverty. It’s the formula for poverty. On paper, it looks deceptively innocuous, but it’s tearing the world apart. Below is a list of 14 apocalyptic problems that can be reduced from mountains to molehills by using an economic system that isn’t based on creating, sustaining and increasing economic inequality.
In a predatory economy, farms can’t give food away for free because they’d go bankrupt. Most farmers can’t even afford to sell their products at reasonable prices, because everything they have to buy to run their company and take care of their family, costs as much as possible. The largest corporations could lower their prices, but they beat their competition and established themselves as market leaders by caring more about profit than human life or happiness to begin with. If they ever stopped exploiting their customers and workers, they’d lose their market share to a competitor who will.
Corporations improve their competitiveness by growing food in third world countries using slave labor and then shipping their harvests back to first world markets where they can charge the highest price. This causes a false food shortage in third world countries, which raises the price higher than the local slaves can afford.
However, obesity isn’t an epidemic in first world countries like America because their citizens are living as extravagantly as French aristocracy, but because food companies further lower their operating costs and maximize profits by mixing their products with preservatives, flavoring, coloring, and filler. So instead of first world consumers getting the best nutrition from around the world at the cheapest price, they get the most unhealthy, processed junk food at the highest price.
Americans who make minimum wage can’t afford healthy, unmolested food. So they grow up eating boxes, bags, and cans of chemical mulch saturated in sugar, growth hormones and carcinogens, which sets them up for health problems later in life. There’s no conspiracy to commit chemical warfare on the civilian population. Businesses are just designed to make the most profit, and you make the most profit by selling the cheapest product at the highest price, regardless of the cost to human life.
2: High health care costs
The law of supply and demand says the more people need something, the more they’re willing to pay for it, and predatory capitalism says to match your prices to your customer’s desperation level. So going to the hospital to fix the inevitable health problems caused by stress and poison is as expensive as possible because medical schools and medical supply companies charge doctors and hospitals extortionate prices. Doctors then pass the exploitative costs onto their customers while also increasing the final price even higher to further take advantage of their customers’ vulnerability.
The world has enough resources to house everyone. In America, there are already six times more empty houses than homeless people. The reason working class families can’t afford to buy abandoned property is because the government, in collusion with lending institutions, has inflated the price of real estate through convoluted mortgage laws.
At the same time, the rich are buying up more land than they need, creating false scarcity that further drives up prices and fuels a never-ending cycle of housing bubbles/bursts that teeter back and forth between excluding the poor from being able to afford homes and then decimating the equity of those who could.
Since landlords and businesses have to pay the same extortionate mortgages, they pass on the cost of extortion to their renters and customers. That’s why rent is so damn high. This isn’t just “how life is.” This is a predatory business model invented to take money from the poor and give it to the rich in exchange for nothing.
4: Lack of basic utilities
If everyone who works was guaranteed food, water, shelter, electricity, telecommunications, and transportation, then most of the fear and pain in the world would be eliminated. Then everyone could get on with their lives and only have to worry about the most important issues.
The reason utilities are scarce isn’t that we lack the resources. It’s because the people who own the world’s resources make them as prohibitively expensive as possible. Even when governments build and operate their own utilities, they have to buy the materials at inflated prices, limiting the services they can provide.
Public utilities are becoming a thing of the past anyway since private (and often foreign) companies have been bribing politicians into privatizing those services for decades. The companies taking over utilities claim they can provide a better product at a cheaper price, but the ultimate goal of business is to make profits, which is why you can always expect the cost of utilities to go up, and you’ll keep finding more meaningless fees on your bills.
5: Stress
The definition of stress is, “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.”
Nothing is more stressful than fearing for your life, and everything you need to survive costs money. So your safety is directly dependent on how much money you have, but almost every business overcharges as much as possible. You’ll even be charged for things you didn’t ask for, don’t want and disagree with. Your entire life will be spent fighting for survival against everyone you have to pay. This is a formula for perpetual stress. The solution isn’t to read more motivational books. Life isn’t stressful because you’re weak. It’s because the economy is designed to keep you trapped in perpetual danger.
6: Mental health issues
The human brain can only take so much stress before it cracks. Anyone living in permanent anxiety will experience mental health issues eventually. The more traumatic your childhood is, the quicker you’ll succumb to all the internal and external consequences of poverty, and the poorer you are, the more damaging your childhood will be.
Seeing a cheap mental health expert for one hour costs more than a minimum wage employee makes in an entire day, and that money is already earmarked for food, rent, utilities, transportation, repairs and government fees. So the people most at risk for mental health problems are least able to afford it.
If you become too mentally broken to work, then you’ll have to live on the streets and beg for food. The size of America’s mentally ill homeless population isn’t a regrettable byproduct of an otherwise great system. The system is designed to create that problem by keeping help as far out of reach as possible and then funneling anyone who can’t function without it onto the streets to beg, steal and die.
7: Drug abuse
It’s also not an accidental byproduct of an otherwise great system, that at least 87% of Americans have drunk alcohol, 10% have smoked marijuana, 16% have smoked cigarettes, and 13% are on antidepressants. The system is designed to make earning more money, and being able to afford a better life, as hard as possible. For the least academically inclined, it’s virtually impossible.
Paying high prices to consume poison so you can feel better in the moment is irresponsible because it limits your immediate potential and kills you prematurely. But if you know you’re going to earn slave wages for the rest of your life, and you’ll never be able to afford your dreams anyway, the cost/benefit analysis of ending your miserable existence in a blaze of euphoria starts to add up. America doesn’t have a drug abuse epidemic because so many people are weak. It’s a proportional response to how stressful and hopeless life is in a predatory capitalist economy.
8: Domestic violence
Financial problems are one of the most common causes of divorce, but worrying and fighting about money is a long, painful process. Normal people are anxious and angry because the economy turns life into a grueling, unrewarding rat race. It’s only a matter of time before that frustration comes out somewhere, and the people you’re most likely to take it out on are the ones you see most, which are the people you live with.
You’d think the divorce rate would be higher when everyone is constantly worrying about bankruptcy, compromising on spending, working beyond their physical and mental endurance, suffering from suburban sensory deprivation, and wrestling with the constant source of unfulfillment that comes from not being able to afford your dreams. Actually, the divorce rate would be higher, but poverty often traps dysfunctional couples together because they can’t afford to live on their own.
9: Violent crime
America’s violent crime stats are directly proportional to the stress and desperation created by the false scarcity of food, housing, and wages. African-American ghettos don’t have third-world-level violent crime rates and are prone to riots because African-Americans are genetically predisposed to act like wild, desperate animals. Their problem is they live in a third world economy surrounded by first world neighborhoods they can’t afford to escape to.
Predatory capitalism traps them in an environment in which there are more people competing for resources than there are to go around. When everyone has to fight to survive, it becomes responsible to learn how to fight, and your best chance of succeeding is to join a group of fighters. That’s life for anyone who lives in a ghetto, regardless of their skin color.
No matter what country you live in, you’re surrounded by idiots. You know this. They stress you out every day at work, and at night you see them on the news fighting tooth and nail to destroy everything good in your country. If you’re not grabbing your head and screaming, “Why is everyone so stupid!?” then you’re not paying attention.
Why do you have to be surrounded by idiots? Poverty. That’s why. We could have already built the ultimate, free, global online school that could provide unrestricted access to all the world’s knowledge and skills. The internet is slowly providing free online education, but since everything is as expensive as possible, and there’s no profit in charity, humanity can’t afford to create the ultimate educational tool.
Even in affluent America, students can’t afford to attend universities because predatory capitalism dictates the more your customer needs your product, the more you should charge. Universities are copying the housing and healthcare industries and taking this philosophy farther than the market can bear. They’re charging students beyond their means, which is creating an education bubble, which is making college so expensive the cost/benefit analysis of enrolling doesn’t necessarily add up anymore. Predatory capitalism has created a system where it doesn’t pay to get a college education. This is putting a glass ceiling on the intelligence level of the entire world.
Going to school isn’t the only way to learn about the world though. There are media companies in every city producing information for mass consumption, but they can’t give content away for free without selling advertisements, which is a form of misinformation.
The price media outlets can charge advertisers is directly proportional to the size of their audience. In order to attract the widest audience possible, businesses have to deliver the most popular content. Thanks to the oppressive nature of the economy, most people are uneducated, scared, stressed-out slaves with cabin fever, who are longing for escape. This sets them up to want to consume media that satisfies their base instinctual desires for excitement, hope, love, popularity, wealth, and power.
Even news agencies, which supposedly follow a code of integrity, drown out useful information with content that’s more entertaining than educational. The six most successful media companies have bought out most of the world’s independent news agencies and syndicated the same distracting brain candy to every city.
The reason you’re surrounded by idiots is because 90% of the world population are victims of economic oppression. I doubt there’s secret conspiracy to dumb down the population to make them easier to control. It was just a convenient and inevitable byproduct of every business’s single-minded pursuit of money.
11: Religious extremism
There’s a well-established correlation between poverty and religious belief. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to be uneducated and feel stressed, hopeless, alone, unfulfilled and meaningless. Religion offers a solution to all the problems created by poverty. It promises if you believe a story and follow some rules, you’ll be rewarded after death.
Religion is the perfect consumer product. It costs nothing to produce, and your customers will pay you for years without getting anything in return. They’ll do your advertising for you and defend your brand to the death even in the face of overwhelming proof your product is a sham. If your religion teaches hard work and sacrifice are virtuous, and idleness and self-interest are evil, then your followers will make the perfect employees for you or any business lucky enough to hire them.
Not everyone who believes in religion becomes a terrorist, but there’s a well-documented correlation between poverty and religious extremism. If you want to start a death cult that will kill people and steal their resources for you, believing they’re serving the greater good, then all you need to do is promise them that joining your organization will solve all the problems in their lives created by predatory capitalism. Then, indoctrinate them with time-tested brainwashing techniques to base their identity and self-worth on their status in your pyramid-shaped organization. Finally, criminalize dissent and make it as hard as possible to leave. This is what ISIS and the U.S. military do, and if you copy their model, you can achieve the same success.
12: Corruption and systemic political failure
Corruption was inevitable the moment money was created. Since money is power, those with the most money have the most power regardless of who sits on the throne of government. Business owners don’t need to sit on the throne themselves or rely on the judgment of others to pass laws that allow them to exploit their workers and customers to death. Modern democracy has created a streamlined path to corruption. Since politicians have to accept donations to fund their election campaigns, they’re beholden to their investors. When the majority of politician’s careers are funded by the same businesses, lone-wolf politicians can’t stand up to all the corporate representatives. That’s why you can’t expect to see hope and change from young, charismatic politicians: because the investors they represent value profits more than human life.
13: Perpetual war
Once you have enough representatives to control how a nation’s wealth is used, you can use its tax revenue to bribe foreign politicians into letting you pillage their resources. If they won’t play ball, you can depose them with military force, guaranteeing you won’t have to compete for global market share with worker-friendly politicians or foreign businesses.
Predatory capitalism also guarantees perpetual war simply because war is profitable. The military-industrial complex needs taxpayers to buy its weapons in order to remain profitable. So it behooves them to invest in campaign financing so they can lobby politicians to stay in perpetual war.
Even without a secret conspiracy by corporations to manipulate militaries into fighting for them, our economic system is still a recipe for conflict. As a general truth, survival requires resources, and when resources are scarce in a local community, they become as valuable as life itself, and people will kill their neighbors to keep what they’ve got and take from the weak. When a country’s resources become scarce, it will act the same way, and the goal of predatory capitalism is to consume resources as fast as possible.
Since the world’s wealth is being funneled to a few families instead of being distributed to everyone, the nations with the least infrastructure are left in abject poverty and thus chaos, which creates a power vacuum to be filled by the strongest local warlord, which is convenient for big corporations, because warlords prevent small businesses from growing into global competitors, and warlords are happy to sell their nation’s resources to foreign companies for pennies on the dollar.
14: Environmental apocalypse
As apocalyptic as all these problems are, the worst consequence of predatory capitalism is the destruction of the very eco-system keeping the entire human species alive. In order for companies to make profits, they need to make as many products as quickly as possible, which means they need to consume raw resources as quickly, and spend as little money on health and safety, as possible. It would be an understatement to call this a recipe for environmental destruction. Predatory capitalism makes pollution a moral imperative, which is why big businesses are so desperate to convince the population global warming is a hoax. Saving the planet would negatively affect their profit margin.
The solution to this problem isn’t to guilt-trip consumers into buying eco-friendly products. That’s like forcing people to become cannibals and then convincing them to fight cannibalism by only eating each other’s legs. The problem isn’t the victim. The problem is predatory capitalism’s addiction to economic growth. That’s the herd of bears coming to eat you and your tribe. Solve that problem or you’re effectively committing suicide while being complicit in genocide.
I’m less interested in convincing you to accept my theories than I am in inspiring you to do your own research and come up with your own. If you want to know my theory, the simplest solution is to require governments to spend tax revenue on feeding and sheltering all of its citizens before they’re allowed to spend taxes on anything else. This will solve people’s immediate problems, give them the freedom not to have to work/consume, and eliminate the leverage businesses use to exploit everyone at every corner. If governments won’t do that, citizens need to organize to create private sustainable communities to shelter themselves from poverty.
The problem with the world isn’t that poor people are all lazy and greedy. The problem is that people who have never been poor have no idea what it’s like. They can’t even imagine it. So they fill in the blanks with their own experiences and end up convincing themselves they live in a happy world where the poor enjoy all the luxuries of life without having to work for anything, and every job is a window of opportunity that leads to The Promised Land. This perspective is so far from reality it constitutes insanity.
One of the most common complaints you hear about welfare recipients is that they just use their free money to buy steaks and other expensive foods. The first problem with this myth is it implies poor people don’t deserve to eat good food. There’s enough food in the world for everyone to eat well. You should be mad at the system that only lets poor people eat steaks every once in a while, because the rest of the food they eat is the cheapest, most generic processed crap the government will approve for human consumption.
Mostly, poor people eat cheap processed food, but not because they’re too stupid to know it’s unhealthy or they’re too uncivilized to want to eat fresh fish and truffles. They walk past rows of savory food every time they go to the grocery store and stare at it longingly as their stomachs grumble. On the way home, they pass aromatic bakeries, cafes and ethnic restaurants where they can’t afford to splurge $7 on a cup of coffee or salmon quiche. When they do eat at restaurants, their eyes dart immediately to the prices on the menu looking for the lowest numbers. Then they decide which of those items they’re going to order. Poor people only order steaks at restaurants maybe once a year. They won’t even buy steaks at the grocery store except on special occasions. So if you see a poor person buying steaks with food stamps, you should be happy for them that they’re taking a break from eating hot dogs and cereal and getting to eat like a real human being for one day.
It’s especially meaningful when a poor person gets to eat steak, because if their bodies aren’t malnourished from the nutritionless boxes of food they’ve been eating, they’ll be drained from the hard work they have to do. The cruelest lie ever told about the poor is that they don’t work. For every unemployed poor person, there are ten million who work all day every day as fast as they can at dangerous, tedious jobs where they’re permitted as few breaks as possible and are given as few amenities to accommodate them while they spend their entire lives trapped at work.
How do you think food gets from the field to the grocery store all packed up in boxes? Where do you think all the clothing and gadgets at the mall come from? They’re processed, assembled and stocked by people working all day for barely enough to survive. Every day they’re fighting for survival. Work is a life and death struggle for them, and if they can’t keep up the pace or grovel before their bosses reverently enough, they’ll lose their job and die. Everything is always on the line. The stress and anxiety this causes is soul crushing.
You can’t spend your life this way without breaking. Something inside you has to die in order to keep going. Those who do survive will never earn enough time off or money to take vacations. A backyard BBQ is the closest they’ll come to a vacation. If they save their pennies for long enough they might be able to take a trip to a beach resort, but they won’t have enough money to rent jet skis, go scuba diving, get a massage or eat more than one gourmet meal. In the end, they’ll come home broke and have another few years of unrelenting work before they can take another whirlwind vacation, assuming no unforeseen expenses pop up before then.
You can’t go a month without having to pay some kind of fine, fee or bill, and everything is as expensive as possible, especially health care, which is why insurance exists, but poor people are too poor to afford insurance. So they don’t get to go to the hospital. If they break a finger, they just tape two Popsicle sticks around it. When poor people do go to the hospital after their bodies break down from relentless work, they end up literally paying their life savings to get better.
Obviously, if they can’t afford vital medical attention, they certainly can’t afford cosmetic ones. Rich people can afford to have wrinkles removed. Poor people can’t afford to have warts removed from the bottom of their feet. Poor people don’t even get to go to the dentist regularly because it would cost too huge of a percentage of their life’s savings.
Poor people might be able to afford preventative health care if they didn’t get taxed so much. When someone with no savings gets paid $1,000 and gets taxed $100 they’re paying 10% of their entire net worth. That’s not just inconvenient, that’s crippling. It’s the difference between being able to see the dentist or not. Rich people can afford to pay more in taxes and still eat steak every day. Poor people can’t afford the taxes they’ve got.
And poor people don’t get much back from what they put in. They don’t get health care. They don’t get to go to museums, national parks, airports or take long road trips. Some of them don’t even get covered bus stops. They do get to go to jail for not being able to pay the relentless barrage of fines and fees the police dole out for any conceivable excuse though.
Poor people don’t even get welfare. I walked into a welfare office once and told the caseworker I had no car, no home, no family, no friends, no job and $1,000 in savings. He told me I didn’t qualify for welfare, but if I applied to fifteen jobs and didn’t get hired, then he could give me barely enough money to survive if I ate rice and beans every day. However, if I got a job, then I wouldn’t get any more money. So I’d still be financially destitute until my first paycheck. Then I’d continue to be destitute for the foreseeable future while I saved up my pennies by not enjoying any luxuries in life and hoping nothing bad happens to me.
That’s not an extraordinary story. That’s the norm. That’s how much the welfare office helps. It’s not a safety net. It’s a toilet to flush the poor down. As if to prove a point, the welfare office I went to had a lock on the bathroom door. When I tried to open the door, a security guard told me to go back to my place and sit down. For all the taxes poor people pay, they don’t even get a toilet to piss in.
I don’t know how you get money out of the welfare office, but even if you can, it’s not enough to live a stress-free, fear-free life, and sooner or later you’re going to have to go back to work at an inhumane sweatshop. The only other alternative is turning to a life of crime. Then you’ll have the time and money to live like a real human being… at least, until you go to jail, but at least then you’ll get three meals a day and won’t have to pay utilities or rent. You’ll probably still have to work in an inhumane sweatshop though. Plus, you’ll still have dangerous neighbors, and you’ll have to address your superiors as “sir/ma’am” and follow orders just like at a real job.
Rich people might be stamping their feet at this point, shouting, “If it’s so damn bad being poor then why don’t you just get a degree and/or work harder and pull yourself up!?!” To that I would say, if poor people can’t afford to go the hospital, they sure as hell can’t afford a higher education.
More importantly, it’s impossible for most of them to work any harder. They’re already pushing the limits of human endurance, and many have more than one job. All they do is work and recuperate from work. The problem isn’t that they’re not trying. The working poor are poor because a predatory economy keeps them chained to work with expenses and debt. If jobs paid more than the cost of living, then people wouldn’t be poor. The system is designed to ensure they never get ahead. Sure, there will be a few who beat the system and go from rags to riches, but that’s the exception. Endless poverty is the norm.
The physical and emotional suffering caused by poverty are stressful enough, but it also has a profound spiritual cost to its victims. When you have no money, you have no freedom. You can’t travel where you want. You can’t quit your job. You can’t pursue hobbies. You can’t be picky about where you live. You can’t afford to take classes or buy books. You can’t do anything but go to and from work. So you spend your life in a place you don’t want to be, doing things you don’t want to do for people you don’t like. But you have no choice. So you do it. All day, every day.
In the end, all your life amounts to is a tool at a business. You’re a machine, bound to follow orders, unable to make decisions for yourself, explore the world or find yourself. You’re not even allowed to express yourself by the clothes you wear since you’re forced to wear a uniform. Not that you’ll make enough money to buy good clothes anyway; you’ll shop at thrift stores and wear the faded clothes of people richer and older than you.
Poverty robs the poor of their very identity, dooming them to be unable to give their lives meaning in or outside of work. Poverty defeats the purpose of sentient life. It kills the poor inside before killing their bodies. There’s no purpose of humanity existing if the rest of our history revolves around oppressing the masses so the rich can live like gods.
At every stage in my life I’ve been told not to expect to get everything I want and that I was lucky to be blessed with the luxuries and opportunities I have, and if I want more, I’ll have to make sacrifices and work hard. When my parents told me that, I did my chores. When my teachers told me that, I studied hard. When my employers told me that, I wore their uniforms, followed their rules and went above and beyond what was expected of me. When the government told me that, I paid my taxes and enlisted in the military. When the military told me to salute an officer, or work overtime, or go to the Middle East, I obeyed enthusiastically.
Sure, I complained along the way, but I never stopped working, because I believed in the mantra that real men “suck it up” and deal with the unpleasant weight of responsibility. My generation has been living like this for almost forty years now, and looking back at everything I’ve endured, I no longer believe in this creed or that we should be teaching it to children without including some major caveats.
What struck me about the person’s response wasn’t its originality, but its popularity. Here are a few comments from people who disagreed with me about my assessment of the military:
“Eh no difference than anything really, but everywhere is a pyramid structure. Whether it’s a MIT program or internship every business wants you to buy in. The ones that do are the ones that move up. The ones who don’t do something else. It’s life.”
“I served 17 years in the Army. When I went to Iraq, Army finance screwed my child support payments up. When I got back stateside I had a warrant for my arrest. I ended up serving 18 months of a 3 years sentence because of someone’s fuck up. You don’t see me trying to make any military branch look bad at all. Grab what balls you got left son and turn that anger into something positive. Believe me it will pay off sooner or later. The path you are taking with this trash that you have written is not the answer. P.S. I would NEVER tell any Veteran face to face that you wrote this shit. You’re asking for a goddamned ass kicking if you do.”
“I wanted to dig into your comment piece by piece. I will put your statements in quotes. ‘They break you down to build you back up.’- Of course they do. It’s meant to get you out of the mindset of everything being about you (break you down), and direct your mind to focus on the team aspect (build you back up).‘You do what the military tells you to do. Where to live, what to wear, what to look like, how to act.’- Of course. That’s the structure of order. You do the same thing at work. You’re told what to do, and you may or may not wear a uniform at work. Active duty is just like you being on the clock at all times. You must remain and act in a professional manner all the time. ‘Some E-6 or E-7 will dictate the terms of your life’ – You mean my boss? Yes, my boss does have the power to tell me what to do. ‘In your off time (liberty) there are certain things you can’t do and certain places you can’t go.’ – This is false. The only thing I can think of is our loss of the right to protest against the government. However civilians cant protest against their job w/o repercussions either so it’s the same thing. Yes joining the military means that you give up certain rights and freedoms so you civilians can enjoy yours. I wouldn’t call it brainwashing, all men and woman in uniform know that there are certain rules and guidelines you have to abide by. Just like working for any company or corporation. When you wear a uniform that says you represents something or someone you have to act and behave accordingly. I know plenty of businesses that won’t allow you show of your tattoos at work. Just using that as an example.”
Perhaps infantry troops need to have their rights stripped away, their identities stolen, and be forced to endure extreme stress to prepare them for combat, but if everyone’s life is as bleak as basic training, then what are those soldiers fighting for?
More than one adult has already told you life is full of authoritarian pyramid structures, illogical rules, demeaning treatment, low wages and other inconveniences and indignities, and that’s just how life works. Mature people accept it and deal with it, and only immature spoiled pussies complain about the status quo.
There are times when it’s mature to do things you don’t want in order to get the things you need, but the system goes out of its way to force everyone into that position. We’ve created an artificial environment that makes it irresponsible to stand up for yourself or follow your dreams.
The problem with young people today isn’t that we tried to make sacrifices but were just too big of pussies to stay the course. The majority of Generation X and the Millennials have been eating their pride and pounding sand since day one. We’ve held up our end of the bargain. The problem is we found out too late, there’s no finish line. This is just how life is forever. You spend your whole life getting pushed down and being told, “You gotta learn to follow before you can lead,” until you die. Now that we’ve figured this out, we’re expected to keep calm and carry on as normal despite knowing we’re playing a game we can’t win.
You’re damn right we’re going to complain. That’s not the American dream we were promised. A perpetually servile role isn’t good enough, not by a long shot. Not for my generation, and I don’t want to hand down the mantra of battered-person syndrome to the next. This cultural norm needs to die for the sake of all future generations.
Even if I’m blowing the whole situation way out of proportion, and success really isn’t so hopeless, we need to stop and ask ourselves, is the system we have good enough? If it can be improved on, shouldn’t we do that? Are we really doing ourselves a favor by militantly, dogmatically defending the way things have always been done?
In order to figure out how to rectify this problem, you need to understand the root cause. The reason self-subjugation is considered a virtue in America is because you need money to survive, and in order to get money, you have to work for someone who expects slave-like obedience. Employers are motivated to control, overwork and underpay their workers because they need money to survive and grow their company. They have to fight tooth and nail against other business, and if their business fails, they lose all their money… which they need to survive. The stakes are life and death for all of us. Business is war, and war is hell. In this environment, the most valuable survival skill an employer can have is sociopathy, and the most valuable survival skill workers can have is obedience.
Our economy is fueled by fear. We all do great and terrible things we didn’t know we were capable of because we’re afraid of running out of money and starving homeless in the streets. Remove the fear and we won’t have to act like desperate animals anymore. It doesn’t take a full-socialist, communist or fascist government to accomplish the bare minimum of guaranteeing that every person who works receives food, water, shelter, and electricity. Everyone doesn’t have to be equal, but everyone needs to be guaranteed the bare minimum. This could be funded with less than half the taxes we already pay for the police state we currently have.
We’re never going to have a humane economy as long as we keep yelling at each other to suck it up and deal with the one we’ve got. We should be shouting at our overlords and telling them the system they’ve given us isn’t good enough. If they won’t listen, we should turn our backs on them and build a better system ourselves. But nothing is going to change as long as we keep blaming the victim.
Suffering from high anxiety or depression is a sign of bad mental health. If you see a psychiatrist, they’re likely to diagnose something wrong with you and prescribe you pills to fix the problem, but most of society’s anxiety and depression stems from the fact that the political and economic systems we live in are insane. So if you’re a logical, reasonable person, then the absurdities and abuses you’re subjected to will drive you to anxiety and depression. Think about these points:
Work places have totalitarian control over your life while you’re at work, and America has one of the largest prison populations in the world, but we’re told we live in the land of the free.
All day long the television and radio churn out commercials encouraging us to buy wasteful junk, and then we’re told if we buy that junk, we’re irresponsible and destroying the environment.
It’s fashionable to get drunk. It’s unconscionable to get high.
If you feed your family poison over the course of several years until they die, you can get the death penalty. If you run a tobacco company that poisons millions of people over several years until they die, you get a golden parachute.
The stock market is designed to fund companies at the expense of the investors, but when investors lose their money (in the system that was designed to take their money) the investors are told they were foolish with their money.
Houses cost twice what they’re worth and are so confusing to buy you have to hire someone to help you navigate the paperwork, and we blame the people who got tricked into buying houses that cost twice as much as advertised for the mortgage crisis.
A higher education is necessary to earn a living wage, but if you can’t afford a college education you’re told the reason you’re not earning a living wage because is because you’re lazy and worthless.
People are killing each other over which mythology is the most loving.
We’re taught that slavery is unconscionable, but almost all of our clothes and household goods are made by slaves in sweatshops.
Poor people work the longest hours at the hardest jobs, but we’re told they’re poor because they’re lazy.
America spends trillions on the industrial war complex to protect freedom, but America is the largest exporter of war.
Janitors have to take drug tests, but political leaders don’t. In fact, they have diplomatic immunity.
Police cars are designed to look intimidating, but they have the words, “To protect and serve” printed on the sides.
Shows like South Park and The Sopranos come with warning labels that say, “For mature audiences only.”
A man can take off his shirt in public, but women are told their chests are immoral.
Bribery is called lobbying, and propaganda is called advertisement.
When goods in a store are only sold at a 1000 percent markup instead of a 1200 percent markup, we’re told they’re on “sale.”
Banks call their investors “valued customers” but they charge you with fees for everything possible, even for not having enough money.
We’re told there’s no cruel and unusual punishment for breaking laws in the West, but going to jail is almost a guaranteed sentence to get beaten and raped.
The tax laws are so complicated you have to pay someone else to do them for you, and if you can’t pay your taxes or you fill them out wrong, you’re a criminal.
Workplaces use performance quotas to push workers to the limits of human endurance, and if that stresses you out you’re told it’s because you don’t have a positive enough attitude.
Self-help books and religious books offer ineffective, fantasy-based solutions to real-world problems, and when they don’t work, you’re told it’s because you didn’t believe in them enough or try hard enough.
Fox News is considered “news.”
We’re charged the highest possible cost for goods and services while being paid the lowest possible wages for our work, and we’re told that wealth trickles down and that supply and demand justifies our exploitation as necessary.
The celebrities we’re encouraged to emulate churn out mindless, idiotic, formulaic art. People who actually take stances on important issues are told they take life too seriously and should lighten up. And we wonder why the world isn’t improving.
We’re raised from childhood to believe romance and wealth are the most important goals in life, and when we spend our whole lives chasing them only to find out they don’t work in life like they do in the movies, we’re told we were childish for believing what we were taught on television.
Western society is a labyrinth of smoke, mirrors, contradictions, misdirection and dead ends. The lies and falsehoods are so ingrained in our society you can’t escape them. If you even begin to wake up to the reality of how un-user-friendly society is, it will cause you deep anxiety and depression, and when that happens you’ll be told by the television, your boss, your co-workers, your political leaders, your mental health professions, your religious leaders and maybe even your friends and family that there’s something wrong with you. And just like the military, you’ll be pressured to conform to their twisted mindset or be rejected and even punished by the brainwashed individuals who have given up the quest for sanity and given in to the status quo.
Anxiety and depression can be signs of mental health when the rest of the world around you is insane. If you don’t experience anxiety and depression, then you should be very, very worried, because that means you probably aren’t paying attention or asking the right questions, and that’s not mentally healthy.
The Wise Sloth 