02-10-2021, 10:44 AM
(02-10-2021, 07:54 AM)random3 Wrote: The elites want to make everything illegal so they can fill their private prisons and kill off the 99%, but life would be much better if everything was legal and people could travel, make money, go to church, go to school, and start businesses.
Complete nonsense! The elites need their servants; they need enforcers of their rules and monitors of their assets; they need construction workers to build and maintain their castles, mansions, and palaces; they need people to make and sell stuff that induce people to go into debt; they need entertainers and purveyors of entertainment (including such people as ticket-takers at cinemas and amusement parks); they need people to deliver the stuff; they need soldiers.
Most people seem happy enough to put in eight or so mind-numbing hours of toil sandwiched between an hour of commute time each way (a jalopy if one can afford one, slow mass transit if one is really poor), vegetate on a tacky sofa to watch the idiot screen between getting home and falling asleep, only to wake up, take a shower, eat breakfast, and return to work for the same stuff. If one is supposedly lucky one can choose between 200 channels of mostly garbage or play video games on the idiot screen (which serves as a monitor).
Neoliberal economics is the menace to a good life. To be sure, one must be very rich or very stupid to like it, but when one considers that the educational system is not so much for giving hints on how to find happiness and meaning in life as it is to train people to do mind-numbing work... our system largely pushes people way down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The system offers fear instead of any semblance of security, and even the supposed safety of being overworked and underpaid typically indicates that one works for a marginal entity.
The last forty years have been a rotten time in American history, all in all. With a few lapses such as the first two years of Democratic two-term administrations things work almost exclusively for shareholders and executives. For the rest of us the rule is to suffer with a smile and always remember to count your blessings. If you run out of blessings to count, then start counting the same ones again.
We seem to be going into a new era. Multitudes no longer believe that the take of the super-rich will ever improve their lives.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.