As Americans, we're our own worst enemy
And the tools that we use to cripple ourselves are forged in greed, apathy and white supremacy.
We've become a dysfunctional society, not really a society at all, but rather a huge collection of isolated individuals, fighting for self-serving interests and utterly disconnected from each other and the world around ourselves.
America is suffering from pandemic pathological dissociation. The results are clear: Massive wealth inequality, social and racial oppression of minorities, of women and of the poor. Destruction of the evironment. Fear and hatred of outsiders. And the most self-destructive tendencies imaginable.
We are well on a path to self-collapse and we only have ourselves to blame. To change direction represents the idea that what we've done to ourselves is wrong. And that very idea of possibly being wrong creates a massive case of cognitive dissonance. "How could we have been so wrong? After all, we're Americans, we live in the greatest country on Earth."
But by not listening to voices who tell you what's wrong with the system we've set up in this country, we suffer from blindness to those who exploit us to their own unfair advantages.
So this self-failure is planned and codified. It's not by accident at all. The mindset is trained into our national psyche, in order to fashion our own identity.
All you have to do is just look at the media as a whole, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and gauge that against the dichotomy of the real world surrounding us to understand how this delusion is accepted as reality: Where whiteness, malesness and straightness becomes the norm by which everything else is judged. How a nation of immigrants seeks to devalue the humanity of immigrants and fashions boundaries based on imaginary lines. Where anything, no matter how trivial, can be blown out of proportion in order to create an existential threat, all while ignoring things that are real, like global climate change and inequality. How we can become disconnected from our very environment through the commodification of the land, the sea, the air and everything within it.
These are all signs and symptoms of the problems before us, and as a whole, we are blind to them because we've accepted them as natural states of being.
The system works against us all because we've accepted the belief the we are nothing more than either our own individually assigned, but systemically induced failures, or that oppressed groups are to blame for their own oppression and disenfranchisement. If you don't belong to an oppressed group, thank your lucky stars. If you do, why can't you just stop complaining about it?
You simply reduce the available resources (money) to a pittance, induce competition between those who have little access to those resources and just sit back to watch the sparks fly.
If the level of misery is reduced by compensation through cooperation, simply do what you can to divide and conquer some more.
Induce hatred and fear against "The Black President," against "thugs," "illegals," "Muslims," and "feminists."
The targets are all equally available and valid.
Just never look behind the curtain to see who's sitting on a pile of riches and bones. We're supposed to believe that's where we belong as well and it's too much trouble to think about how utterly wrong it is to allow that sort of exploitation in this day and age and on this path of self-destruction.
After all, it's the way it's always been, right?
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Excellent rant, MrScorpio. Yes, it's always been this way, but we've never stopped fighting it either.
