The United States is the national embodiment of schadenfreude.
Mistakes/failures WILL be mocked and met with cruelty, unless of course you come from enough wealth to be bailed out, in which case you're "so brave" and "aspirational" for putting yourself out there, trying new things, and learning from failure. Again, ONLY if you're already wealthy, otherwise you deserve your suffering, and why aren't you suffering more, you fuck up making bad decisons?! 🇺🇸
Jack Welch, former GE CEO and current free gravestone urinal had a lot to do with changing corporate culture to completely abandon the pretense of societal responsibility as well.
Contrary to the pretty lies we like to say here in the US, “There’s help if you need it/you matter/don’t be afraid to get help” There are no meaningful resources to help those not attached to meaningful capital, and seeking help will almost certainly leave you with more problems than you started with.
And if you’re a man, you’ll also be ridiculed for it.
We made a society that works against itself to the point that we eagerly send the biggest losers out to die of exposure under a freeway, of course screaming “time out please I give up I need help” isn’t going to end well for you.
I wish at the very least we could be honest with ourselves and cut out the patronizing, cutesy lies that we say to absolve ourselves of the guilt of our society’s cruelty.
I’m just here to provide as as little value as possible without being fired, while my employer tries to exploit as much value out of me as they can without me walking out.
The laborers didn’t set these rigged, antagonistic terms, but failing to game them as a laborer just makes you a fool. Almost no employer is earnest with their employees, and that lack of respect should go both ways.
The market capitalists are more than welcome to restructure their orphan crushing economy into one that rewards the labor that makes their capital over do nothing shareholders demanding mooooaaaaar for nothing, simply because they present chips from their last exploitation casino outing, but we all know they’d rather civilization collapses, because the peasants having enough to do more than subsist would make them feel less wealthy by comparison, and would make their fragile egos cry.
Which is why I scold myself for so much as thinkng about work off hours. I tell my supervisor as much when they ask if I’ve had time to think about a solution to a technical issue.
They’re very A type and I enjoy how much my disdain for the modern business ethos bothers them.
“But I go to work so it isn’t faiiiiiiir if they don’t die in the gutter!”
-Someone struggling to make rent/mortgage, and having 95% of the value they produce extracted to run up the ego scores of our con-men owners.
They propagandize us through the media they own, and the curriculum they influence, to look down and to the side for who to blame, because our benevolent job creators would never work against us, would they? It’s in-fucking-sane.
Right, but there’s no term for being greedy, sociopathic, or engaging in hoarding in economics.
They fall under Orwellian double speak terms that make them complimentary, “rational self-interest, creating externalities, curtailing redundancies” etc. Language designed to turn their sins into their achievements.
Considering the central prominence of greed in our economy, it’s a glaring ommission that the capitalists and economists themselves seem to have forgotten that word, or to create an economic term for greed that isn’t complimentary.
They are driven almost entirely by insatiable greed, yet the term is never uttered in their earnings reports or economic news.
They seem to want the concept of greed as the pejorative it is to be forgotten entirely, despite it demonstrably being their core value.
I don’t disagree, but they are a symptom, not the root issue.
But hey, nevermind. I think they stole a few of our cookies. Some guy in a suit sitting on a mountain of cookies yelled down to warn me about them. Great guy, think his name was Warren.
And that’s how the owners control us in perpetuity.
Blue collar vs white collar.
The homed vs the homeless for lowering their property values.
Red vs blue and the race wars too.
Etc.
There are only 3,000 billionaires on Earth. Extrapolate that down to people with triple digit millions in net worth, about 28,000 people on Earth worth more than 100 million, and you’ve found humanity’s common enemies manipulating us into beating one another down when not making them more money.
Our common enemies are tiny in number, a few tens of thousands lording over billions, but they manipulate us into fighting each other.
Most of us without meaningful capital are either forced to do it in practice with our labor, or be cast out to serve the owners in another way: as capitalist scarecrows. Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter. They exist to die slowly and publicly of exposure, and constant police capital defense force harassment, to terrify the capital batteries into continuing to show up to their jobs to produce value for their owners.
One way or another, those without capital are forced to serve the owners. Nothing “voluntary” about modern market capitalism, short of slitting one’s own throat.
You will serve the owner’s insatiable greed directly, or you will serve as an example and threat to the others.
I’m not for people only interested in benefiting themselves being the ones rewarded most by society, let alone being the ones effectively in charge of society as they are.
It isn’t heroic, benevolent, or even minimally pro-social to spend your life trying to accrue private profit for the sake of private profit. It just makes you greedy and selfish. Or as they call it with their orwellian language manipulation, “rational self-interest.” being greedy, selfish, and unconcerned with the effects your actions have on others makes you a vile, broken, contemptible person, and humanity seems to have forgotten that entirely, or at least we’ve been propagandized to forget it by the owner class.
We punish people that dare to pursue vocations that benefit society, like teachers and paramedics, and reward selfishness.
I can’t root for my own species in this state. Slitting eachother’s throats when there’s another dollar to be had by it. If this is truly what our species has chosen as it’s most practiced purpose and meaning, I want no part of it, and I will be grateful when it’s time to leave it.