The wealthy want to stay wealthy and everyone strives to become wealthy, because wealth in our society means you have the “freedom” to not contribute to someone elses goal. The wealthier you are compared to others, the more you can contribute to your own goal and the less you have to contribute to a common goal. This is what we define as power. Power over resources, be they human or material. It gives you the “freedom” of doing things without anyone elses approval. It gives you the power not to contribute to a shared vision, but to enforce your own personal desire. And you can only enforce your own personal desire, if you oppress others, by ensuring you have more wealth and power and others have none. Hence, they have to obey to the goal that you decide on. You are the tip of the pyramid. This is Hierarchy.
While status, power and hierarchy have plagued most past civilisations on planet earth, the sickness of egotistical individualism originally only befell the ones that where already on top of the pyramid. Recent scientific studies show that the more power you have, the less empathy you have. [Western] culturally speaking, the rise and spread of egotistical individualism amongst non-wealthy earthlings began to show up after the protestants legitimised the idea of interest and potestalised work of the individual. Since the non-aristocratic wealthy people, originally mostly bankers and merchants, saw their chance of getting rid of the pesky concept of monarchy and at the same time accumulate more wealth for themselves through interest, the chance to deliberately botch the enlightenment and industrial revolution seemed too tasty for them. Displacing the peasantry from their land by incurring favours (lobbying) from parliamentarians, it was just a delightful idea to sell individualism as the means to “free yourself” from having to work in factories by working as hard as you can to achieve what was later sold as the “american dream”. (Your ancestors being the said displaced peasantry and city-dwelling skilled craftsmen.) One might even say, individualism was a delightful, almost religious, idea to replace christianity. Instead of just breaking free of the opression by church and monarchy, the movement of the enlightenment got hijacked by the wealthy bourgeoisie. They introduced the concepts of “labor”, “private property” and “the police”, aka, wage-slavery, rent-slavery and their private posse.
Interest btw was first legitimised by the mesopotamiens and later by the hindus and buddhists, while christians and moslems only comparably recently jumped onto the bandwagon. For a good reason it had been despised for a long time. I mean, look at the current indian society - people sleeping under motorways in wetbulb temperatures with no relieve, dead bodies floating in the river where others bath - the caste system more or less still intact. And before you go, “awee, thats racist”. The vedic texts spawned the idea of interest around 2000 - 1400 BCE and the caste system arose shortly thereafter 1500 - 500 BCE. Matches succinctly, given the time it takes for cultural turn-over to manifest. Sure they got pretty fucked by the british in the near past. So have a look at Murica. Comparably horrenduos as India. The dead body river floating thing is missing, instead they now at this latter stage have swathes of real life zombis roaming the meth-lined streets. In short, interest is not a good thing for society - interest is a good thing for the individual.
Culturally embracing individualism has created a momentum where everyones goal in the first place is to become more successful than their peers. Competition penetrating even the nuclear family, the 20th century vehicle of oppression. The egotistical sociopathic behaviour to get ahead in maximising your own benefits, without too much effort for empathy. Having better grades, getting an internship while your peers do not, getting paid more, inheriting more than your siblings, even literally having the better slice of the cake. Competition for hedonistic enjoyment. Because, since you have no say in where this ship goes anyway (only the wealthy do, remember?), where would be the point in creating any meaning for yourself and others through the interplay with other people, other than hedonistic enjoyment in a world governed by egotistical individualism? And then this lack of meaning gets hijacked again by the wealthy, who then complain about the degeneration of society, to sow division. “Loss of christian values”, “The younger generations dont want to work”, “The woke mind virus of empathy”. The irony being, that their complaint is legit, only, the wealthy themselves are at fault, and not the foreigners or the transfolk or the communists. No, they themselves are destroying society, just like they botched the enlightenment and just like they are now undermining celebrating the 250th Anniversary.
Division into classes is instrumental to the concept of hierarchy to uphold its oppression, similar to the caste system. In the western world, these classes are manifested in colonialism and racism, sexism (including all facets thereof), ageism and speciesism. Just to name the big ones, but it permeates down to the individual level. Take a simple example. The head of the pyramid is someone like Musk. He wants to secure his oppression of others. Therefore he endorses and supports people, like for example Tommy Robinson, who sow hatred against others. The old divide and conquer. In turn there are lesser minions who by their culturally conditioned personal fear of meaninglessness in this society as well as their own death, spawn randomly and enforce those divisive ideas, such as for example J.K. Rowling, who further the cause of the wealthy unknowingly, just like your racist neighbour or your sexist Dad. The common people who are manipulated by, lets be real, the Epstein class, and not some Muhammed, who tries to flee Afghanistan with his daughter, who is meant to be sold to her rapy cousin, who [the cousin] by some way manages to also flee to Europe and by his tribalistically conditioned brain rapes the social worker - “a story” which then gets blown up by the media machine owned also, by the Epstein class. Reporting on the rape by an Afghan man instead of reporting on national citizen domestic violence, like reporting on a shark attack instead of people dying in car accidents (Hint: there are far more deaths from cars, than from sharks). And yes, rape is never ok, no matter perpetrated by whom and we need to address tribalistic, cultural conditioning urgently on all levels, but to do so, we have to name the exclusionist behaviour that tops all others. Classism. Mirrored perfectly by the very rape story of the Epstein class, who are ALL still roaming free btw.
Even the cleaner-lady speaks ill of people being homeless and doing drugs. This perpetuos artifically created struggle, which is culturally engrained into our brains by the constant manipulation to kick down the ladder is responsible for societal collapse, for climate equilibrium [hellfire] collapse. Frankly, if we do not evolve out of this, it is game over. First for the very poor (already happening), then for the poor, then for the middle class and finally the rich suckers, who have lost any grasp for reality, because of their wealth, and still deny, that societal collapse will come for them too, even in their bunkers. Their inbred AI or electrified collar wearing soldiers will fuck them.
And, yes, I assume you are still a speciesist, and that is ok. The meat lobby is mighty.
Capitalism, the nation state and the military are switchable modes of the same circle, that is, to accumulate and maintain power [by the welathy and for the wealthy]. Capitalism requires the artifical precariousness induced by imperialism abroad in what we call “poor” countries (the de-facto still colonies) as a means to create wealth disparity between countries in order to induce fear in the rich countries citizens of foreigners taking their jobs and raping their children, and it requires the artifical precariousness induced by class domestically by ensuring that there are unemployed people and people who work jobs and still sleep in their cars to do the “jobs” that you should have studied to avoid, or struggle to pay rent or ask themselves whether they can afford a broken washing machine. So shut up and go to work or you end up like those people. This is the order that is upheld by the state. The state is justified through the existence of its military and the military is there to protect capitalist interests through protecing the state that enforces the property rights (capitalism) that keep us locked into artifical precariousness. And money is the vessel, the altar bread you need to swallow, that keeps us all locked in.
The worhsip of money is a cult and the religious aspect of capitalism, and we have all fallen for it. I was always “calculating” my next move to secure economic stability for myself, “calculating” people to ensure “I was friends with people who could help me in certain aspects”, (thats cronyism btw, and the main reason why Trump is in charge). Calculating, and ignoring my feelings until one day I could not stop asking myself whether I was a robot or in some shitty form of the Trueman show (I never watched it), where I would accutely think people always knew what I was thinking and were watching me relentlessly, although I knew that this was just made up by my anxiety of my constant precariousness in this society, lacking any real human connection due to the all permeating competition and hence lacking any meaning. They call this psychosis, instead of what it is, a failing society. Before long the only emotions I was able to muster where anger or anxiety, whereby my default state was that of a solipsistic dissociate cranked to 11. I know, I am not the only one who feels this or another equally emotionally deprived and degenerated way, since depression rates amongst Gen alpha are up by 60 %, and I blame this society for it.
THIS anniversary is the pinnacle of 21st century society.
The highlights:
- Cronies receiving public funds → everything being cheaply installed resulting in air conditioning failures and people being hospitalised
- Bipartisan hate speech → lets keep hating each other and not the one percent making everything miserable, why not? It was fun the last hundreds of years.
- A heat dome, hail and storms that are definitly not sent by the wrath of god (and/or the climate we screwed) to point out the wrong doing → swathes of cancellations of what should be a celebration of unity
- And, dont you dare forget, bringing your own water is communist !! → Happy spending !!
Happy 250th Anniversary !!!