"Life is fair" is magical thinking.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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Was listening to a podcast this morning discussing BlueAnon and why people believe in conspiracy theories so readily. There was a quote discussing actively believing or non-believing being so much more attractive than basic disbelief. The activity makes us feel like we have some power or control over a situation instead of it just being an immutable way things are.
There was a decent bit of sympathy for the conspiracy believers, because many of them just are grasping for some shred of hope, as unbelievable as it may be. If our choices got us into our bad situation, surely if we make better choices, we can get ourselves out. If we think 99% of us are systematically entrapped in an oppressive system led by the most powerful, where is our hope?
The article was not as hopeless as I expected, which is a little reassuring. It was just slightly over half saying homelessness is an individualistic issue, while 40+% said it's systematic, so we're not too far off the deep end. The victim blaming leans hard conservative, as you probably suspect already.
Seeing the homeless can be bothersome to people for a variety of reasons, but I'd have to think if you're also part of the same group that leans against removing those social safety nets while also being in the same group that limits workers protections and preventing us from having healthcare provided to us as a human right, there's some self-aware part of the subconcious that knows they're one misstep, accident, or medical event from them being there, and seeing these people can be a painful reminder that those face-eating leopards are out there waiting.
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They have to believe it is a choice. If not, they are equally at risk of losing everything and becoming homeless and that terrifies most people. Picard's "you can do everything right and still fail" is not something most people want to know. No one wants to be impoverished, homeless, sick, mentally unwell. Instead they find it comforting to believe that this is happening to others simply because that person made the wrong choice. The same happens for success. The one who make it would have everyone believe that if they made the exact same choices, they too would be rich and that opportunity, chance, luck have nothing to do with it.
Also, many people simply don’t want to acknowledge the safety nets that they have had surrounding them. Ever moved back in with your parents after a breakup or because you couldn’t afford the rent? Ever got a lead on a job because you knew someone who already worked there?
People tend to think of safety nets as government handouts, but the reality is that the vast majority of safety nets are social. And some people don’t have strong social circles (like family or friends) to rely on.
I seriously think this is the reason why everyone got so mean post-Covid. They realized it can always get worse; there is no rock bottom. Everyone was forced to accept that things can always suck WAY more tomorrow than they do today, and they/we can’t handle knowing that.
It broke a social contract.
Alternatively everyone realized it could be a lot better.
Way too many chucklefucks sat at home collecting pay "working" remotely for almost 0 hours per day
Those people got to bake bread, go outside, learn to be themselves, be happy.
Then despite hitting every goal for their department/whatever - they were told to come back in.
Post COVID is an attempt return to normal. Except it's not even normal. It is worse in every quantifiable way. Everyone is more stressed out. Money is tighter.
Nobody is in a good mood when they are hungry, and tired
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Individual choices, like being born poor, not being able to afford higher education, or worse, having any long term illnesses! They made their bed they can lay in it
/s I guess
I mean, why didn't they just try to not be poor?
Well, if it can happen to anybody then it can happen to them, and that's scary.
But if you can blame choices, then they just never make that choice and live safely in their judgemental bubbles, because it'll never happen to them.
This thinking also "protects" from a multitude of other terrible (potential) life events.
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My family's income rose by about 300 dollars per month a few months ago. We immediately lost about 250 dollars per month in rental assistance and SNAP benefits. But it's totally individual choices that keep us in poverty. If we just budgeted better we cou- Wait. No, scratch that. We also get in trouble for having too much money in savings and assets. We'd actually lose all our benefits before we managed to save up any appreciable amount of money.
Silly, all you need to do is set up a shell company in the Caymans to hide all your assets!
(/s if it wasn't obvious)
U.S. Corporate Capitalism is a cult. Adherents worship the Market as god and believe it is the sole arbitrator of wealth and worth. They believe that if you give your time, money, labor, and life to the Holy Market and follow it properly it will reward you with wealth and importance, but if you do wrong by it, it will punish you with poverty. If you are rich, you must be a good person who should be listened to and emulated. If you are poor, you must have done something wrong and need to do right by the Holy Market by giving it more of you time and labor. The poor must be lazy because if they worked properly the Holy Market would surely reward them.
Thus, welfare, which separates the poor from the consequence of their economic sins, is evil.
Stock brokers are the priests. They commune with the Holy Market on behalf of people in exchange for a tithe (commission.) Billionaires are the saints. They have been greatly blessed by the Holy Market and thus are the best of all people and should be followed and emulated. The U.S. Federal Reserve chair is the Pope and the rest of that board are the cardinals. They represent the Capitalist orthodoxy and are often at odds with the more radical believers.
Donald Trump... is the messiah. The faithful believe he is here to bring in a second coming of U.S. financial greatness. They bring him offerings of gold. He travels the world in a (soon to be golden) flying chariot, wielding vast financial powers in order to extract tribute from other nations.
This is actually very cohesive. Well done.
This comes from the same mindset that states:
"If you don't like the interest rate on your credit card, just pay it off and close it"
"I am a self made man. I started with nothing, and had to take a small 10 million dollar loan from my father to get started"
"If your job doesn't pay you enough, then quit and get one that does"
People are sooooo out of touch with reality.
my favorite is "Just take risks, and success will find you"
Yeah, its real easy to take risks when you parents worth 45 hojillion dollars, who can throw a million bucks at every one of your dumb ideas until one sticks without even noticing as more than a rounding error.
For the average american, if they take a risk and fail, their life is utterly ruined forever.
I usually counter those arguments with “So how come you’re not a multimillionaire?” “How come you’re not (CEO, Foreman, successful business operator, position of leadership)?” “How come you didn’t buy your house with cash?” Etc.
Individual choices of the few keep the many in poverty needlessly, yes, indeed.
You’ve done a wonderful job helping the line go up. But in an effort to further grow, we must innovate further by shedding unnecessary weight. It’s nothing personal, but it’s time for you to go now.
Leonidas spartan kick
The soul crushing machine demands cruelty and suffering for the line to go up.
(All system do, that's nature, but without having optimisers to change the red line indicator from money to societal progress we for some reason just keep feeding this baby killing machine.)
I would be surprised if the percentage was much lower in any country experiencing a surge of the far right currently
The only reason they can gain any ground is there's a large contingent of people who have been conned into blaming others for what's actually caused by the failings of the economic structures built around them
They have to, it's the only way they can justify the system they love so much. If poverty is a systemic failure, then they might have to change something, but if poverty is a personal choice, all's fair.
About 6 in 10 Americans say personal choices are a “major factor” in why people remain in poverty, while just under half say unfair systems are a major factor and about 4 in 10 blame lack of government support.
I think a lot of people in the comments are acting as if there is only one cause, and individual choices cannot be it because it doesn't account for everything. Admittedly, the headline does frame it as if people believe it is the sole cause, rather than just the most popular. Personally, I would say both personal choices and unfair systems are major factors.
For lack of Government support, I am not sure how I would answer. The government actually does spend a lot on assistance for the poor relative to other countries, but I believe it is not done so efficiently to lift people out of poverty. It is very reactive and focuses on treating symptoms of core issues, so you end up with a lot of people in a constant state of being just barely able to keep their head above the water. It's largely half measures that end up with worse outcomes and being more expensive in the long run than proper investment into making things better would be.
Add in the fact that most welfare literally requires you to remain under a poverty threshold to continue receiving those meager benefits and you get the results we have. If you are disabled and receive disability payments you cannot work or you lose your coverage. There is an income cap of something insane like $1000/month for disability recipients. Its a deliberately evil system that forces families to divorce their sick spouse simply to allow them the access to insurance benefits they otherwise would be disqualified from.
How can anyone honestly recover from that? You make $1 more this month and the half of your income that paid for food and rent is gone, now youre worse off than someone on welfare just because you "arent poor enough." Its like the exact myth they tell about tax brackets only it actually exists and happens to people in real life all the fucking time.
The thing goes even further back than that:
- The poorer you are born the more choices are bad choices for you because you either can't afford them or if they fail can't recover from them and the whole system is far more likely to punish you for it.
If you're a scion of the rich you can chose to be a totally fucked up Nazi-loving ketamine user and still be wildly successful by this society's metrics, but try, say, going into the Arts as the child of working class parents with zero connections in that environment and see how well that turns out.
Having genuine Options without massive risks of horrible outcomes is only for rich people.
And this is without going into the whole Mental Health domain and how people who live a life of strife are for more likely than the rest to tend to seek to escape if only for a short while by taking stuff they shouldn't really be taking.
The overall idea behind this article, headline and poll is that we have constructed poverty in our society. We have made a system that creates homeless people and children starving.
It's a false dichotomy created by the wealthy that our only options in life are to fail or succeed, if we all really wanted it bad enough we could build a system that guarantees basic needs and rights for every last person. It's not personal choice that lands people in poverty, it's the fact that poverty is allowed to exist at all.
The government actually does spend a lot on assistance for the poor relative to other countries but I believe it is not done so efficiently to lift people out of poverty
I mean, we'll spend $200k employing a handful of life coaches to tell poor people they just need to work harder and submit to any abuses bosses want to inflict on them instead of giving poor people $200 to pay their bills, but I wouldn't even call that "assistance for the poor," it's just subsidized hassling. When it comes to actual tangible assistance for poor people (e.g. nutrition healthcare housing etc.) I think we're actually very skimpy.
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Oh, I ~~live~~ love that definition: "actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor". Magic morals on a planet where life devours life just because it is hungry/capable
Guess there really are people who think humans are totally not animals
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"Until it happens to them"
I do volunteer work for homeless outreaches and yeah I'm totally sure the women who are homeless right now due to escaping domestic abuse it was totally an "individual choice" to get their faces beat in on a daily basis. The kids who are homeless because their parents abandoned them for being LGBTQ+ - totally an individual choice on their part. The military vets who are homeless because their country ditched to the curb, yup that's an individual choice because they decided to serve their country and then their country said "get lost". The ones who end up on the streets because they couldn't get treatment or help for their mental illness. Why that was an individual choice to go mentally ill in the first place! The Elderly who can no longer afford to pay the constantly increasing rents on whatever fixed income they have, totally an individual choice to not some how make more money at the age of 80+.
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Well, yeah, they've been indoctrinated for decades to think Money = Merit by those who want them to think that Rich People are only Wealthy because they're superior to the rest (which is a hilariously false idea given that almost the Wealthy come from Wealthy or at least Upper Middle Class families - they were born at or past the finish line in the race for success, not all the way back like the rest), and the other side of that exact same coin is the idea that it's the fault of the Poor for being poor.
Forget decades. Try millennia. Historically people didn't even think being wealthy came from working hard and good decisions... but that God willed it that you be rich.
Well yeah, for ages, literally the richest dude, be he king, emperor or great Khan or what the hell ever was "blessed by heaven and god and had the divine right".
So most us adults are idiots. Checks out.
And cherry on top: guess I am safe to say they are so very not alone
I live here- can confirm vast majority have a terrible education and don't care enough about things like history or statistics of poverty. Tbh, a ton being in poverty probably doesn't help them think about these things and there's just this constant strain trying to live even in the middle class.
Which is something that I can never understand: it is obvious neither of us decided how much taxes we pay, how high salaries are, how much margin the companies are allowed to have etc. So yeah, our choices do have a role in where we are now, but we are far from only players in the game, so to speak. And this line of thought does not require any profound knowledge
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Problem is the choices are often choices made before you're even an adult. Even more difficult for those from unstable households and those that were refugees. Children that have to take care of their parents or siblings.
The there's how the right choice one decade cane be the bad choice the next. So you commit to work on like bioengineering or medical research, spend a very long time in school to get there, and it goes to shit once you hit the workforce. When you were a kid accountants were in high demand so so many went into it and then the finance department went from 200 people to 10 because of software improvements. Computer related and law degrees today. Trades as well where you can find work, but there's so many that you don't necessarily make a great wage hourly especially adjusted for benefits
So if everyone made the right decision individually based on the data current to them or what the data says to go for in 5 years when they could complete school/training, whatever it is will have so many people that the field is saturated and something else is the short staffed high paying career. So the correct decision is a moving target. Communal correct decision would be a strong social safety net
Individual bad decision is almost always deciding work has to be a passion. The 8+ hours at work has to be a part of your joy. Most people don't get that. Those that accept that making good money may mean doing a job they don't like have a better shot at financial stability. Not guaranteed, just a better shot
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The inescapable conclusion to draw from that is most people are fucking stupid.
Edit: from not form
70% of Americans still believe angels exist, so yeah... We've got a long fucking way to go.
They feed us this shit in our media for decades, and then people conduct studies and find that the indoctrination is working.
Most of the modern media I consumed in my lifetime had this basic message behind it. Surprise, surprise, people believe the shit they read, view, and listen to even if the evidence isn't there to support it.
No wonder their politicians are shit.
The ignorance of opulence
Sure. So according to most adults, humans are somehow perfectly adapted for this very short and specific period of history. And corporations don’t take advantage of that at all.
That's about as dumb as you get right there. It's not even tricky to see that's wrong.
I would say it's a lack of universal basic income
Most adults can't read at a high school level (usa.) World full of idiots.
I just read that the uk has more homeless than the us per 10k people, which surprises me. I'd be interested in finding out what their government does to help, as possibly when and if our government returns to sanity, we could do to change.
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Americans really are ignoramuses.
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