Weeeeeeeee. Ussssssssss Peeeeeeooooopplllllllleessssssss’s. We really want better. Ok? We are Reeeeaaaaallllllyyyyyy adept at waaaaaaannnnnntiiiiiiinnngg Aaaaaaaaannnnnndddddd even voting for better. We just be flat out F’d by proxy.
Goddamnit.
Just like you don’t get termites without dry rot, you don’t get fascists without a rotten polity.
If everyone just stayed home for a few days and consume no media, with a full internet blackout in protest, all the rich people would get in line. Just unplug your router and don’t buy or consume anything.
Take sick days at work if you have to.
Sure, some get a bump from the supplies getting bought beforehand, but the majority would be in instant panic mode.
None of their fancy projections can handle that.
Edit(2): don’t not doing. Or not out
What’s great is it doesn’t even require everybody (which is basically a non starter since some would disagree with the protest).
I can’t remember where so someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but even just a 10% general strike would have a noticeable impact.
I was listening to a podcast where an expert on revolutions was talking about it.
I think it’s something like, as few as 3% of the population can achieve revolution, but their actions need to be very focused and targeted. It’s a small number but almost an impossibility.
Like any authoritarian regime there’s oligarchs supporting representatives who are supporting the leader who supports the oligarchs with tax concessions et cetera.
Nothing will change until the oligarchs decide that the current regime is not in their best interests.
If you could get 5% of the population to permanently stop using services associated with the magnificent seven, that might be enough. However it needs to be people who are presently relying on their services and they need to discontinue completely, and indefinitely, and in protest. I’m not sure I could convince even 1 person to stop using the services of a single one of those companies. Hell, I’m reliant on microsoft services myself.
It’s a small number but getting that small number to do what’s necessary is almost impossible.
Hell, I’m reliant on microsoft services myself.
Start looking for alternatives.
Baby steps.
You’re here, posting these words. I’m here, reading them. And the other 98 out of 100 are doing something else, ignorant about what’s going on either purposefully, as in an ostrich, or not.
Capitalism will dangle shiny toys in one hand saying “you can have this for the right price” while emptying your wallet behind your back with the other. The idea that society will ever reject capitalism is as close to impossible as it gets. Besides, we’re already too far down the road between capitalism and totalitarianism to turn around. Lethal and independent AI is the final turning point before hell really breaks loose.
I mean, it’s totally worth a shot. But a day or 2 isn’t going to do much. They know everyone will fall back in line after that. It’ll be a bump in their finances, sure, but It’ll be managable. These people are on track to literally enslave you. They’re not going to back off, just because a bunch of people waited 2 days to buy their new phone or groceries.
Yup, this presidency has killed my faith in our supposed system in record time. Congress’s inaction and complicity were the final nails. I have no faith in this country or its people. Hard to not come to the conclusion that we’re entirely motivated by greed and schadenfreude. We the people have the government we deserve.
Congressional Democrats shut the government down for a record length of time in refusal to fund ICE.
There are a million other things they didn’t do, but they did do this one thing.
Sure the government has been corrupted and hollowed out, but the people deserve some credit.
From Minneapolis Minnesota standing firm, building barricades in the streets, and bringing food to families to afraid to leave to folks in Portland directly engaging with frozen water cops, common citizens have shown they won’t roll over so easy.
I also just saw on Threads this morning (ick, I know) there’s a “warehouse fire tracker” that’s up to 90 now (!).
I think there are a lot of people and individual communities who are resisting Trump and deserve incredible credit, but it’s accurate to say that this has shown the weakness in American society.
Right now, our social fabric as a country is really frayed. We have terrible safety nets. Our ability to get healthcare is tied to our jobs (some states now are trying to implement or have implemented work requirements for Medicaid, making even that now depend on employment). Many Americans are a missed paycheck away from losing housing. Our stagnating minimum wages are making it hard for a lot of people in fields with a lower barrier to entry to build up savings, and people in traditionally high paying tech fields are seeing the encroaching threat of AI. It’s incredibly easy for employers to fire people in most places, with only a few protected categories that you can’t be fired for, and those you’d have to prove in court against an employer in a lawsuit, needing either to find a lawyer who’ll work on commission or pay up front in hopes of winning the wrongful dismissal suit, assuming you have the money for it in the first place.
Our housing supply has been badly outpaced by the demand for housing, and also large corporations are buying up swathes of housing to rent out to people at the highest rates they can get away with, while building new housing is expensive, often tied up in red tape, and rarely accessible to the average person as a result. Zoning in many places also locks people into specifically low density single-family homes, which are one of the most expensive and inefficient ways of building housing, making it harder for people to find starter homes and also making people dependent on cars, another expense that tends to put people in debt, worsen dependency on oil due to cars mostly being internal combustion and electric cars being more expensive, worsen public health for similar reasons (making healthcare access even more important, making people even more dependent on their jobs) and something which makes life even harder for folks who have a disability which makes driving impossible or requires expensive vehicle modifications.
Our food system is a mess. Many people live in food deserts where reliable access to fresh produce requires transportation long distances, and local options are mostly shelf-stable ultra-processed foods which do not fill most people’s nutritional needs on their own. These foods are profitable for large corporations which use their influence to affect public health policy to keep people dependent on these foods, prevent regulation of potentially harmful ingredients, and bury studies that show the harms of these foods. Cooking at home takes time, energy, and access to affordable ingredients that people in food deserts working three jobs to keep the lights on often just do not have.
Public schools have often experienced funding cuts leading to staffing cuts leading to school lunch being prepared using limited fresh ingredients (particularly fruits and non-starchy vegetables), ultra-processed foods and minimum labor, often by third parties due to the lack of on-site kitchens, making it hard for schools to afford to change this if they want to. This may be the only meal a day kids from impoverished families get. If their parents have any problems with the paperwork for free school lunch and fall into lunch debt, these meals may be taken away from their child and replaced with a sunflower seed butter sandwich. The federal school lunch program heavily pushes dairy as well, so good luck to lactose intolerant kids, who might get a carton of soy milk instead but probably not. (Lactose intolerance rates are higher in African-American, Native American and Latine populations, of course.)
Public schools are frequently under-funded, and are funded primarily by property taxes for the school district, meaning that public schools in areas where people are already disproportionately impacted by poverty are going to have lower funds, contributing to lower quality school meals, fewer resources, fewer teachers with larger classes, and generally as a result less effective education. Private and charter schools may come in, but of course may charge for the education of their students (making it inaccessible to many), and often have substantially fewer regulations and anti-discrimination rules, allowing them to wield their power to effect desired agendas. Many are specifically religious and will teach their students according to the specific religious interpretation of those running it. Do they choose to interpret the Bible as forbidding same-sex relationships and identifying as anything but the gender you were assigned at birth? Fucking sucks for you, queer students!
And speaking of people pushing their preferred reading of their preferred religion from a position of power, we have lost huge amounts of third places, such that for many people, their only real available third place for in-person socialization is their local church. Don’t share a religion with most of your neighbors? Sucks to be you. Differ in interpretation of a shared religious text from your local church? Sucks to be you. These churches have an outsized influence on local communities, and in many rural and predominantly white places in the US, they are pushing a specific version of white Christian Nationalism passed down from the top by influential rich folks who subscribe to those beliefs. And because of the gutting of social safety nets, a lot of local churches or religious organizations are the main option for seeking assistance with things. Trans? Muslim? Good luck with your local Salvation Army and their discriminatory policies.
I could go on long enough to write a damn book. Social media created by billionaires, optimized to be addictive and lock people in to their services even as they enshittify, have become one of the few other options for socializing, and are constantly pushing misinformation that serves a fascist Christian white nationalist agenda. Journalistic sources both local and national are being bought up by billionaires turning the reported news to their own agenda. Public funding for scientific research is being cut, leading to scientists relying on private grants to continue their research, allowing – surprise surprise – billionaires to exert outsized influence on who gets to practice science and what they research. Municipalities are collapsing under the financial weight of inordinately expensive car-centric infrastructure that they cannot afford, leading to them cutting more services and municipalities with predominantly impoverished residents especially struggling.
I barely even touched on the ways that sexism, racism, ableism, anti-queer discrimination, xenophobia and our broken migration system (broken in the sense that under-resourcing of immigration courts and absurd laws make it a long and difficult process for migrants to obtain legal residency and citizenship, leading to many migrants being left without documents and thus vulnerable to exploitation and further targeting by ICE) amplify these things and make them worse, nor how they divide people and make working class solidarity more difficult, nor how Imperialism and the Imperial boomerang affect things, nor our police system that actively incentives officers to act in harmful ways and prevents accountability, nor a million other things because everything is just too damn much. I literally forgot to even mention the US making war on Iran! Oh, the Epstein files! Voter suppression and gerrymandering!! Gun violence!!!
So frankly, it is a Goddamn miracle that despite all of this, people are organizing. It is a testament to the resiliency and endurance of humanity that Minnesota is organizing against ICE. It is beautiful that people are organizing national strikes, and that the numbers are slowly growing. It is heroic that people are forming mutual aid groups and building local power and building food and housing security.
I won’t say there aren’t a lot of American people who suck. People voted Trump in, twice, and many of his voters are actively celebrating his cruelty, while the remainder are like “oh, I didn’t like the cruelty, but I thought he would be good for the economy,” which, okay, “I’m only overlooking The Horrors because money!” isn’t much of an excuse. A lot of working class Trump voters have been shaped by webs of disinformation and targeted manipulation that make them vote against their own interests, and I have a sliver of sympathy for that, but actively choosing to support or ignore the horrors being inflicted upon the vulnerable by this government is simply bad. They are choosing to do bad things.
So yeah, some of the American people do suck. But it’s not most of us. Our society is broken, and it’s going to take incredible work to fix it. So I don’t see “the weakness of the American society has led to this” as a damnation of our people nor a downplaying of what so many are doing to fix it; I see it as a descriptor of the problem, in hopes of helping realize the solution.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk. Support your local mutual aid network. Start a garden. Advocate for housing reform in your community. Do something so that you know you are a part of the solution, and do not try to do everything, because you will burn out and this can only be fixed by rebuilding our society as a group, not a single individual fixing everything.
Also, if anyone knows how to do a “read more” block, please tell me? I’m using Voyager and don’t see it built in, and the Markdown implementation for collapsed text blocks varies across every implementation I’ve seen.
AFAIK only “spoiler” formatting enables the expand-for-detail behavior you describe.
I use it similarly for anything long, even if it’s just collapsing to the first sentence of each paragraph.
(Note that you’ll have to use the “select text” menu option on this comment to see the syntax of the examples below.)
Thesis A
Detailed explanation A
Thesis B
Detailed explanation B
Most clients render first level no problem. Only a few allow nested/multi-level. GL 👍
Thank you! I actually discovered this like yesterday, but had totally forgotten about this old comment. Updated!
TL;DR
K, noted
The warehouse fire thing is just a case of Apophenia. The one toilet paper warehouse arson caused people to go looking for local news reports of warehouse fires and - because they happen all the time - they found them. That doesn’t mean they’re connected or that there’s a wave of arsons vis à vis resistance against corporations. There has been no actual uptick in warehouse fires.
And distrust of one another! Don’t forget that important motivation
What you are seeing is the end result of a fifty year long class war against the middle and working Americans that the rich have waged, and won.
Warren Buffet was making this known two decades ago and no one listened.
And what has buffet done to address the issue?
Pushed for a change to the tax code - this is just one old man remember - and the government made some noises about it, but ultimately failed to go anywhere on the issue, esp. so since Trumplestiltskin took office.
Thank you for the link. I was genuinely curious and uneducated about it.
Glad to help!
I guess, as a rich capitalist, he helped to escalate the issue.
The business plot never died it just mutated
Unless you rewrite the constitution this will keep happening
There must be a separation of corporate influence from government, billionaires should not be allowed to involve themselves with politics in any way, no funding, no support, you choose to become a billionaire you lose your vote, same for religions
Of course citizens united turned political corruption into a big business and opened a gaping national security hole
It’s all fucked and a new constitution is needed
The military becomes the last line of defence, gun rights have to go
There is a movie with Jeremy Irons and I can’t recall which one. But he discussed how the rich are always the same for a milenia and we are just observing their control change forms over and over and over again.
Longer than that, I’d say. The rich have been screwing with the lower classes since the country was founded.
This is not the first time though. The reason the 50s were considered a golden age for the middle class is because after the great depression we showed them who is the boss and taxed the shit out of them. We need to do it again, and frankly we need to go beyond posting on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok and other crap.
Those sites exist to keep us in disengaged.
The rich have been screwing with the lower classes since the advent of money. Point me to a time in world history where those with money and power didn’t abuse the rest of us. The problem with hierarchical systems is the worst people always end up rising.
I claim that the bugs living in your stomach would consider you a compassionate and wise ruler if they could think. You eat food, they convert the food into shit and usable nutrients, and then you dispose of the shit. It’s a win-win relationship for both parties.
They control our thoughts way more than you’re considering.
Ever get “hangry?”
Democracy at work.
Here is the demand: eating a meal. A succulent Chinese meal. This is democracy manifest.
You can also say
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
It’s not that the system is bad, although it’s not robust enough, it’s that it was totally took over, and no system can survive that. Congress isn’t inactive and complicit, it is, as well as all the other branches, under complete control of the same group of people it was supposed to keep in check, and that happened as a consequence of decades of direct political action.
People felt victim of apathysation and surrendered control of their country to grifters and frauds. That happens sometimes. Better luck next time.It’s the failure of the managers of the Democratic party to elicit even the weakest of resistance that gets me above all else.
The fascists and racists are clear about who they are. Democrats and the ruling “NPR” liberal class lie to you that they are some kind of ally simply because they expect you to vote for their proffered member of the management class.
Definitely. In fact I believe many of them in high positions are secretly alright with much of what Trump and the Republicans have been up to. This resistance from our supposed representation is a joke. They’ve been out of touch with the working class and in the pockets of the elites for way too long, completely compromised.
The problem is that the executive branch has too much power. Congress should have a committee of scholars convene and propose laws that would balance the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The laws would be forwarded to Congress for debate and implementation as they are proposed.
Doesn’t work when one side says scholars are literal enemies and traitors. Sorry.
Democrats can use this against Republican candidates running for reelection. Just say this candidate voted against this proposed reform and say what the reform is.
The problem is the people that voted for the Republican candidates are (mostly) absolutely thrilled by their voting history. Even if they aren’t, there are tooooons of Republicans that would rather eat a mile of shit than ever vote for a Democrat. Welcome to the world of ultra polarization. We’re divided beyond recourse.
I don’t think this is quite so true. If the only thing the resistance did to win back power was grab the presidency, that still wouldn’t be nearly enough. Trump and his body of oligarchs managed to corrupt the DOJ, the special counsel, the supreme court, an entire political party, and more. It is a machine far beyond one person that prevented the checks and balances on him.
I’m open to people’s suggestions for how to improve the three branches, but I’m sad to say, even when such suggestions bring up “a special commission, a voter-approved team of judges, a friggin’ AI”, there’s no absolute means to say that group won’t be either corrupted by special interests through insidious means, or completely ignored when their time comes to act.
We all know that another Trump is coming. And this other Trump will be far worse than this one.
Sure but can’t we just try to deal with this Trump first ?
By all means. But can you?
I agree but who knows if that will be in 3, 10, or 20 or 50 years
My money is on 20-30 years. That’s enough time for:
- Trump’s death.
- The GOP attempts to prop up a direct successor to Trump, which fails.
- The Dems regain some control over the country as the Never Trumpers and MAGA fight over the direction of the GOP.
- Massive stagflation occurs as a result of Trump’s activities when he was alive. And corporate greed.
- Many years pass, and New Trump offers a new way forward for the GOP. He distances himself from Trump by saying he won’t TACO, and he’ll make foreign countries suffer for putting the US in the current (future) economic crisis.
- New Trump builds up a coalition and wins bigly.
fraid so. tv and electronics in general have led to a society of couch potatoes only suitable for mashing and smothering in butter and chives
Is that actually true?
Or is it a scapegoat to disguise the impact of over policing and the massive incarnation rate?
the “over policing” could’ve been a nonissue if there had been sufficient resistance and proper accompanying legislation to curb it and enact better training programs for cadets. scapegoats can be named to anything one chooses depending on which side one sympathizes with, but for my own part i see no scapegoating beyond that thst the executive branch has instituted
the “over policing” could’ve been a nonissue if there had been sufficient resistance
That’s tired horseshit.
One dude shoots a ceo and literally millions treat the incarcerated one as a hero. In a country with hundreds of millions of people.
It’s the “I’m gonna do something about this” dude while everyone else just remains seated.
And there’s like hundreds of millions of you vs a handful of billionaires.
I know cows with more rebellion than this. Flies even.
Stop him? American society created him.
Not really sure how to fix this.
Could we say that technically Australia created him? Rupert Murdoch is the devil.
Hey, we’re not solely to blame. He cut his teeth in the UK media market - they deserve some of the blame too.
They just point at Jimmy Saville’s grave and hand you a copy of 1984
As the UK always does…
A cause, not creation. Trump is our collective shadow, as it were. That thought where you want to say “Fuck the Rules” and do whatever you think is best, damn the consequences, is where Trump comes from.
- The war with Iran? Iran has been pestering the US for some time. So why not just kill those guys and be done with it?
- Europe keeps talking back and disrespecting your authority. So why not teach them a lesson by increasing prices on their stuff?
- Maduro thinks he can fuck with the US as much as he wants. Let’s see if he still feels that way in an American prison!
- The people whining in Minnesota must have been put up to this by the Radical Left or something. A good hit to the head will calm them down!
Iran has been pestering the US for some time.
How so?
Ousting the Shah, preventing the US from furthering their interests; selling Shahed drones to Russia for use in Ukraine; being in China’s sphere of influence.
Rupert Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship.
Since 1985, he’s 100% US. He’s all yours.
Fucken oath! American capitalism allowed him to build the massive media empire that he has now. Couldn’t have done it from here.
Not really sure how to fix this.
By uncreating him?
That leaves the process for creating another one intact.
Yeah the analysis has to start with the fact that a majority of American voters chose this.
Laws needs to change to fix this. To begin with - there has to be punishment for when Trump is breaking the law and Trump should not be able to do any punishment back.
If laws meant anything, Trump would be serving his first of many lifetime prison sentences right now. But laws only work as long as people believe they should, and yet another law wouldn’t help that.
In Warhammer, there’s an Ork flying machine that works because the Orks believe it should work.
In that respect, Ork war technology is more advanced than American law.
Step 1: lying to congress should be punishable immediately.
Also refusing to answer a clear question directly.
People need to change and stop expecting that problems with the ruling class will be solved by laws. Who do you think is making those laws?
At very least, if the president is immune from civil suits while in office for acts committed while in office, then he shouldn’t be able to sue others in civil courts.
When a president stops following the law, the army should automatically remove the entire cabinet and hold new elections.
It’s clearly illegitimate if it does not want to follow the law.
The Untied States should have their independence revoked
Fuck Ralph Nader. If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have had Dubya and the Iraq war. Hell, we might not have even had 9/11 and the Afghan war because the administration would have heeded the intelligence that showed Al Qaida was planning the attack.
The midterms are coming, and I hope to God my fellow citizens use it to send a message that a reckoning is coming in the primary too. But I suspect the spineless Trump supports will start thinking a 3rd term is justified given how the previous election was ‘stolen’ from him and they’ll accept whatever twisted logic Republicans use to erase that bit from the Constitution. Or hell, at this point they’ll keep it in there and just ignore it because they don’t give a damn anyway.
We’re trying folks. Bare with us as we trudge through this hellish time in American politics.
deleted by creator
Piss off a bunch of french and you got a mob hunting you down.
Piss off a bunch of americans and they will still go solo at you, like minions in a movie, because grouping together is considering an evil socialism there.
That’s not fair, they can be duped by a senile conman to storm the capital and shit on a desk as a group.
Probably worried it would make them look gay.
brb, off to make an educational video on the merits of announcing “no homo” and how the simple declaration can restore order and civility.
Well yeah. It takes violence to stop violence, and we’ve been brain washed in schools with the “Zero Tolerance Policy” that retaliating is worse than being a bully. Kids who defended themselves from aggressors often were either the only ones punished, or punished far worse than the instigator. That’s been going on for at least 2-3 decades in said schools. It has obviously made a bunch of adults too afraid of doing the right thing.
It’s why we hold parades instead of protests with the threat of escalation. If we really wanted to make changes, Republicans and their minions(ICE) would not have homes to live in, or comfortable lives. Same for their enablers.
We would have taken them off the board and held special elections as populace. Still can, and will still need to when we have finally had enough. That or a foreign power will do it for us, but then they get to make the rules instead of “We The People”.
You’re very much on the right track, but I think it goes much much deeper than violence. It goes to self-reliance.
Go back to the time of the Framers. If you wanted something to happen, literally anything at all, you had to do it yourself. Criminal stealing your shit? By the time you get to town to ask for help he’ll be gone, so either say goodbye to your shit (and maybe your wife too) or grab your rifle and confront him. Government not doing what you want? Grab your pitchfork and head to City Hall, or run for office yourself. Feeling hungry? Better start cooking. Want to have meat this winter? Better start raising a cow today. Bully picking on you? Better learn to fight his ass. Your house is broken? Better grab a hammer and a saw because nobody else’s gonna help fix it.
Over the last 100ish years, that attitude has been slowly changing. Individual self-reliance has given way to a sort of mutualist service society where self-reliance is no longer the norm, it’s no longer the exception, it’s become almost an outlier.
Criminal stealing your shit? Call the police and hide until they arrive. Government not doing what you want? Write a letter or whine about it online. Feeling hungry? Grab your phone because food’s an Uber Eats order away. Your house is broken? Call a repairman or a carpenter.
What’s missing there? Any kind of self-reliance, self-empowerment to solve your own problems. Every problem involves asking or paying someone else to fix it for you.
I argue that the result of this is a society of people who’ve forgotten that they DO have the power to solve their own problems.I don’t blame malice for this, I blame a combination of laziness along with a LOT of well-meaning people and policies that only further disenfranchise the populace from their own agency, usually in the name of safety. You mention zero tolerance for bullying, that’s certainly one as it teaches the victim not to fight back. Police say the same thing though- police always say if confronted with a threat just give the criminal what they want and run away when you can.
There’s pockets of resistance to this sort of attitude, but they are largely isolated and focused on their own agendas without real connection. The most obvious might be gun owners and the concealed carry movement. But there’s plenty of others- the open source community, the right to repair movement, the maker community, the free range parenting movement, and just about any other DIY community. They’re all focused on their own individual niche, but the attitude is the same-- you CAN do ____ yourself, you DON’T need someone else to do it for you.
We need more of that. And I think it starts with school curriculum. If I was in charge, I’d take one academic semester out of high school (or at least a few credit hours) and devote it to purely empowering and constructive practical lessons. Wood shop, auto repair, plumbing/electrical, coding, cooking, industrial design, financial planning, etc. I don’t think this should be optional electives to bypass, I believe these lessons are just as important as reading writing and maths, because if we create kids that are book smart but life stupid, we’re doing them a disservice. And that’s what we’re doing now.
For our society to find our way out of this, we (the population) need to empower ourselves, recognize that we are NOT helpless, and take back agency over our lives.
Unfortunately I think that won’t happen until either a. a real leader comes along who can energize people- think Obama before his first term, but with actual balls to FIGHT rather than watering everything down. Bernie could have been that. But I think we need another MLK type person. Or b, things get a good bit worse, for the population to stop desperately trying to stay afloat in a rigged game and instead doing a table-flip rejection of the rigged system.
Au contraire, a truly “mutualist” society would never fall for the bullshit that is happening.
If everyone had trust and a good working relationship with their neighbors and solidarity with their working class comrades, the US capitalist class and therefore the government in its current form would quickly cease to exist.
The problem is specifically that the US capitalists inserted themselves as unavoidable middlemen into every aspect of US life. Notice how you’re not getting food from your community kitchen, you’re getting food from Uber Eats. You’re not usually calling a repairman from your local community, you’re calling a company that sends one out to you. You’re not getting help from your community militia, you’re getting it from an armed wing of the bourgeois government.
(ironically, this was possible to do through years or “rugged individualism” propaganda, that you are repeating here; other things like car dependency also made things worse)
This lack of local community is a big part of why there is so little organized protest. It’s very difficult to rile up your neighbors to take up arms and meaningfully protest when you barely even know them. This would apply even more in your imagined scenario of everyone becoming individualists who raise their own cows - people wouldn’t even have time to protest because they would spend all of it on their own survival, and those who stick their head up are easily arrested and thrown into jail, with noone to protect them.
Everything you have written here, I agree with. I think the self-reliance or even community reliance is what’s missing here. That service reliance is a big factor in our learned helplessness.
It truly is just a giant mess, with many confounding factors. I hope others take the time to read what you wrote.
