Remember that line from “The Usual Suspects”? “The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he doesn’t exist.” Well, the biggest scam that imperial residents ever fell for was that their country was one of freedom and democracy when half the citizenry cannot stand the liberation of anyone other than themselves. No one and nothing matters to the empire more than protecting the privilege and power of beneficiaries and sycophants, and anyone who believes otherwise falls into one of those parties.
There is no accountability in this “country,” just pain, especially pain designed to punish people for not being able to cause pain for others. Among many terrible normalized phrases are, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” and “If you want to make an omelette, you’ve got to break a few eggs.” Within these metaphors is the assumption that it is acceptable to hurt others to get ahead in life or to get away with–wait for it–hurting others. People have been brainwashed to believe that the world is what we make it, but they conveniently forget the passes that they gave deliberately harmful people.
No matter how hard people work, there is no further financial stability because the most important thing is control. If people were able to buy homes, they could stabilize their financial futures and make choices other than consume and potentially procreate. College degrees now mean nothing because there were not enough barriers to keep the graduating classes among predictable demographics, as this blog post is being written by a Black double legacy from Yale University. Trade schools offer nothing, either, because it became too important to take jobs away from human beings and give them to robots and computer programs who would allow companies to avoid paying for the cost of living.
What is the end game for all of this? Total collapse and pretending that everyone else without control and/or resources made it happen. A “country” with an extractive rape culture built on genocide and slavery has no other options because anything else would require both accountability and a willingness to evolve. People with control and resources have no interest in evolution because that would take away both their abilities to harm others and the resources they skillfully hoard. There is no positive goal, and people who believe otherwise are simply hoping to return to a status quo that requires nothing of them.
Chasing A Dying Empire 