For most of my life, there has been a relentless drive to encourage people to visualize different lives than how they were actually living. Starting with the beliefs that “clothes make the man” and that people will judge by the company one keeps, people expanded on the social climbing efforts inspired by previous generations–often without the actual resources. Luckily, being broke will shatter even the strongest delusions as people finally realized that they were expected to maintain visions without the tools necessary to survive. Eventually, people started living the lives they actually had, not the lives they wished for, and that threw off the “elites” who kept hoping to keep a machine moving that they never fueled.
“Dress for success” was a huge campaign of the 1980s, and there were a myriad of montages in films and television shows modeled around that theme. People began speaking constantly about “dress for success,” even envisioning ridiculous closets, something Home & Garden Television recirculated as, “This closet is enough space for me, but not us.” As salaries remained stagnant and the cost of living increased, more people recognized that “dressing for success” was designed around consumption, not aspiration, and there are now fewer people pressuring ourselves to portray a vision that has nothing to do with our actual circumstances.
“If you believe it, you can achieve it” is another motto that many people like to throw around without considering what it takes to actually accomplish a great deal. Telling everyone to start businesses or buy homes without recognizing multiple barriers is a callous way of pretending that “everyone has the same 24 hours.” A lot of people started regaining clarity when they realized that “visualizing success” was a brainwashing tactic designed to keep people ignoring their actual circumstances while pursuing ventures that would ultimately reject them. Now, fewer people are internalizing their failures because they are actually paying attention to what is required, because time, energy, and resources are becoming more precious as everything is reduced. After all, even if someone can ride a bike 20mph, they still have to have the hour to go 20 miles.
Some of these attitudes were fake spiritualism, but a lot was considered “good business strategy.” Scan many of the bookshelves in the dwindling middle class, and one will find a lot of the same books about how “anyone could make it.” Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the rise of Dave Ramsey, and a lot of other prosperity gospel cultists had lot of undue influence over people of ordinary means. The trick was convincing all of us that it was our fault if we failed to become wealthy, and it was “probably” because we lacked ambition, the will to work hard, or whatever fake reason they imagined. This mindset transcended race because in a lot of cultural communities, people still believe that if we work ourselves to death, we could become wealthy.
Now that people are living actual lives instead of aspiring to have more than anyone else, the “elites” are running away from the empire to run the same grifts on others, but thankfully, their reputations precede them. People are looking at the “elites” with contempt, because they see how the dominant narrative has impacted lives far beyond what could have ever been useful. Slumlords and selfish abusers are losing their grip on the narrative not just because of their malicious intent, but because people finally see that there is no benefit into feeding the delusions of evil.
Chasing A Dying Empire 