Because the empire is cultishly individualistic, there is a tendency to believe that nobody owes anybody anything despite the very few taking from everyone else. Even if someone is helping others or changes life in a way that greatly impacts them, we have gotten into the bad habit of “thanking” people for their sacrifices, but not restoring what was lost, even if it was substantial. If suffering occurs as a result of this thinking, we are trained to tell people that an immediate sacrifice will lead to greater gains, at the same time refusing to listen to what that sacrifice actually costs people.
Meanwhile, those who take have gotten steadily bolder and truly believe that everything should belong to them because “they earned it.” The “elites” buy up media to continue projecting this message, which is one of the reasons that it is easy to internalize poor behavior from those who have no reason to treat everyone badly, and know that. Millions of people living in poverty parrot the words of the “elite” while refusing to look at the ones keeping them in poverty because they have been told “no one is coming to save them” and “earn it the ‘right’ way” from people who lived in privilege. This, I believe, is one of the reasons that organizing has been incredibly difficult because one cannot trust communities that thrive on taking from others, and refusing to acknowledge that divide.
People cannot keep saying that nobody owes anybody anything if we want to continue living in a functional society. The whole point of society is that we are interdependent and share the same space, and to pretend otherwise is to doom portions of humanity. Healing requires that instead of continuing to grind ourselves into oblivion, we stand down and start demanding that people who took restore the harm, and stop giving them a pass because of our conditioning. We can live healthy lives on a healthy planet if we stop granting evil permission to run amok.
