LeftExchange
Stockholm Syndrome
There are reasons why people resist new ideas. There are definite reasons why whole segments of American Society—and by that, I mean people of the United States—resist radical political change. Facts do not lie. Interpreters lie, interpreters help focus, or distort, perspective.
So, a little less than half of us scramble for 1% of the wealth. We end up fighting hard for what we get, and we aren’t afraid if things get ugly. The thing is, though, that when things get ugly, they get ugly between those of us who make up that last 40%! We fight each other for 1%. Rather than looking to the 1% who seems like they could spare some.
O.K., so that’s a lot of numbers, and a lot of percents. Basically, here’s the deal:
There are 100 people in a room. There are 100 hamburgers. Everyone is hungry. Instead of giving each person one hamburger, 1 person gets 30 hamburgers. What do they need so many burgers for? They earned it. Can they possibly eat 30 burgers in one sitting? No, but they don’t have to share. In fact, they will simply throw out whatever they don’t eat. The next 4 people share 25 hamburgers, or get roughly 6 burgers each. The next 15 people share 25 hamburgers, about one-and-half burgers. And 40 people share one single burger. You can’t cut one hamburger into 40 parts. There’s not enough to go around. Every one of the bottom 40 are still hungry. So, that’s America.
Read Feedback
Recently reported facts:
And yet, some of the most ardent supporters of capitalism are people who belong to that bottom half. I’m not afraid to say lower classes: I’m one of ‘em!
What the hell is going on?
Let me tell you an interesting story. Well, it’s not so much a story as a factoid:
The Stockholm Syndrome comes into play when a captive cannot escape, is isolated and threatened with death, but is shown token acts of kindness by the captor. It typically takes about three or four days for the psychological shift to take hold.
A strategy of trying to keep your captor happy in order to stay alive becomes an obsessive identification with the likes and dislikes of the captor which has the result of warping your own psyche in such a way that you come to sympathize with your own tormentor!
Those of us at the bottom, who fight each other on a daily basis for crumbs, suffer from Stockholm Syndrome on a pandemic scale. We don’t want to change the system. We’ve come to believe the system works. The evidence is that there are those wealthy 1% people, right? They earned it, why can’t we? They think those on the bottom are on the bottom because they deserve to be there. We come to believe we deserve to be here, starving, miserable, and losing any shred of hope by the minute.
This way of living doesn’t make any sense. We need to change it, change it now.
e