1. Capitalism creates generational poverty.

  2. Generational poverty breeds desperation.

  3. Desperation leads to self-destructive behaviors, broken families, fractured communities, isolation, crime, child abuse, etc.

  4. Capitalism creates prisons, nonprofit industrial complex, big pharm, etc. to profit from the desperation.

It’s a never-ending cycle.

  • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    13·
    3 days ago

    I’m more impressed that it took him 20 years to figure that glaringly fucking obvious fact out.

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 days ago

      he probably went in as a true believer in the justice system and needed a lot of proof the break down the decades of propoganda that he grew up with. he might have thought prisons were for evil criminals that deserved to be there. he might have thought criminals are inherently dumb and that he could educate them on how easy and good it is to be good. a lot of cops and prison workers believe all this shit whole hearted and are too dumb to ever have another thought about it.

      many of them just base their lives on a religious “authority is moral and just” style of beliefs and think it’s inherently morally wrong to question the rules. the authorities (their preachers and politicians) tell them these things, so to talk back against that would be sinful. even just thinking about how they might be wrong is sinful.

      figuring out that the penal system that your core belief system always told you was right and good is actualy a tool of oppresion is simply too much for most of them. it’s not a simple matter of logic, it’s an assault on their very reality. to them the world is defined by the word of others. they don’t ever have to wonder if something is right or wrong, they have authority figures to do that for them. to tell them that said authority figure is wrong is to tell them that they can’t trust that up is up or down is down. it’s also how they feel no cognitive dissonance when doing things that their religion would say are wrong. the Bible and other Abrahamic texts are very clear that God’s plan is mysterious and unkowable. they’re also inherently vague and open to interpretation. Christian specifically are largely discouraged from deriving their own enterpretations from the texts. they don’t base their beliefs on the Bible, they base them on doing what they’re told. they do what God tells them, but most people can’t hear God so they do what the priest tells them. the priest tells them what politics and politicians are right because one side wants to pander to the church. so in their mind God talks through the priest to say that Donald trump and his ilk are just and good and godly. don’t worry about what they say or do, just trust that they will bring God’s will to America.

      oppresing poor and brown people with the prison system is a primary goal of these politicians. their followers often believe that they are right with literal religious zeal. this guy probably had to have his entire world shattered before he could believe this.

      that or he believed it the whole time and is just using the time he spent there to lend weight to his argument. or maybe something else entirely. idk, i made a lot of assumptions there.

      • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        It can get quite dismaying at times… quite ilithiophobia triggering… inviting defeatism.

        … And then someone wakes up.

        Better late than never.

        I’ve seen some go from gleefully spitting the choral hate, unwittingly class traitors to all humanity, in fully totalitarianised psyche, obeying their corporate masters both wittingly and unwittingly, vigilantly cajoling their fellow humankind to do so too… and then turning around completely in short duration to see how wrong that is, how wrong they’ve been treated, how wrong they’ve been treating others as part of that societal machine of oppression, and stopping themselves from doing that, and putting as much energy as they were putting into recruiting for and preserving the status quo’s abuses, instead into waking others up and out of the psyops and abuse. None are so bold, vibrant and vigorous in their freedom&fairness advocacy as the recently spontaneously awoken. In the fresh seen contrast, it’s so very vivid to them, and they think (not entirely incorrectly) that things can be turned around for the better, in just as short a time as their awakening took. And it can… once tipping points are reached, filling the population with that exponentially accelerating revolutionary spirit.

        We can still mend this.

        “Usually when a process of mass formation emerges in a society and a population, only 30% of the people is really hypnotized. So that’s something very important, because it seems there are much more. But it’s not the case. There is only 30% of the people who are really hypnotized.

        Then there is an additional 40% of the people who goes along with this first group because they never go against the current, and they feel that they don’t want to go against the current, that is too difficult and too dangerous to go against the crowd.

        And then there is an additional 20% or 30% or something who is not hypnotized and who wants to speak out, who wants to do something. But it can be surprising, like even in totalitarian States such as Germany or the Soviet Union, usually not more than about 30% of the people is really totalitarian. And that’s something that is observed time and time again.” – Matias Desmet. https://thecitesite.com/authors/mattias-desmet/page/3/

        And even that hypnotised 30% can snap out of it. Keep speaking out [not just for the 40%ers]. :) Mendwards!