The idea that "Anyone can succeed through hard work and individual effort" has the dark corollary that "Lack of success and prosperity is your fault and shows a deficiency in your character"
Basically, if you don't succeed it is your fault and no one should feel bad about your situation or feel compelled to help you in any way.
To put it bluntly "I got mine and fuck you if you don't"
We have legions of “losers” who take that in internally and blame themselves, and legions of Americans struggling to survive themselves who revel in the schadenfreude of being able to look down on the homeless, refusing to look up at their shared enemies in the little club who put both of them in their dire situations of slightly varying degree.
Basically “Whether or not I got mine, fuck you.”
A race to the bottom. The losers, aka the majority, are so busy looking for bigger losers to punch down, we won’t even consider solidarity in punching up at the wealthy interests intentionally propagating this for profit inhumanity.
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.
Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.
They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.
It’s called 🇺🇸The American Dream🇺🇸, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
-George Carlin, who knew how irrevocably fucked we were when it was still considered a funny thought exercise. We’re now almost 50 years, not 30, from the Reagan Revolution that converted almost all government resistance on your behalf into bribe taking neoliberals, and now we all feel the price for turning that bull of insatiable greed loose on society.
I knew Carlin would be here and with good reason. He was one of the greatest orators and philosophers of the 20th century, possibly the best the US has ever produced.
I couldn’t agree more. For better or worse, his words raised me more than my own POS father did. A critical thinker on a level the US goes to great pains to avoid producing in modernity.
In terms of modern social/philosophical commentary in comedic form, I only see a glimmer of such potential and depth in Bo Burnham, who is himself an avid fan of Carlin who has dropped his name in his art several times.