It’s sad that we encourage and reward sociopathic behavior in this country. That turns into people with power, that includes home owners, often cheering for their fellow American’s suffering and reveling in it to feel superior. The same people that “succeed” ie are the most successfully selfish, oh I’m sorry, “rationally self-interested,” are of course the first to want to pull that ladder up because fuck everyone who isn’t them. They have a mindset of “I took what was mine, if you didn’t, you must deserve your suffering.”
This culture of our cutthroat, big winners and die in the street losers economy has poisoned every aspect of the society it is supposed to be in service to. The United States is basically the sociocultural embodiment of being shamelessly drunk on schadenfreude.
People should feel a sense of guilt for feeling like a bigger winner the more severely and more numerically other people lose, but empathy has to be taught young, and the US treats the very concept of empathy with everything from hostility to outright rage, some even turning it into a derogatory slur, “virtue signaling,” treating life as a competition against others, rather than cooperative experience with them.
That’s good for keeping us divided so the real winners can keep running the table though, laughing at the middle rung poories beating on bottom rung poories, obliviously doing the job of stoking division and standing against social equity against their own interests… for free!