In the US there’s something in the drinking water to make people passive. Only explanation I can think of as to why people aren’t constantly rioting considering living conditions.
Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all-out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.
Gore Vidal
That’s not exactly what Steinbeck wrote. He wrote: "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians…Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” But he wasn’t necessarily talking about the American people as a whole, he was talking about the socialist movement of the time. He was saying that few socialists were actually working class, and many were, and are today, members of the upper middle class who could be seen as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”
Netflix, sports, and fear of homelessness/poverty.
Three things
- Red scare propaganda. Anti-socialism sentiment is the default in the US. Poling in the US has to find a way to express good policy without making it seem “socialist” in order to show majority support
- Lack of a social safety net. Rioting could mean losing your job, which means homelessness
- Appearance of political division is high. Most Americans agree with good policy (once you ask “correctly”), but the poison pill of conservative echo chambers have made a segment of people aggressively opposed to such sentiments. It makes it so you don’t know who you can express and share those ideas with.
It’s echo chambers in general imo. There’s more than just conservative echo chambers, and in fact I’d wager that there’s less conservative safe spaces than the others
Removed by mod
We get cyberpunk but without the cool stuff
