r/antiwork • u/DoofusExplorer • 12d ago
Real World Crisis 🌎 The Great Gaslight: How America Uses “Personal Responsibility” to Ignore Systemic Failures
https://medium.com/@madougherty90/the-great-gaslight-how-america-uses-personal-responsibility-to-ignore-systemic-failures-7dc5b5968173627
u/UnparliamentaryPug 11d ago
Great article. This part hit hard:
When personal responsibility is overemphasized, it gaslights struggling people into blaming themselves for systemic failures. It lets politicians and corporations off the hook for structural inequality...But perhaps the most insidious effect is how it turns people against each other.
The same people told to “work harder” when they’re struggling often apply that same mindset to others...This isn’t an accident. It’s part of how the system sustains itself: by making people police each other’s suffering instead of questioning why so many are struggling in the first place.
This mindset is everywhere at my job. When we shifted to RTO, people were upset because they made choices on where to live and how to organize their lives on the assumption that WFH would stay; we were told to get over it. Never mind the offices we returned to were objectively crappier than pre-pandemic.
When people asked for exemptions from RTO, they set up byzantine processes that made people prove they couldn't work on-site (ever try to prove a negative?).
And when people burned out at work, they organized wellness committees and webinars to tell us it was our own fault for not managing our stress. Breathe deeply and fix ourselves.
Anything to avoid facing the fact that the system is working as intended.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
"You just need to reduce your stress! Therapy would help you for sure." ... there is no amount of therapy that can help with this shit. When the very system we live in is the source of our endless stress and existential dread... well you can piece together the rest.
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u/Old_Baldi_Locks 11d ago
Exactly. If therapists were doing their fucking jobs, if they had a valid right to be treated like competent adults, their number one prescription would be "less work and more time on self care".
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u/SecularMisanthropy 11d ago
This has been quite the hot topic among counselors and counseling psychology since 2008. Most people become therapists because they genuinely want to help other people, so when what people need isn't something they can provide, and no amount of talking through it will make anything better, it's hard to miss. And the pattern is particularly noticeable when every client is struggling with the same things, year after year.
Of course, academia has plenty of nepo babies always looking for the next terrible idea to prop up the status quo, so the frustrations of therapists have been met with pushback from opportunistic psych phDs (with more hierarchical credibility than a mere therapist), so as yet the conversation is still only happening on the fringes.
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u/LemFliggity 11d ago
Early on I asked my therapist if he thought I was too anxious. He said, "No, you have just the right amount of anxiety for someone living in 21st century America. I'd be more concerned if you came in here and you weren't anxious about anything."
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u/idioma 11d ago
“Self-care” is another one of those weaponized concepts—corporations promote it as a solution for the malaise which they themselves inflict upon their workers.
I don’t need or want a free subscription to a mindfulness app. What I need is a wage that keeps up with the rising cost of living. What I need is access to affordable healthcare and housing. I also need an employer who values my education and experience as much as I do. I need a fair chance at career advancement—one based on clear expectations and free of favoritism and nepotism.
Until I have those things on non-precarious terms, you can self-care deez nuts.
Oh, and while we’re at it, I need a functioning and reliable government, working infrastructure, clean air and water, safe and well-maintained streets and public spaces, equal rights, and meaningful representation through free and fair elections.
These are not unreasonable things to expect or even demand. We are capable of achieving all of the above and more. And every living person in the world should be living under these minimum standards. There is no excuse for anything less.
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u/Wise-Assistance7964 5d ago
I take care of myself fine. I actually need other people to take care of the rest of me though.
Straight up: I need someone to take care of half of my meals. I’m not eating regularly or healthy living alone and working long, unpredictable hours in a different town every day (electrician). And that’s not unreasonable. I also need and want to cook for other people.
I fucking hate when people tell me to take care of myself. I am. Other people are also supposed to take care of me. I’m supposed to take care of other people probably more than I take care of myself.
I guess I’m saying everyone working all day for wages makes no sense. Some people should make money for each other, some people should take care of food and shelter and family for each other.
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u/blush_n_bubbles 11d ago
And let's not forget that therapy is too expensive in the first place! Good luck finding a decent one covered by insurance. Hell, the insurance struggle is just another source of dread. Are we not the only Western nation without socialized healthcare?
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u/TheOldPug 11d ago
Last time I tried seeing a therapist, he was so screen addicted he spent the whole session staring at his laptop.
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u/thaeggan 11d ago
This put into words what I have been unable to for quite a while.
I work construction and foreman keep asking me to become a foreman. The stress I see them go through is more than I'd like and I'm already stressed often enough as an installer. I'm often told I just have to manage the stress or that I'll eventually find a way to live with it.
Nah, I'm good. When that clock hits end of shift I am gone. No after hour calls or hanging on lingering problems to solve.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 11d ago
I read a very interesting book called “The myth of depression as disease : limitations and alternatives to drug treatment” by Allan M Leventhal that talks about this in some detail.
I would take it further and say that our society deliberately sets out to make us feel anxious and depressed. That way we can be sold solutions - from cars and clothes and holidays, to drugs, to political extremism.
Its ironic that, for a chunk of the population, a global pandemic was a lacuna of comfort - working from home, baking bread, keeping chickens, starting new hobbies, staying with their families…. Which is not to undermine the horror of people forced to work, and the collective trauma of the healthcare teams. Its just that it was so painfully obvious that when left to our own devices, this is what makes so many of us happy - and this is exactly what we are deliberately deprived of so as to keep the wheels of commerce grinding ever finer.
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u/Itinerary4LifeII 5d ago
It's sad that so many good things are actually posted in Reddit, but most will never see it and nothing will change as a result, and reddit will continue to be negatively judged for other content that typically gets associated with reddit. If people saw some of these posts here, and enough people saw them, I think things could actually have a chance of slowly changing.
I know many people say that things are the way they are and can't just be changed because it is what it is and that is how it's supposed to be. However, at the end of the day, many of these things we blindly believe and accept are made up and can easily be changed or done away with just as easily as they were thought up. Let an astroid or something wipe out a few satellites, and the debris from the destroyed satellites cause a chain reaction of more destruction wiping out the rest of the satellites, or something massive disrupting technology as we currently know it. Without communication and devices to record, save and track everything, most things we have either given meaning to or blindly accepted will suddenly no longer have importance and many beliefs and made up structures would have to either be erased or changed.
The moment that someone with perceived power decides that tangible paper money no longer has any value, or something happens to make that a new reality, it will suddenly become useless and unimportant. So many imaginary things in this world we blindly follow and believe and accept. Nothing really has to be the way it currently is when it comes to the structured lives of humans. It can all be changed, and easily, even if the change comes with some undesirable consequences and the discomfort of breaking what we've learned to accept as "normal" and necessary.
There is almost always more than just one rigid way to achieve or do something. Obviously, our current way isn't the best, and there are also too many outdated things mixed into the current systematic process.
....And here I am wasting more time typing when it will not change anything. Has anyone ever watched old sitcoms and comedy talk TV shows like Johnny Carson and noticed that the jokes made about societal and political problems back in the day often just make you realize how long things have been actually going on and haven't really changed?
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u/Itinerary4LifeII 5d ago
It is funny how many companies nowadays are hopping on the "mental health help accessibility within the company" bandwagon.
I'm like "hmmmm, well at least we're now admitting there is a problem and enough people are suffering because of it that mental health help accessibility in the workplace is becoming a new norm. Maybe some day people might decide to actually address the issues instead of just normalizing talking about it more while allowing them to continue."
But, then again, I have to be honest with myself and ask myself that if I was benefitting very well financially from the way the system is operating, would I have any interest in trying to change it, or try to convince others that could weed me out of their team to help me change things? Or would I become one of those people who end up saying "life isn't fair" or "that's just the way it is?"
Anyway, I don't even know why I'm wasting my time typing when it's not their problem and therefore it will not change anything on the grand scheme of things, but I already typed it, so I will post it.
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u/No_Carry_3991 11d ago
We need to have a conversation about middle management and the caste system that we have here in this country. We have a caste system and almost NO ONE is talking about it.THAT is a convo we need to have.
The greater system at large that inhibits the growth of the cannon fodder class is held down by that free labour. Done for the power elite. BY the middle class and middle management.
What we think of each other works better to keep this sick system in place better than any legislation enacted to dictate what we do in our society.
When someone who makes twenty thousand a year more than someone else, they not only have their opinions, they influence how those at the bottom are viewed and treated.
This influences how seriously things like worker safety are taken. This influences how things like a late paycheck or time off are handled.
It's laws. But it's also thoughts and biases and prejudices.
We need solidarity among the classes. That is critical to the success of this system. And without it, the powers that be can do whatever they want.
The Middleman.
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u/lyravega 11d ago edited 11d ago
Was going to quote this exact part from the article. It's spot on. You left this bit out though, and I think it's very relevant too.
If they had to grind through exhaustion, sacrifice their health, or take on multiple jobs just to survive, then why should anyone else get help? Struggle becomes a rite of passage — and anyone who challenges it is seen as lazy or entitled.
It's a great article, a must read anyway.
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u/AlfalfaHealthy6683 12d ago
Epically displayed when a reporter was asking about cutting school lunch programs and the politician was like it’ll be good for them they can earn their own money. Kids.
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 11d ago
There was an idiot Republican politician in my area who said that children would get “spoiled” if we, you know, fed them.
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u/xibeno9261 11d ago
What is really idiotic are the people who continue to support and vote these politicians into power. If the American voter continues to support these politicians, then maybe the American people are against feeding children?
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u/thrawtes 11d ago
If the American voter continues to support these politicians, then maybe the American people are against feeding children?
I feel like you're being rhetorical but, yes, obviously there's a ton of Americans who don't believe children have the inherent right to food and should starve as punishment for their parents' "bad choices". That's just fact.
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u/xibeno9261 11d ago
My point is that in a democracy, we get the politicians that reflect what the people want. Politicians are not going to do things that nobody supports.
So instead of blaming a particular Republican or Democrat, people should be taking a deeper look at our society. Why are there so many Americans with such fucked up values?
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u/thrawtes 11d ago
Why are there so many Americans with such fucked up values?
I'd argue that "if they aren't in my tribe, fuck 'em, their kids can starve" has been broadly popular sentiment throughout human history. Even now many people that would sacrifice to ensure every American child is fed wouldn't do so for every child globally.
The main difference is that a significant portion of the country has stopped seeing "all Americans" as "their tribe" in the information age.
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u/keetyymeow 11d ago
I would say a lot of Asian cultures share a more culture to care about each other and their communities.
Western culture is inherently more selfish but even more so in the states.
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u/xibeno9261 11d ago
I'd argue that "if they aren't in my tribe, fuck 'em, their kids can starve" has been broadly popular sentiment throughout human history.
Many countries have free lunch for children. Even poor countries like India, free lunch programs are widely popular. So being against feeding children isn't normal in the rest of the world.
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u/lingeringwill2 11d ago
not only that but other kids not being able to eat doesn't really help anyone at all. They're clearly not against it for any practical, scarcity based reasons.
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u/mortgagepants 11d ago
in america it isn't all americans or their tribe. many americans would prefer free lunch for kids. but americans think if they vote for the party that will do that, rich people would have to pay taxes, you couldn't be racist, and everyone will become trans.
so millions of american voters will gladly starve kids because they think the alternative is worse.
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u/Cultural_Double_422 11d ago
It's a bit more complicated than that. Gerrymandering, unlimited money in politics, the majority of the population too busy trying to survive to truly be engaged politically, and the entrenched 2 party system that keeps people in office until death have made it far easier to end up with politicians that only pay lip service to the needs of regular people. Of course there are entirely too many people that vote for ideas that hurt people, including themselves, and we need to address it, but we also need to fix the system because in many places that Republicans win regularly, they are elected by a minority of the population.
It's impossible to win a rigged game.
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u/xibeno9261 11d ago
Gerrymandering, unlimited money in politics, the majority of the population too busy trying to survive to truly be engaged politically, and the entrenched 2 party system that keeps people in office until death
All of these things are have the support of large enough number of people, which is why in a democracy, they still exist. If there wasn't sufficient public support, they would be gone by now. For example, today, you cannot use a whip to punish people. Note that I didn't write corporal punishment, but a literal whip. Historically, we did use a whip, but we don't any more. Why is that? Because there aren't meaningful number of Americans who will vote to bring back the whip. There might be supporters of corporal punishment, but not whipping people.
And people like you, who will blame "the system" rather than American people, are part of the problem. The American voters are not some sort of sacrosanct entity that cannot be criticized. As a democracy, the American people are the root of our problems. Unless we are willing to admit that Americans have fucked up values, we are not going to get better.
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u/Ki-Larah 11d ago
If you look at that Princeton study about what laws actually get enacted, you’ll see that rarely do the policies people want actually come to pass. The ones corporations want however…
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u/literate_habitation 11d ago
I highly recommend the book Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti.
It's not that the American people are so callous and want things that are bad for society. Those with money and power decide what happens on a systemic level, and they only need to sway a small percentage of voters to get it.
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u/rbb36 11d ago
Why are there so many Americans with such fucked up values?
It's an important question, and one I can shed a bit of light on. My profession plays a large part. Until I retired, I was an avarice engineer.
I am a data scientist. I do the low level math side of machine learning / artificial intelligence, and I worked with petabyte scale data. I specialized in retail application of machine learning. I used data about people's historical interactions with information to predict what I could dangle in front of them, at what time, to induce a purchase. The field is quite broad and the algorithms arcane and subtle. It includes things like detecting weakness, addictive behavior, and emotional states.
That is not to say that there are no bad people, nor that people have no responsibility for their actions. But many consumer decisions are reached with the aid of manipulation programs.
While I did not delve into social media professionally, I have done a great deal of recreational research on it. Political opinions are formed within a similar maelstrom of persuasion operations. Russia's are among the most often discussed (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=russian%20social%20media%20operations&ia=web).
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 11d ago
You should definitely write a book on this. I’ve read a number on how people’s food choices are manipulated at levels they never see, and its both fascinating and infuriating.
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u/rbb36 11d ago
Fascinating and infuriating is my exact reaction. The fascinating part is why I got into it more than a quarter century ago, in its infancy. The infuriating part is why I had to stop even when the financial rewards were extraordinary.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 11d ago
I’m curious to know if you think this science could be used for good instead of evil 😄 Can you use this knowledge to discourage people from impulse spending ?
One of the things I got from the food books is the ubiquity of these sorts of influences, and how hard it is to escape them - particularly around food of course; but are there ways to escape the constant pressures of consumerism ?
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u/rbb36 11d ago
It absolutely can be used for good - or at least to good ends. One big case of engineered emotional response was the US campaign against smoking. Its intent was to create a disgust response in people who saw someone smoking, by associating smoking with images of people who looked unhealthy.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27690639/
Other examples of mass social engineering include Smokey the Bear, the anti-littering Native American, and the ad campaign, "The More You Know".
The reason it hasn't been used for good very often in social media is that it is so effective that everyone who is any good at it gets paid six figures to do it for profit or power. It also requires a lot of compute, storage, and network resources to do it on a large scale; so even with people like me donating our time, it still needs a lot of funding to make it happen.
Getting people with the skill to do it and the will to do it for benevolent reasons is also a challenge. Among my friends who believe in doing good with data science, very few believe that the ends justify the means. Most turn their noses up at the idea of intentional psychological manipulation, even if the end goal is unambiguously good.
It's an age-old story. When good triumphs, it is because the vast majority of people are good. When evil triumphs, it is because they have no moral qualms about fighting dirty.
The dirty weapons being used on social media are new and incredibly powerful. And society has not had time to evolve effective immune-responses to viral disinformation.
But it is happening. Where a lot of the benevolent activity is happening right now is in creating platforms that are resistant to direct manipulation by hostile actors. Most notably, pretty much all social media platforms are currently majority owned by oligarchs. Outside campaigns running on oligarch-controlled platforms are always at risk of being shut down. So the focus for a lot of people is creating fully decentralized social media.
For example: https://freeourfeeds.com/
There are also people out there who are working on developing oligarch resistant campaigns of benevolent direct action psy-ops. I think it is possible. I even think it will happen, I think it is inevitable. But there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there. That might be the story worth writing.
But I digress, hopefully I managed to answer some of your questions, somewhere in that ramble. :D
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u/The_Xhuuya 10d ago
i’ve recently started to realize (not to sound a bit woo woo) everything is an attack on psyche these days. everything is for the benefit and efficiency of the machine.
i don’t know why it brings my attention to a recent struggle personally (sorry unrelated a bit but some may understand ifkyk) I’m an artist that leans towards logic and math. i visually Love art nouveau, its gorgeous to me and i love to look at things done in the style. however, my favorite designs that i Make are art deco. yet visually i can’t stand it in my space
it feels like one of those in between understanding space, trying to understand an amorphous and constantly evolving shape. but you can never quite get it and it causes so much exhaustion almost
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u/rbb36 10d ago
I get what you're saying, and I feel it too. I think it is predominately an American phenomenon, tied to the topic in The Great Gaslight article above. There are those who are trying to spread the philosophy to the rest of the world. I hope that other nations are better at resisting, and that US resistance rises.
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u/Excidiar 11d ago
Politicians are going to do lots of things that almost nobody supports if those who support those things can hide the things done or brainwash people into thinking the things weren't done.
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u/Square-Cook-8574 11d ago
"Why are there so many Americans with such fucked up values?"
Toxic hyperindividualism, racism, narcissism, and victim-shaming culture rooted in fundamentalist religion.
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u/NurgleIsLord Anarcho-Communist 11d ago
It could possible be due to the fact that the US was founded by religious extremists who stole the land we currently live on, used stolen labor in the form of slavery (which, despite what we were told in school, never really went away), and did everything they could to shame the poor as 'sinners'.
My point is, our whole country is rotten to the core and built by selfish, hateful, rich people.
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u/MGD109 11d ago
Worth remembering in general, but overall purity thinking is kind of useless. It doesn't matter who built what or how it was used in the past, only how its used now.
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u/Argrath 11d ago
If corporations are people and money makes campaigns happens then how can the regular people even make our voices heard? There have been studies done that show that our government doesn't give a single fuck about what rhe populace wants in general. If you don't have gigantic money your opinion doesn't fucking matter.
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u/Ki-Larah 11d ago
Yeah… unfortunately that mentality has been around for decades at least. My own dad would say free lunch shouldn’t exist because “they need to learn they won’t eat for free in the real world”. 🙄😔
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u/sklimshady 11d ago
They do actually want the kids to work. Look at Arkansas.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
They yearn for the mines dontcha know
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u/sklimshady 11d ago
They seem to be yearning for the meat grinders mostly.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
Fucks sake youre not wrong 🤦🏻♂️
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u/sklimshady 11d ago
I wonder what percentage of human meat/viscera/blood is ok by the FDA to have in our ground meat? Like the rat feces?
I'm kidding, but also kinda need to go look some stuff up.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
That is a thought that had never occured to me and quite honestly, I wish it never had. I suppose we can suffer together with that one. Yay trauma sharing!
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u/No_Carry_3991 11d ago
Like it fr really seems they do. they do actually want kids working.
So. Segregation back again.
Abortion ban.
No more unions.
No more SNAP which I agree has to be cleaned up
No more workers rights.
No more OSHA so safety at work is out the window.
No more Dept of Education.
No more 988 crisis line help and referrals for trans kids ( wwwwwWTF?!)
No more EPA
No more Federal Post Office
Child labour.
No votes for women.
Detention camps.
Random illegal arrests.
Disappearing of people.
more. there's more.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
I mean all you have to look at is Project 2025. Spells it all out in very plain text... This is all so absurdly fucked.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 11d ago
Just on the thing about SNAP - I’m in Australia, and we had a govt. program to “clean up” some of our social security programs. It was an unmitigated disaster - Google “Robodebt” if you want the details.
Every time I’ve seen a government decide to stamp out welfare fraud, it has inevitably resulted in the most desperate and vulnerable people in that society being treated like criminals who are trying to “rip off the system”. Look at what’s happening with the Carer’s payment recipients in the UK at the moment. People sent to prison because they earnt £15 a week more than they should have, and they’re still carers for elderly or disabled relatives, who are now bejng thrown back onto government care programs at enormous cost.
Does welfare fraud exist ? Yes it does. But every single time I’ve seen a program to “clean it up” or “stamp out fraud” it has inevitably hurt the most vulnerable people in the community, while costing milions more than it saves.
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u/SlippedMyDisco76 11d ago
As a fellow Aussie - fuck robodebt and fuck the c**s who *still haven't been taken to task over it.
It hurt so many people and so many families and was a way to vilify the "pesky dole bludgers" who in conservative views is anyone on centrelink
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u/SecularMisanthropy 11d ago
They need people to replace all the deported agricultural and service workers, and look, now there will be all these convenient children with no schools to attend.
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u/WildBlue2525Potato 11d ago
Tennessee has rolled back the legal working age to 14 and it is my understanding that some other states are considering similar legislation with discussions of lowering it to age 10 or 12. SMH.
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u/ci23422 11d ago
only 3% of jobs listed on the state government website are over $20,000
When someone tells you to just find another job, tell them this.
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u/Universal_Anomaly 12d ago
The normalisation of never accepting any responsibility by accusing your victims of not being responsible enough.
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u/BeltOk7189 11d ago
The people that are like this are the first to chastise someone when they fuck up when it comes to shit they know about but others may not and the last to accept any responsibility when they, themselves, fuck up when it comes to something they don't know much about.
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u/alarumba 11d ago
And your competitors.
The one that bugs me most is any Western country doesn't have to reduce emissions cause China is worse. Yeah, the country that you sent all your dirty work to and get everything shipped from, who still manages less emissions per capital.
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u/tgt305 12d ago
The great American “no you” philosophy
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u/regprenticer 12d ago
It's a bigger problem for all of us now because social media/online content is slowly spreading that mindset.
I'm in the UK and i'll suddenly notice my kids say something that sounds very American and think "where did they get that idea from"
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u/belabensa 12d ago
This happens and has happened all over the world though, its not unique to America, just perhaps happens more in neoliberal societies (though the practice started well before that)
The UK did this a lot in their colonies, for example
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u/5presidents1Week 12d ago
Say something like what? I'm curious to know so i can identifie it.
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u/krat0s5 11d ago
“I’m seven now mom I don’t need no more of y’all schools ima go buy a governor with my Christmas money, exploit the labour of others, buy a dessert eagle and be a famous tik tok influencer. ALSO! Free healthcare is communism! Education is communism, minimum wage is communism, large government you guessed it communism and making me eat my peas? Communism! Do you really want to be a communist dictator or do you want to get me a tub of ice cream like a real patriotic capitalist?”
Probably also some stuff about dabbing or twerking but I don’t think you have to worry too much about that.
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u/5presidents1Week 11d ago
Your kids use those words?? C'mon man 😂😂
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u/Grand-Page-1180 11d ago
A lot of this comes from our rugged individualism as a culture. If everything's the individual's fault, then you can't blame corporations, capitalism, the government or anything else. But who has all the power? The sad sack individual, or everything else? If everything's a persons fault, then the institutions never have to be held accountable, never have to change. It's a form of denial and deflection. Don't worry about what I'm doing it says, the problem is you.
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u/AuthenticLiving7 11d ago
I have this debate on the finance subs from time to time. People love to point out the bad decisions others make financially. Yes it is true many people do make poor decisions (myself included).
But I point out that the whole entire economy revolves around people spending irresponsibly. We are constantly encouraged to purchase. And it's not enough to have 1 item. We are encouraged to have entire collections of cups, candles, makeup, junk. Capitalism is also making it easier and easier to purchase impulsively.
Not only are we encouraged to purchase, but we are never taught about personal finance. We are never encouraged to prepare (save) for the future.
They can't seriously argue it's about personal responsibility when most people are failing. It's a culture issue.
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u/candleflame3 11d ago
Saw a TikTok yesterday that said if people need a payment plan to buy a Crunchwrap Supreme, society and the economy are off the rails.
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u/alarumba 11d ago
Overconsumption via collecting is also another symptom of our a deeper problem.
Many of us are naturally creative. We want to build, decorate, invent. When you're burnt out, and/or don't have the resources (time, money, tools, space) the next best thing is just to buy something. "My work produced this."
And it's hardwired in our monkey brains to gather. We can't go out into the bush and pick berries, next best thing is Hot Wheels cars at Walmart.
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u/OttawaMan35 11d ago
From its founding, America has been obsessed with the idea of self-reliance. The Protestant work ethic turned labor into a moral virtue. Capitalism turned wealth into a measure of character. The “rags to riches” myth turned billionaires into proof that anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough.
And yet, here’s the contradiction: America promotes individualism while constantly bailing out the rich.
Personal responsibility is a requirement for the poor but an option for the wealthy. When corporations crash the economy, they get billion-dollar bailouts and golden parachutes. When an everyday worker can’t afford rent, they get lectures about budgeting and personal choices.
The U.S. treats systemic failures as personal failures — especially when it comes to poverty. In Denmark, a low-income worker pays about $1,000 a year for childcare. In the U.S., that cost averages over $10,000 per child. In most developed countries, medical debt isn’t a thing; in America, over 40% of adults have medical debt. Other countries provide universal healthcare, affordable education, and stronger worker protections. The U.S., instead, blames individuals for struggling — as if economic hardship is always a reflection of laziness rather than a byproduct of policy choices.
If you’ve ever felt like you were working as hard as you could but still struggling, you’re not imagining it. If you’ve ever been blamed for things outside your control, you’re not the problem.
So the next time someone tells you that success is just a matter of working harder, ask them:
If hard work guarantees success, why aren’t nurses and teachers billionaires?
Why do the people who contribute the least take home the most?
Why does every crisis somehow become our fault — while the people who created the mess keep getting richer?
Because if everything is your fault, nothing ever has to change.
And that’s exactly the point.
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u/JargonPhat 11d ago
A child born into poverty doesn’t have the same opportunities as one born into wealth. A person with chronic illness can’t just “work harder” to afford healthcare. A worker in a rigged economy can’t out-hustle inflation, wage stagnation, and rising costs of living.
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u/lsdmt93 11d ago
Therapists perpetuate this mindset too. Every single therapist I’ve seen in the last decade has done nothing but invalidate my tangible problems by insisting they’re nothing more than “negative thoughts and perceptions” and pushing the same useless corporate guided meditation and breathing apps. I’ve given up on therapy all together because these motherfuckers are all part of the problem.
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u/Awatts2222 11d ago
You are right. These corporate approved therapists only job is to get you back on the hamster wheel.
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u/candleflame3 11d ago
Oh god, there is a big well-being push on at my workplace and someone has come up with the terrible idea to have bosses ask employees about their well-being, particularly mental. There are SO MANY problems with this, including that such info can also be private medical info and bosses can't just ask for that, that the vast majority of bosses are in NO WAY trained or qualified to deal with people's well-being issues, or that bosses could use this info against employees in all kinds of ways. It's a shitshow that could blow up at any moment.
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u/pocketmoncollector42 10d ago
Isn’t that kind of stuff specifically disallowed via things like HIPAA?
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
Literally why I refuse to go to therapy. Why would I waste my time and money on someone who will tell me a bunch of bullshit? Especially when I'd look them dead in the face and tell them they're full of shit.
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u/dahComrad 11d ago
My first therapist at Kaiser Permente was fucking absurd. Refused to talk about any of my trauma and instead redirected it to me, as if I had caused my own suffering or was lying or something. Went to a mental health clinic and my current therapist is amazing. Its like any other profession; you have good and bad people working in them.
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u/Old_Baldi_Locks 11d ago
YEP!
They relentlessly push CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) which is nothing more than "have you considered just not being sad about your slavery?"
That's it. That's the most popular therapeutic technique right now. Just "stop feeling bad about your existence". Nothing whatsoever that's actually going to benefit you, only what will benefit the slave owners.
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u/captd3adpool 11d ago
"You need to change your perspective" "think of all the things you have to be thankful for!" "You have a roof over your head! Many dont have that same luxury" - that last one is from my fucking mother but same energy. It's all a load of garbage.
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u/L-RondHubbard 11d ago
That's...not how CBT actually works. You probably just had a shitty therapist.
I have depression/anxiety/PTSD from childhood trauma. The first time I tried therapy as an adult, it was a CBT-lite sort of approach, and the therapist focused on getting me to identify automatic, negative thought patterns and challenge them with data. Some of these thought patterns included things like, "if I make a mistake at work I will end up homeless and on the streets," or "I am fundamentally incapable of being loved."
There are limitations on CBT, to be sure. For one thing, if I actually was one mistake at work away from being homeless on the streets, no amount of CBT would help, because the data would support my negative thoughts! And it usually won't actually resolve some of the deeper symptoms of trauma (no matter how much I did it, I was never really convinced I was "safe," just "safe enough for now").
And I want to be clear, therapy is not a substitute for systemic change. I think we're probably in agreement that "mental health" is being weaponized against the working class in order to convince them that they are the cause of their own suffering. But for people who actually need this kind of intervention for reasons unrelated to structural issues, it can be literally life-saving.
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u/harlotcharlotte 11d ago
Yeah. I had one amazing therapist about 10 years ago, so I know they're out there, but trying to find an even decent one since I moved has made me swear off ever getting therapy altogether. I'm sure CBT has it's good points, but the constant "just have a better mindset" therapy has me want to pull my hair out.
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u/AspiringMILF 11d ago
CBT is bullshit. In majority of cases, of you understand cause and effect at a basic level, it will not benefit you
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u/trash-dontpickitup 11d ago edited 11d ago
thank you for this reply. they call us "consumers" now in mental health treatment, as if i have a choice about whether or not i'm living with severe persistent mental illness.
after a decade of dealing with their darvo, i've found out:
cbt is a victim blaming system that attempts to retraumatize child trauma survivors in order to keep them unstable, vulnerable, and reliant on a perceived "safe person."
dbt is an excuse for case workers to deny you access to basic human needs.
meds are usually very helpful. there are extenuating circumstances where they just aren't. who do you think the current mental health system blames for that?
emdr is smoke and mirrors. i can't believe that an entire establishment will fall for such an obvious placebo magic trick... but then i think about the lebron james-curated bullshit all over the calm app and i remember that cults will always recruit celebrities and praise high prestige procedures, just to keep the fraud going and they can continue stealing from the people they claim to help.
if contemporary mental health treatment in america has helped you, that's great. but just know: the people who have been suffering since childhood are completely and fully exploited by it.
sincerely,
a person living with such intense mental health issues that they change my diagnosis every time i engage with them*
*it's happened frequently enough that i finally figured out they were doing it to keep me engaged and coming back weekly, paying that co-pay every single visit. it's a total fraud, friends.
ETA: couple typos, but i also wanted to add that the american system is going full exploitation for folks like me with the implementation of the "peer support paraprofessional" roles popping up everywhere. word to the wise: these are not job opportunities, these are some of the most egregiously exploitative positions i've ever encountered. if you accept a job in that field, you are willfully accepting your own malicious exploitation. be like me: become a peer so you can tell all of your clients to quit their jobs. sorry for the wall of text; ama being exploited lol.
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u/innerbootes 11d ago
EMDR doesn’t work for CPTSD unless it’s paired with another modality like IFS. It was designed for single-event trauma, the kind that causes PTSD.
Sorry you were misled.
— fellow childhood trauma survivor
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u/Junior_Blackberry779 11d ago
I have to disagree with you on CBT. For my anxiety where I catastrophize minor errors "I don't know this basic task because I'm too stupid" cbt helped me restructure my thoughts "I can't know everything,even simple simple work tasks can be forgotten"
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u/throwawaybrowsing888 11d ago
When applied poorly, CBT reinforces the perception that it is up to the individual to cope with systemic problems. It can help in some circumstances like you mentioned. I benefited from it a lot when I was first diagnosed with cptsd and had a lot of trauma to cope with due to childhood abuse.
Unfortunately, it can also be a tool of oppression for those who are being exploited at a systemic level.
As a personal anecdote, my therapists tried to get me to “CBT’d” my way into thinking if I just tried some other approach, some other strategy, I could cope with the symptoms of my mental illness. Instead of recognizing my limitations as I presented them in therapy, they insisted that “if I wanted to, I would” do the work to manage my mental health.
Turns out, I had undiagnosed ADHD all along: a disorder of my brain chemistry that physically affected my ability to even remember what we talked about in a session, while obscuring the fact that I forgot.
After I was diagnosed, my new therapists should have helped me cope with the anger of my disorder overlooked for my whole life and the ways that I was let down by people who should have recognized the signs when I was growing up. They, too, treated as though it was an issue of “willpower” despite the diagnosis.
Instead, they ignored/brushed off the hard work it took to get to where I was (lower middle class childhood to graduate degree, working full time, etc adulthood) despite the undiagnosed adhd, and acted as though I was “giving up” on improving my symptoms.
They insisted that my perceived limitations of my physical abilities were “distorted thinking” that should be addressed, rather than actual limitations of my disability that I was trying to adapt to.
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u/pstmdrnsm 11d ago
CBT was really useful for me too because it gave me tangible actions to take to change the way I perceived things, which in turn changed the actions I was taking.
But, it can be very harmful for people whose depression or anxiety is neurological or caused by brain irregularities, rather than just circumstance. Reframing things and taking new actions does not fix a physical/neurological disability.
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u/innerbootes 11d ago
CBT is excellent for what you describe. In OP’s case (and my own), it’s a disaster. We have a brain that tells us we’re garbage, essentially, because of how we were raised. We need to change that, not gaslight ourselves into thinking everything’s fine.
Calling yourself stupid is also a sign you were raised by shitty people. So proceed with caution. CBT can help you short term (it did for me too). Longer term you could still struggle and your mental health could worsen. I did CBT for two decades, so I know a little something about it. For deeper recovery, you need bottom-up therapies like IFS, somatic work, and possibly EMDR.
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u/glamazonee 11d ago
Agreed. It was a game changer at 23 to realize that I don't need to feel horrible about myself all the time.
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u/MGD109 11d ago
Okay, were they actual therapists or were they hired by your employer?
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u/TrumpImpeachedAugust 11d ago
This article primarily focuses on gaslighting w/r/t class mobility, but it also brings attention to another category of society-scale gaslighting that especially infuriates me, by (correctly!) calling out that we need "a justice system that rehabilitates instead of just punishes."
A few days ago, in a thread about TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), I said the following. It feels relevant here, too:
The conversations that must happen around all of this are extremely difficult for a lot of people.
A TBI can change someone's personality. If people can, in effect, have their brains physically modified such that they are significantly more likely to commit crimes, then what is the point of punishing them?
Note: I'm not asking "what's the point of imprisoning them"--I think it makes a fair bit of sense to keep dangerous people separated from society. But, if there's a large cohort of people for whom punishment does not act as a deterrent, then what's the point? Why go out of our way to treat them poorly? Should we not be treating them like chronically ill people, even if others suffered as a result of the illness?
A common retort to this line of inquiry is e.g. "well, there are people with TBIs who don't commit crimes."
I bet a good number of the people who find that retort compelling would become significantly more predisposed to criminal behavior if they sustained a TBI. This isn't a matter of how morally resilient some people are, but how lucky some people are. You may not be able to reason your way out of antisocial behavior if the organ which conducts your reasoning has been damaged.
We need to treat "bad people" with more empathy. Simply labeling them criminals and deciding that they "deserve" a cruel life in prison is a massive cop-out.
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u/mdunaware 10d ago
To take it even further, there’s compelling evidence from modern neuroscience that free will, as we tend to understand it, isn’t nearly as “free” as we like to assume. This raises all kinds of very uncomfortable questions about moral responsibility and punishment for wrongdoing. We aren’t ready for that discussion.
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u/innerbootes 11d ago
As someone who is seeking an autism diagnosis soon, at age 55, all I can say is: YEP.
Add in that if you’re a woman or a POC, you “will not get support you need” x1,000 in this country. They may only see and treat white men for what ails you, for example. Or only view your illness through the white male lens when it comes to research. If you have a disorder that only affects women, fuck off entirely.
So not only do you have to potentially deal with a disability your entire life, which is hard enough, your disability will be rendered invisible. And you will be personally blamed for any shortcomings arising from it.
I’m officially giving up. I’ve worked hard all my life, never understanding why I never went as far as others who put in half the effort. I’m not playing the game any more. I will take every advantage I can, anything just short of what might get me in trouble. It will never make up for what I was robbed of.
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u/candleflame3 11d ago
They may only see and treat white men for what ails you, for example. Or only view your illness through the white male lens when it comes to research
This is kind of my beef with the new show Adolescence that people are talking about so much. To me it looks like more of when white men and boys have mental health issues, all of society must sit up and take notice and something must be done. But everyone else can just fuck off.
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u/red_raconteur 11d ago
It will never make up for what I was robbed of.
This hit me so hard. Nothing I ever do is going to make up for it, and the powers that be that could make a difference are never going to. I will continue to live robbed of so many things, so I will stop feeling bad for not 'living up to my potential'.
Good luck with your autism assessment. I was formally diagnosed at age 32 and it gave me a lot of clarity and helped inform my future decisions.
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u/Frothydawg 11d ago
The Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis via the BBC.
Watch it. It’s a long one (4 hours total iirc), but he covers this extensively.
In a nutshell: this has been an ongoing 100+ year long social engineering project that the oligarchs have honed down to a science.
They know damn well what they’re doing. It’s not a conspiracy; they’ve been quite open and vocal about it, in fact. They just dress it up in cute language that they know sells well; “freedom”, “liberty”, “personal responsibility”, “free market enterprise”, etc.
It all boils down to the same rotten shit: The plebs bicker & blame endlessly among themselves whilst business interests do whatever the fuck they want.
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u/Big-Crow4152 11d ago
I have never understood why the philosophy on life is "yep, you just have to survive by a string, just how it works"
Like why? Why are so many people ok with this?
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u/bavmotors1 11d ago
I was a Republican because I understood the simplicity of personal responsibility but then you get older and you realize that people have different decks to play from and some flat out cheat in the game.
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11d ago edited 2d ago
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u/candleflame3 11d ago
At this point it's seriously disturbing that society accepts homelessness at all, for anyone. There is no good reason for it.
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u/Faceluck 11d ago
Yea this belief system is a poison. It strips community away as well as people start to assume that failure lays squarely at their feet.
I’ve had several close personal friends, relationships, and family members that sort of dissolved with this mentality being at the center of it.
I dated someone who fully bought into the idea that anything wrong in your life is because you haven’t worked hard enough or didn’t want to fix it hard enough. She absolutely would not entertain any other perspective, and it caused a lot of division in the relationship.
As far as I understand it, her company fucked up and lost value because of the fuck up, and laid people off/sold off the part of the company she worked for, and because she was a relatively recent hire, she was also included in the layoffs despite having done essentially nothing wrong.
And yet she spent a lot of time and mental energy feeling hurt/down like she had somehow failed to work hard enough or something.
You can see it in schools too. People always act like underperforming students are a result of personal ineptitude instead of 40+ students being crammed into a room with one teacher that could never reasonably provide a good amount of personalized education or attention.
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u/spacecadet2023 Profit Is Theft 11d ago
Looking back at my adult life I see how much I have been gaslit. Especially with my past jobs.
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u/Playswithsaws 11d ago
We have a personal responsibility to demand our weakest and most vulnerable receive the support of the community. Everything else is just victim blaming.
But without the resources the hoard, it’s real hard to bootstrap yourself ain’t it…
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u/stranded536 11d ago
I almost see this in therapy as well. Therapy teaches us ways to cope with life yes, however I feel its purpose is to make you feel okay in a fucked up world. Who’s to say we’re supposed to feel okay in a world this fucked up? Are our depressive and anxious reactions not a direct result of the world around us rather than a misregulation of our own minds? It’s almost like therapy puts the responsibility on you rather than putting the responsibility on things in the world that WOULD change if we all stood up. But it’s bad to be anxious and depressed so we should just avoid that at all costs by taking pills and watching TikTok.
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u/MGD109 11d ago
Eh, therapy is more about helping yourself than society.
Whilst it might say something about the larger problems in society, your basically advocating that its better for people to suffer in the hope it might provoke people into fixing the larger-scale problems.
Historically speaking, they just leave you bleeding in the gutter.
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u/cnxd 11d ago edited 11d ago
"it almost puts responsibility"
it almost doesn't. it literally does not if it's something like, "yeah this world is fucked up but you gotta find a way to live in it somehow". if that's literally what it's saying.
you can't be like "well the world being on fire is not my responsibility" (and it isn't), but then whenever poked at "well...so why don't you just move on with your life" be like "are you implying I shouldn't feel like that? like it's my responsibility to be anxious over it??". cause it isn't.
the functional takeaway is "well whatever" and not just "let me spin over what's out of my control for literally nothing". but then again, that'd just be victim blaming and telling "how to feel or not feel", right. so well, if it's your prerogative, see how that spinning is gonna turn out. (I personally just do not have energy to spend on it.) it's like, where does the line end between "don't tell me what to do" and performative "ooh I'm so anxious about the world ooh", and wisening the hell up
"if only everyone would stand up" first of all, no one will ever 'just' anything. second, they do stand up. and then vote for the worst people ever. cause more than half of the population are just idiots. which is also just another fact, aspect, that one would just have to accept instead of huffing and puffing over it to no avail
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u/SecularMisanthropy 11d ago
Fucking FINALLY. I've been saying this to everyone and anyone for more years than I'd care to remember, while people who look exactly like this guy assure me, with the greatest confidence, they know better and I'm just deflecting blame. Thanks for noticing, white guy with a medium page. Now maybe people will listen.
Uh... end rant, apparently.
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u/imatiredwoman 11d ago
Deming’s Red Bead Experiment shows how managers hold workers responsible for systemic failures. They don’t know how to track their systems other than year over year so blame people instead. The Harvard Business Review talks about it. Look it up.
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u/moodygradstudent 11d ago
I've been calling out this bullshit for years now. I'm glad to see more people talking about it.
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u/tanksalotfrank 11d ago
Reminds me of shitty parents doing a shitty job parenting and then blaming their kids for turning out shitty. It's a pandemic of ignorance and stupidity.
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u/Disastrous-Bowler-99 11d ago
Wonderful article..if hardwork guaranteed success why aren't nurses and teachers billionaires. Sad state of affairs
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u/ellindriel 11d ago
Appropriate sub considering the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the fact that in many workplaces/types of occupations, employers and even unfortunately the public love to blame individuals for incidents or accidents or when things go very wrong (I work in healthcare so these issues or constantly on everyones mind) that end up being more about a systemic problem in the workplace or society than any one persons fault (not that people don't make mistakes, but in high stakes situations things should be set up to minimize such risks). The system that really caused the issue is more often than not downplayed with that individual taking all the blame, suffering and punishment even though in many cases it was definitely not an individual issue.
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u/Digitaltwinn 11d ago
Most obvious in the healthcare industry.
We love blaming people for getting sick and injured like it’s their moral failure. But the moral failure is our entire system.
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u/incognitochaud 10d ago
America will be remembered as the world’s most successful propaganda machine.
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u/SewSewBlue 11d ago
Goes both ways too.
I'm in the process of settling up my aunt's accounts after her death. It took the wheels of bureaucracy almost 2 months to get us the death certificate.
She was behind in many of her bills.
I'm not paying one cent. Or anything she personally owed. They can come after her estate formally but I'm not going to pay goodness of my heart.
They keep trying.
Most of them don't have their shit together to notify the courts within 60 days of the notification. They rely on your sense of obligation to pay, rather than follow the legal process to charge an estate.
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u/wigzell78 11d ago
You really think your plastic straw is responsible for the millions of tons of plastic in the ocean...?
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u/TrashApocalypse 11d ago
And now being taught to us in therapy as “you are responsible for your own feelings”
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u/Lower_Amount3373 11d ago
As a New Zealander, this may not be as ingrained into our society as it is in America but it's still the standard mindset of our right-wing politicians and voters
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u/imafixwoofs 11d ago
This is why Democrats are failing. They don’t dare question this logic that the individual bears all responsibility for his successes and his failures.
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u/metalpossum 11d ago
It's all down the cult of individuality. It's a complete opposite mindset to places like China, where the government might be questionable but the people are relatively safe and provided for.
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u/No-Complaint-6397 11d ago
Duh- where in any education or science did your teachers show/prove even tell you that you have libertarian free will? Nowhere, it’s unfalsifiable, with huge amounts of empirical evidence against it.
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u/Future-Bunch3478 11d ago
The country is dead
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u/MGD109 11d ago
Nihilism has never solved a single problem in all of human history, but it has helped them all grow.
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u/Writing_is_Bleeding 10d ago
I went 10 years without health insurance (pre ACA), and I had a number of untreated problems. At the time I just assumed it was my fault somehow, and/or that I didn't deserve care. That notion of not deserving something like medical treatment is a by-product of the U.S. not guaranteeing access to every American. In the healthcare debate, we don't talk about that enough.
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u/TYNAMITE14 10d ago
The American dream was a scam. Just work harder and you will be rewarded. That's exactly the type of lie that benefits the rich. Ask yourself how its possible that america is the most productive its been in years yet everything is becoming more and more expensive....
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u/Chance_Zone_8150 10d ago
Boot strap metaphor...used on minorities to make them feel like it's their fault...I swear once it happens to others that's when people notice
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u/tommy6860 8d ago
The article makes totally objective points except for the one idea that is prevalent throughout it, that the system is broken. Folks, it is not broken, it operating just as the wealthy, corporations and the politicians o make the laws being funded by the aforementioned, want it to function. That whole function has been going on for centuries, and it is not like capitalism was once a great economic system for everyone that was never exploitative and oppressive at one time and then somehow became broken. It is working as the sole purpose of capitalism to function, that profits come before any other consideration.
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u/Phantasmagorickal 4d ago
I'm just happy everyone else is seeing what African Americans particularly have been saying forever now. Y'all late but it's better late than never.
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u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 11d ago
There’s a great book called “unlearning shame” that discusses this in depth. It starts with an anecdote about the invention of automobiles without roads or drivers licenses - When the auto industry eventually was held accountable in court for all of the pedestrians, who were dying as a result, the industry put the blame on the pedestrians by inventing the term “jaywalking”. It worked!
ETA- author is Dr. Devon Price