New poll results show 53 percent of those surveyed couldn’t recall struggling harder to make ends meet
A majority of Americans now say the cost of living is the worst they can remember — and most of them blame President Donald Trump for their predicament.
Poll results published Friday by Politico showed 53 percent of those surveyed couldn’t recall struggling harder to make ends meet, up from 46 percent in November.
The poll by Public First also found 46 percent felt Trump was fully or mostly responsible for the state of the economy, unchanged from six months ago.
I don’t mean to single you out because this is a common reaction but holy fuck am I tired of seeing it. Experiences are not universal. What is obvious to you may be completely invisible to millions of people through no fault of their own, and they need to be told. Again and again, until it sinks in. Until they learn it, they won’t be able understand the scale, nature, or origins of the problems they and their fellow humans face.
American Republican culture relentlessly reinforces the idea that personal struggles are personal, shameful problems; that most people are stable and well-off, and if they aren’t it’s because of laziness, addiction, gayness, or some other moral failing. So, everyone hides their suffering from their peers, all the time. They don’t know how other people are really doing because the entire cultural and informational ecosystem is built to suppress and obfuscate the prevalence of suffering. If you are in that ecosystem, it’s really hard to see outside of it. Articles like this are the first step in the pipeline out, and they need to be as obvious as they need to be. They need to exist, and they need to be perpetually written and re-written as long as the problem exists, no matter how obvious the problem may seem to someone on the outside.
Sorry for shouting.
No that is 1,000,000% their fault if they don’t know.
No, not in all cases. There are two types of people in a cult: the people who make money, and the people who don’t. The former are truly ghastly people who largely do know better, so they’re not actually ignorant. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the latter type of cultist: the marks. They are the targets of a massive, concerted information attack designed to make them trust the cult and distrust anyone outside of the cult. They get hit with it from birth, and it molds them into a uniformly manipulable population and it is really really hard to see outside of it when you’re in it. It really is all-encompassing and grand-scale in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it.
And it’s very, very important to distinguish between the people who are willfully blind (the money-makers) and those who are blind by design (the marks). As someone who was born and raised a mark, I have seen the difference and I have seen how failing to see the difference actually reinforces the groupthink of the cult. I think if we want to defeat the cult we need to see them clearly, and part of that is understanding why marks behave the way they do. It’s not because they’re evil and it’s not because they’re stupid. Those are thought-terminating cliches.
No offense, but if you can’t see gas skyrocketing, rents, healthcare, mortgages, insurance, eggs, meat, electronics, you name it, skyrocketing - people avoiding groceries because they can’t afford them, then YOU ARE FUCKING BLIND.
I’m not singling you out, I just wholeheartedly disagree with your take, and anyone else holding it.
Many of the same people that would try to disagree with the fact that COL Is skyrocketing we’re fucking blowing our ears out when Biden was president. Everything keeps going up - including our national debt and the hatred people have for Americans. Hence the “no shit Sherlock” comment
How did they get blind though? It seems like a foregone conclusion that everyone in the MAGA cult is just naturally stupid and willfully ignorant, and they aren’t. They are stupid by design and ignorant by design, and the cult weaponizes that judgement in service of keeping cultists from forming connections with people outside the cult. “The Democrats think we’re all dumb hicks when we’re just everyday folk trying to get by, can’t we all agree that they’re wrong and also probably lying about us to serve their own nefarious ends?” This question gets asked in a million variations on a 24-hour propaganda firehose and the obvious conclusion is “Yeah, they are wrong. They probably are lying too!” I have seen this play out in my life and once it’s been trained into a person it is extremely durable against outside influence. I see it in my family, a lot of them are deep in the MAGA verse. They aren’t dumb, some of them are genuinely brilliant, but they are in a cult that prevents them, by design, from seeing outside the bubble.
TW: discussion of suicide
spoiler
I got out via a series of lucky breaks, and if those hadn’t gone my way, I don’t know if I would have been able to pull myself out. A lot of the people who feel the effects of the problems of the system, but are rendered blind to the true nature of them (and are therefore unable to effectively address them), kill themselves. It happens a lot and discussion of it is culturally suppressed. It’s seen as shameful. So it becomes another epidemic problem that goes undiscussed and unaddressed. I probably would have been one of the statistics if a few things in my life had gone a little bit differently. It was a relatively near miss as it is. Suicide happens for a lot of reasons, but in my experience, one of the big reasons for suicides among poor people is that they have intolerable problems and they can’t see any way to address them. They can’t see it by design. The system is designed to prevent certain things from being seen clearly, and it works.
My best friend is a Republican whose wife is a hardcore MAGA supporter. He’s incredibly intelligent, she is the opposite. They are both willfully ignorant. Simple as that. He ignores the news not on fox like an ostrich with his head in the sand. It’s not because he’s stupid - it’s because it would force him to admit he’s wrong. That’s really hard for people in general. However the facts are still the facts. That’s where the sides diverge quickly.
Is the cost of living going up? It’s a simple question with a simple answer that takes less than two minutes to research, if the things I pointed out aren’t immediately evident. They are willing to avoid the truth when it’s not convenient for their narrative - that’s literally their entire schtick.
What I’m saying is, it’s not as simple as them being willfully ignorant. The Republicans in my life (all poor) have been trained from birth to distrust any information not endorsed by an approved Republican news source. They are trained from birth to understand that anyone who isn’t an Upstanding Christian™ is inherently suspect and and dissonance between what they say and what an Upstanding Christian™ would say is proof that they are ignorant or lying or both. The ecosystem establishes itself as the sole arbiter of truth. That’s why they resist outside viewpoints, they’ve been programmed. And they have to be deprogrammed.
I went to the same church as my best friend from birth. He was just as poor as I was. Both of our families were poor and surrounded by religious influence. We were taught in the church (a Southern Baptist church at that) to love one another, treat others with kindness, not to cheat, steal, covet, kill, and not to take advantage of others, in addition to many other good things.
My friend wasn’t into politics as a kid and neither was I. His wife is an immigrant from a Slavic country. She didn’t know about politics in the US until she got here. At some point our paths diverged politically. My eyes have always been open to the truth, I seek out facts and don’t rely on one source - I’m naturally distrustful of anything that’s not based in fact.
Our scenarios (you and I) seem very different. My friend and his wife are truly willfully ignorant. For all intents and purposes, by your logic I should be as well. But neither my friend or I were programmed at birth, he’s just lazy and doesn’t care. His circle of friends in his state are his comfortable echo chamber.
Anyone who believes the Republican party is made up of actual upstanding Christians are either ignorant or willfully so, just like my friend. You can’t truly support Jesus and support a rapist conman at the same time - they are diametrically opposed. Just like they overlook the rape, grift, hate, revenge, vote R and continue going to Sunday school, that’s willful ignorance. I don’t believe in the church itself anymore, although I still believe in God, Jesus, and his teachings.
Also, I never made this about politics to start with, you did. I appreciate you discussing this with me though and I don’t harbor ill will towards you, but I don’t agree with your take on it. Are some people programmed? Sure, I suppose. But they’re willfully remaining there in my opinion, no one is forcing their rigidity, that’s the choice they make.
Anyone, regardless of political background, should be able to easily identify the cost of living being worse under this administration, or they’re ignorant or willfully so. The signs are clearly there, plain as day, everywhere you look. I’ll die on that hill.
Edit - I just read your spoiler. For what it’s worth, I’m glad you chose life. I’m sorry you had to go through that.