• argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Systems exist because people willfully build and maintain them. Extreme wealth inequality is not the result of an accident. It is very much by design.

    • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      This is true, but also, the system is designed to make more people to make the system.

      Wealthy kids grow up extremely sheltered and disconnected from the reality of most every else, and while that leads them to being assholes and making horrible decisions and etc, it’s not entirely their fault they ended up like that given their upbringing.

      Schools also propagate terrible ideas, and distort history, etc, by design, but also the kids that grow up in those schools often end up parroting and reinforcing those ideas just because they don’t know any better.

      Personal politics, still, is statistically ties to your family’s politics and where you grew up. People can break out of that, sure, but it’s an extra step, and one that often is personally costly because it can break social and family ties.

      That obviously doesn’t mean people who were raised by asshole families and taught by assholes can’t be held accountable/responsible for then also behaving like an asshole, but they’re that way because of external factors, not because they were just born bad. The systems self-perpetuate through making more people who benefit from them and believe in their virtue, then those people raise more people to fit the system, and so on. Just taking down a few people at the top of a system doesn’t do anything to stop the machinery that will create and empower their replacements.

      The system has to be fixed at a system level, or else the system will just keep churning out assholes. This is true regardless of whether the system was designed out of malice or ignorance or pure chance or all three.