They have to believe it is a choice. If not, they are equally at risk of losing everything and becoming homeless and that terrifies most people. Picard's "you can do everything right and still fail" is not something most people want to know. No one wants to be impoverished, homeless, sick, mentally unwell. Instead they find it comforting to believe that this is happening to others simply because that person made the wrong choice. The same happens for success. The one who make it would have everyone believe that if they made the exact same choices, they too would be rich and that opportunity, chance, luck have nothing to do with it.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
369 points (98.2% liked)
News
32087 readers
3789 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I seriously think this is the reason why everyone got so mean post-Covid. They realized it can always get worse; there is no rock bottom. Everyone was forced to accept that things can always suck WAY more tomorrow than they do today, and they/we can’t handle knowing that.
It broke a social contract.
Alternatively everyone realized it could be a lot better.
Way too many chucklefucks sat at home collecting pay "working" remotely for almost 0 hours per day
Those people got to bake bread, go outside, learn to be themselves, be happy.
Then despite hitting every goal for their department/whatever - they were told to come back in.
Post COVID is an attempt return to normal. Except it's not even normal. It is worse in every quantifiable way. Everyone is more stressed out. Money is tighter.
Nobody is in a good mood when they are hungry, and tired
Also, many people simply don’t want to acknowledge the safety nets that they have had surrounding them. Ever moved back in with your parents after a breakup or because you couldn’t afford the rent? Ever got a lead on a job because you knew someone who already worked there?
People tend to think of safety nets as government handouts, but the reality is that the vast majority of safety nets are social. And some people don’t have strong social circles (like family or friends) to rely on.
Well said.
They feed us this shit in our media for decades, and then people conduct studies and find that the indoctrination is working.
Most of the modern media I consumed in my lifetime had this basic message behind it. Surprise, surprise, people believe the shit they read, view, and listen to even if the evidence isn't there to support it.
We also had teachers shoving it down our throats that working hard would lead to success.
They do more harm than good because most of them are too stupid to realize the forces at play. Major shoutout to the ones who do better!
The inescapable conclusion to draw from that is most people are fucking stupid.
Edit: from not form
It's the answer to most of the world's problems at this point.
70% of Americans still believe angels exist, so yeah... We've got a long fucking way to go.
This comes from the same mindset that states:
"If you don't like the interest rate on your credit card, just pay it off and close it"
"I am a self made man. I started with nothing, and had to take a small 10 million dollar loan from my father to get started"
"If your job doesn't pay you enough, then quit and get one that does"
People are sooooo out of touch with reality.
my favorite is "Just take risks, and success will find you"
Yeah, its real easy to take risks when you parents worth 45 hojillion dollars, who can throw a million bucks at every one of your dumb ideas until one sticks without even noticing as more than a rounding error.
For the average american, if they take a risk and fail, their life is utterly ruined forever.
I usually counter those arguments with “So how come you’re not a multimillionaire?” “How come you’re not (CEO, Foreman, successful business operator, position of leadership)?” “How come you didn’t buy your house with cash?” Etc.
It does not play a zero percent role but its 100% that societal choices keep them there. College dorms give students all the essentials. There is no reason all people could not have a right to an individual roomed dorm. Heck college dorms could get certified in the program reducing tuition.
College is a scam for most people engaging in it.
Paying for board is just another part of the scam.
Kewl, at least the globe knows only Americans think highly of themselves.
Most adults can't read at a high school level (usa.) World full of idiots.
Individual choices of the few keep the many in poverty needlessly, yes, indeed.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Americans really are ignoramuses.
Because we have all been thoroughly propagandized to believe this. I think a lot of people even feel this way about themselves-- a kind of internalized hatred of themselves for being poor. Purely coincidental that everything keeps getting more expensive relative to wages!
This reminds me of one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes.
Expand quote
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158414-america-is-the-wealthiest-nation-on-earth-but-its-people
Damn, that's a banger!
Love me some Vonnegut. I earnestly (albeit temporarily) convert to Bokononism every time I read Cat's Cradle.
That’s the cool part about following Bokonon. Buncha chill folks always happy to see you, no matter how long it has been.
👉🦶🦶-🦶🦶👈❓
The ignorance of opulence
Well, yeah, they've been indoctrinated for decades to think Money = Merit by those who want them to think that Rich People are only Wealthy because they're superior to the rest (which is a hilariously false idea given that almost the Wealthy come from Wealthy or at least Upper Middle Class families - they were born at or past the finish line in the race for success, not all the way back like the rest), and the other side of that exact same coin is the idea that it's the fault of the Poor for being poor.
Forget decades. Try millennia. Historically people didn't even think being wealthy came from working hard and good decisions... but that God willed it that you be rich.
Well yeah, for ages, literally the richest dude, be he king, emperor or great Khan or what the hell ever was "blessed by heaven and god and had the divine right".
The proliferation of Randian Objectivism as a personal belief system has damned society.
U.S. Corporate Capitalism is a cult. Adherents worship the Market as god and believe it is the sole arbitrator of wealth and worth. They believe that if you give your time, money, labor, and life to the Holy Market and follow it properly it will reward you with wealth and importance, but if you do wrong by it, it will punish you with poverty. If you are rich, you must be a good person who should be listened to and emulated. If you are poor, you must have done something wrong and need to do right by the Holy Market by giving it more of you time and labor. The poor must be lazy because if they worked properly the Holy Market would surely reward them.
Thus, welfare, which separates the poor from the consequence of their economic sins, is evil.
Stock brokers are the priests. They commune with the Holy Market on behalf of people in exchange for a tithe (commission.) Billionaires are the saints. They have been greatly blessed by the Holy Market and thus are the best of all people and should be followed and emulated. The U.S. Federal Reserve chair is the Pope and the rest of that board are the cardinals. They represent the Capitalist orthodoxy and are often at odds with the more radical believers.
Donald Trump... is the messiah. The faithful believe he is here to bring in a second coming of U.S. financial greatness. They bring him offerings of gold. He travels the world in a (soon to be golden) flying chariot, wielding vast financial powers in order to extract tribute from other nations.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This might have been true in 1960s, when wages were actually high and if you saved up, you could become a millionaire, but it's no longer true. The mindset is simply stuck in people because people are slow on updates and haven't recognized yet that there's practically no well-paying jobs on the labor market anymore, no matter what you do. The consequence is that you can't get rich if you're poor today, no matter what you do. No kind of saving is gonna do that.
The only way forward is a better social system, and i did some maths the last few weeks and figured out that it's surprisingly doable economically on a macroeconomic level, i.e. if the US introduced a wealth tax and a universal basic income today, it would NOT really hurt the US' long-term competitiveness on the global free market, and import tariffs aren't even needed to sustain the US companies' competitiveness.
This is fascinating because you would kinda expect that if you tax the rich, they would try to make up for it by bigger profits on their products and it would simply lead to inflation. This is partially true, but only partially, because the tax only applies if the company is owned by rich people, and not if it's owned by a large number of normal people. So, companies owned by a large number of normal people have a competitive advantage because they don't need to profit as much to make up for the wealth tax, so they have an easier time in the domestic market.
But even better than that, domestic companies don't even suffer in international competition. Because at first, yes, prices would rise and there would be inflation, but that makes the dollar cheaper (in other words, a bit more worthless), and that makes manufacturing inside the US cheaper, because the wages are cheaper in international competition, because the dollar is cheaper. So it stimulates manufacturing and exports, keeping the import/export business in balance.
How do we refer to the w*men that support this cult by gravitating towards the wealthiest men?
I would argue that money is actually pretty useless, the true value in a economy is time - the time to spend on family and friends, the time to create new ideas, the time to learn, and the time to support society. Capitalism forces people to hyperfixate on money in order to survive, which inherently limits what a person can do to better themselves and the world around them.
It encapsulates the existence of an individual into a fishbowl, forever unable to do more than simply exist in place.
You make some perfectly valid points, the only thing I take issue with is
Money is actually pretty useless
So, I do historical reenactment and one of my focuses is the history of money. Money has been in use, in some form or another, all over the world, for about ten thousand years. Roughly twice as long as written language.
Again, I agree with what you're saying about time and how important it is. But go back to when humans had huge swaths of free time and you still find money. It's just INSANELY useful.
I think that money money represents effort, knowledge, and time - problem is, the wealthy don't appreciate what goes into the money that they hoover up from society. Through locking away too much money from society, the wealthy have essentially robbed the meaning from money. By drying up the fiscal river, the rich have destroyed the possibility of life flourishing within its banks.
I guess that I don't disagree with your correction, so much as that I believe that the worth of American money has been corroded towards the breaking point.
Every time I see this I wonder what happened.
In a nutshell, the Fed dropped the gold standard. Once money didn't need to be backed by gold there was no incentive to keep its value relative to the market. If an ounce of gold bought say... a ton of steel (it's worth a bit more than that, but let's go with it), then the equivalent amount of dollars would also be worth that same ton of steel, regardless of other market pressures. Nixon unpinned the value of the dollar from the value of gold in 1971 instead allowing it to have market value relative to, well, whatever. The value of the USD immediately plummeted and never recovered.
Gold isn't any particularly good thing to base your currency on and the value of the dollar vs an ounce of gold reduced over the decades, but unpinning it completely but still keeping the fractional reserve system of finance doomed the country to endless inflation and national debt. All of a sudden the Federal Reserve banks didn't have to store tons and tons of gold to back the dollar, and they became free to lend the US government as much money as it asked for. Because the United States Treasury may print the money, but we borrow it from the Federal Reserve with interest. That's nothing new, but at least pinning the value to gold limited how much we could borrow.
OK that was a lot more than I meant to say but I hope it makes sense. Once all that money flooded the market, the capitalists were allowed to go crazy and milk the nation and the proletariat for all we're worth. That and now the United States Dollar is just yet another open market commodity. Buy low, sell high. bleed the value in the process.
That's about as dumb as you get right there. It's not even tricky to see that's wrong.
you're telling me that people are so wrong it's anti-social in the nazi country where people think guns stop bullets???
Problem is the choices are often choices made before you're even an adult. Even more difficult for those from unstable households and those that were refugees. Children that have to take care of their parents or siblings.
The there's how the right choice one decade cane be the bad choice the next. So you commit to work on like bioengineering or medical research, spend a very long time in school to get there, and it goes to shit once you hit the workforce. When you were a kid accountants were in high demand so so many went into it and then the finance department went from 200 people to 10 because of software improvements. Computer related and law degrees today. Trades as well where you can find work, but there's so many that you don't necessarily make a great wage hourly especially adjusted for benefits
So if everyone made the right decision individually based on the data current to them or what the data says to go for in 5 years when they could complete school/training, whatever it is will have so many people that the field is saturated and something else is the short staffed high paying career. So the correct decision is a moving target. Communal correct decision would be a strong social safety net
Individual bad decision is almost always deciding work has to be a passion. The 8+ hours at work has to be a part of your joy. Most people don't get that. Those that accept that making good money may mean doing a job they don't like have a better shot at financial stability. Not guaranteed, just a better shot
load more comments
(1 replies)
Individual choices, like being born poor, not being able to afford higher education, or worse, having any long term illnesses! They made their bed they can lay in it
/s I guess
load more comments
(6 replies)
My family's income rose by about 300 dollars per month a few months ago. We immediately lost about 250 dollars per month in rental assistance and SNAP benefits. But it's totally individual choices that keep us in poverty. If we just budgeted better we cou- Wait. No, scratch that. We also get in trouble for having too much money in savings and assets. We'd actually lose all our benefits before we managed to save up any appreciable amount of money.
load more comments
(1 replies)
No wonder their politicians are shit.
About 6 in 10 Americans say personal choices are a “major factor” in why people remain in poverty, while just under half say unfair systems are a major factor and about 4 in 10 blame lack of government support.
I think a lot of people in the comments are acting as if there is only one cause, and individual choices cannot be it because it doesn't account for everything. Admittedly, the headline does frame it as if people believe it is the sole cause, rather than just the most popular. Personally, I would say both personal choices and unfair systems are major factors.
For lack of Government support, I am not sure how I would answer. The government actually does spend a lot on assistance for the poor relative to other countries, but I believe it is not done so efficiently to lift people out of poverty. It is very reactive and focuses on treating symptoms of core issues, so you end up with a lot of people in a constant state of being just barely able to keep their head above the water. It's largely half measures that end up with worse outcomes and being more expensive in the long run than proper investment into making things better would be.
The thing goes even further back than that:
- The poorer you are born the more choices are bad choices for you because you either can't afford them or if they fail can't recover from them and the whole system is far more likely to punish you for it.
If you're a scion of the rich you can chose to be a totally fucked up Nazi-loving ketamine user and still be wildly successful by this society's metrics, but try, say, going into the Arts as the child of working class parents with zero connections in that environment and see how well that turns out.
Having genuine Options without massive risks of horrible outcomes is only for rich people.
And this is without going into the whole Mental Health domain and how people who live a life of strife are for more likely than the rest to tend to seek to escape if only for a short while by taking stuff they shouldn't really be taking.
load more comments
(6 replies)
view more: next ›