Yeah, sure, let's talk about the Epstein files for a second.
I don't care about the details in them - every new "revelation" is just validation of something I've always instinctively understood: The only people who want power are sociopaths; therefore the only people who attain power are sociopaths.
Rather than engage with the files or the people in them or even directly with the acts both described and assumed, let's engage with the mentality behind it all.
Every individual who interacted with this man after 2008 knew, without question, that he was a pedophilic sex trafficker. All of these powerful and famous people claiming ignorance are lying.
I doubt they all participated in the alleged crimes - I'm fully willing to believe many of them were glad to just be on the periphery.
Because the alleged crimes did attract a lot of powerful people, many of whom did participate in them. And the rest of the folks looked the other way even as those crimes were happening in order to gain more proximity to power in order to achieve more power for themselves.
They knew these people were committing horrific, inhumane crimes, but they were making tons of money which they were glad to spend on "smart" people in order to launder their reputations. And those "smart" people - who need that money to do their research, whether it benefits humanity and society or not - were willing to hold their nose and schmooze with known pedophiles, rapists, and murderers in order to get that funding.
They traded basic humanity for money and power. How is that anything other than sociopathic?
It's the same decision most of us make every day when we go to our jobs.
Like Zombies, Sociopaths Turn Others Into Socipaths
We know the people who own the companies we work for are bad people. They do less work than us, but command the majority of the proceeds. They control and own every aspect of our lives. They are constantly trading our convinence, comfort, and stability for their personal gain.
And, yet, we stay in their orbit. We keep working for them. We tell ourselves that we're not the sociopaths - we're good, decent people! The work we do can't be bad because we're the ones doing it. And, if the folks above us are doing terrible things... well, we don't really see or need to engage with that on a daily basis.
And, besides, we have mortages and rents and child care, and schooling, and educational loans, and healthcare, and grocery bills, and utilities, and a whole raft of other things we need to pay for - we need to work for these people, or we'll be poor, starving, and diseased.
But who are we actually paying for all those things?
The folks who own the company you work for also have holdings in many of these other industries. The cash they take from your labor they put into investments in health insurance companies, real estate investment trusts that own rentals, financial insitutions that own mortgages, farm land that produces food, etc.
If you have money in your 401k, you're likely invested in many similar companies, but the amount you have invested - while it may seem a lot to you - is a rounding error compared to the control and influence they have in these companies.
So it becomes a situation where we work for them and the small amounts of money we can extract for our labor go directly back to them in the form of all the necessities we need in order to survive.
They call this "earning a living".
But it's no more than indentured servitude.
We're so caught up in the bullshit they keep dumping on us that we never have a monent to stop and really consider whether any of what we're doing is even worth the effort.
Our Conditioning Makes Us Compliant - And Miserable
This is especially true when we're young. Midlife is giving me a tremendous amount of perspective on things. I spent the majorty of my life acting against the voices in my head telling me all of this was insane, but I never met anyone who I felt could be taken seriously who argued against it.
Of course, the reason I didn't think I could take them seriously is because the louder, moneyed voices told me I couldn't.
Who are you going to trust: The dirty hippy who eschews money, but is mysteriously more happy and free than anyone else I've ever met? Or the rigid, determined, aggressive assholes who seem to be able to afford and do anything telling me I need to knuckle down and sell my life to them, otherwise I'll live in squalor and let my poor struggling mother down.
The happy hippies were not the people I saw on TV. They weren't in my books or movies. They were called "burnouts" and "dropouts" and "naive" by almost everyone in my orbit. I was told in no uncertain terms that not doing well in school, not going to college, not getting as good a job as I can working for someone else would guarantee me a life of struggle and instability while also dishonoring my mother's sacrifices.
And, here I am, staring down year 51, and I'm more unstable, more burned out, more anxious, less free, and struggling harder than I ever have throughout my life.
And I'm not alone.
I don't know a soul that's not been battered, I don't have a friend who feels at ease. I don't know a dream that's not been shattered and driven to its knees. Those are lines from "American Tune" by Paul Simon - published two years before my birth - and they echo endlessly in my brain as an eternal flame of truth.
I don't know anyone who is truly happy. I know no one who is stable. One bad illness, a job loss, the invasion of an authoritarian government - any one of countless things can knock just about everyone I know off the razor's edge they are desperately clinging to.
And, yet, we still answer to these sociopaths who create and support and enshitten this environment in pursuit of their own power and control over every aspect of our lives.
Why Do We Answer to Pedophiles, Rapists, and Murderers?
This is not about politics or even society - it's about basic humanity, and the fact that the people claiming to be in charge care nothing for it.
They already steal from you - there is no logical reason why a CEO should make more money than a person actually designing, building, testing, delivering, marketing, selling, maintaining, or supporting the products and services their company produces. There's even less reason to pay investors who have no direct contact with the business.
Sexual assault in the office is absolutely rampant. The victims rarely get to talk about it - they are cowed and threatened to keep quiet. It's rarely a secret among the executives - it only becomes an issue if the perpetrator becomes indiscreet, or the victims push past their fears to fight back. Even then, it's often compartmentalized and buried - you'll never hear about it unless some other sociopath thinks bringing it to the open will benefit them. Then, and only then, will you get your #MeToo movements - when the rich and powerful choose to highlight them because they think they may be able to benefit from the controversy, so long as they are not named as perpetrators.
Murder is just a course of business. Factories around the world have installed anti-suicide devices because so many workers were throwing themselves out of windows. They deny us access to effective and affordable healthcare, killing millions each year. They gleefully poison our air, water, and land with the byproducts of their wasteful manufacturing processes, destroying entire communities and shortening life spans. They will suck every minute of your life that they can and pay you as little as possible and care not a whit when your body finally gives out. You're "family" until they no longer find you useful, then you're nothing.
Why do we let these people do this? Why do adhere to their unbelievably corrupt worldviews? Why do we let them run rampant over our freedoms, our health, our communities - everything that makes living worthwhile?
Fear and Habit.
If we don't do what they say, they may no longer allow us to work for them. If we can't find work, we can't afford to live. Because they own every aspect of living and gatekeep it all with money, a completely unnatural, man-made concept whose only purpose is to put the control of everything and everyone in the hands of a few. Money is not democratic, the free market is a myth, and everyone inherently understands that, but still clings to it out of fear and habit.
The alternative to all of this is to regain ownership over our labor, our lives, and our communities.
We do this by turning away from these perverts and turning toward each other.
We are, after all, the ones who actually create the world we live in. There's no need for us to take direction from a bunch of out of touch, inhuman, sociopathic perverts.
The best thing we could do right now is walk out of the system. We desperately need a genuine General Strike in this country - not limited by region or time period, but universal and permanent.
We make it permanent by refusing to work for these assholes and working, instead, for and with each other - the people who matter to us most in the communities in which we choose to belong.
THAT'S true freedom, and we only win it by taking the initiative and casting off our dependency on people with serious mental health problems.
Stop Working For Them: Start Working For Each Other
Don't form unions - unions validate and reinforce these power structures. Unionists are just socipaths pretending to care about labor.
If they really cared about labor, they would demand workers have full equal ownership of their work and the companies they work for.
Radical cooperatives, equally owned and run by the people who work for them, are the only ethical and reasonable solution. In a cooperative, if the majority of people feel a change must be made, they have a mechanism by which they can discuss, vote, and make those changes if needed. In our current system, we're lucky if we get to even bring our grievances to someone who will listen.
There can be no freedom or liberty in a system that requires one group of people to be answerable to another. In our own communities, we are answerable to each other; in the sociopathic society we live in, the majority of us are answerable to a tiny minority, under constant threat of physical harm and incarceration.
It's been 250 years since this country had a revolution. We are long overdue.
But, this time, we don't need to raise an army. We don't need to go big.
We just need to turn away from the sociopaths and toward each other, toward the people who matter to us most - our families, our friends, our neighbors, the people we interact with and engage with each day.
It's literally that simple.
Stop working for them, start working for each other. You probably won't even need to learn any new skills - you already know how to do your job far, far better than the people who claim ownership over your work.
So why are you letting them control you?
I thought you were a proud American?