Sad But True - Unemployment Losses/ Food Stamp Cuts/ Most Americans Don't Care

[jtuck004]

13. How else do you explain 300 million people being taken advantage of by, at most, 12 million?

Anyone who wishes to can hear the sentiments echoed in the OP in any store in town, on thousands of web spaces, most everywhere, and it is reflected in our daily lives - how else could one explain what we allow to happen?

The reasons have been written over the years, though I like this one the most, because he doesn't just criticize, he offers a real workable solution, and leaves up to us how we implement it. Simply replace tyrant with Koch bros, Jamie Dimon, any of thousands of people who run private equity funds, oil companies that send our citizens off to die in lonely places for their profit, etc...

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Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows— to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.
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We could, of course, deliver ourselves from servitude any time we wish...but we would to realize that we are as dependent on our neighbors freedom and security as our own, which is the quality the OP sees as lacking.

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From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces...

From: "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" written by Etienne de la Boetie roughly around 1550, but it is no less insightful today.