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
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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.
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
Well said.
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.
"Life is fair" is magical thinking.
Was listening to a podcast this morning discussing BlueAnon and why people believe in conspiracy theories so readily. There was a quote discussing actively believing or non-believing being so much more attractive than basic disbelief. The activity makes us feel like we have some power or control over a situation instead of it just being an immutable way things are.
There was a decent bit of sympathy for the conspiracy believers, because many of them just are grasping for some shred of hope, as unbelievable as it may be. If our choices got us into our bad situation, surely if we make better choices, we can get ourselves out. If we think 99% of us are systematically entrapped in an oppressive system led by the most powerful, where is our hope?
The article was not as hopeless as I expected, which is a little reassuring. It was just slightly over half saying homelessness is an individualistic issue, while 40+% said it's systematic, so we're not too far off the deep end. The victim blaming leans hard conservative, as you probably suspect already.
Seeing the homeless can be bothersome to people for a variety of reasons, but I'd have to think if you're also part of the same group that leans against removing those social safety nets while also being in the same group that limits workers protections and preventing us from having healthcare provided to us as a human right, there's some self-aware part of the subconcious that knows they're one misstep, accident, or medical event from them being there, and seeing these people can be a painful reminder that those face-eating leopards are out there waiting.
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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!
In their defense lots of those teachers grew up in a society where graduating high school could get you a middle class family and factory job.
I can understand why teachers use that convenient lie, because the truth is far more nuanced.
In reality, we should value education because it has intrinsic benefits that exist regardless of whether that education leads directly to your financial success in life or not.
The truth is, education simply makes you a better person. It makes you more personally capable, and therefore less dependant on others. It makes you less easy to decieve, and therefore less easy to manipulate and control. It improves your ability to tell truth from lies and fact from fiction. It gives you a foundation to recognise your rights and stand up for yourself and reject abuse.
It does so much that is not about getting rich.
But try telling a room of 11-year olds "Work hard at school because your education is intrinsically valuable in a way that won't be meaningful or tangible to you until much later in life, y'all"
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.
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
I mean, why didn't they just try to not be poor?
They should take their frustrations out on the people who put them there.
I keep saying, we should be encouraging incels to pivot from elementary schools to country clubs.
The world would be a better place.
Well, if it can happen to anybody then it can happen to them, and that's scary.
But if you can blame choices, then they just never make that choice and live safely in their judgemental bubbles, because it'll never happen to them.
This thinking also "protects" from a multitude of other terrible (potential) life events.
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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.
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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.
Silly, all you need to do is set up a shell company in the Caymans to hide all your assets!
(/s if it wasn't obvious)
70% of Americans still believe angels exist, so yeah... We've got a long fucking way to go.
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".
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.
Add in the fact that most welfare literally requires you to remain under a poverty threshold to continue receiving those meager benefits and you get the results we have. If you are disabled and receive disability payments you cannot work or you lose your coverage. There is an income cap of something insane like $1000/month for disability recipients. Its a deliberately evil system that forces families to divorce their sick spouse simply to allow them the access to insurance benefits they otherwise would be disqualified from.
How can anyone honestly recover from that? You make $1 more this month and the half of your income that paid for food and rent is gone, now youre worse off than someone on welfare just because you "arent poor enough." Its like the exact myth they tell about tax brackets only it actually exists and happens to people in real life all the fucking time.
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.
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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
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I would be surprised if the percentage was much lower in any country experiencing a surge of the far right currently
The only reason they can gain any ground is there's a large contingent of people who have been conned into blaming others for what's actually caused by the failings of the economic structures built around them
They have to, it's the only way they can justify the system they love so much. If poverty is a systemic failure, then they might have to change something, but if poverty is a personal choice, all's fair.
The ignorance of opulence
No wonder their politicians are shit.
Most adults can't read at a high school level (usa.) World full of idiots.
"Until it happens to them"
I do volunteer work for homeless outreaches and yeah I'm totally sure the women who are homeless right now due to escaping domestic abuse it was totally an "individual choice" to get their faces beat in on a daily basis. The kids who are homeless because their parents abandoned them for being LGBTQ+ - totally an individual choice on their part. The military vets who are homeless because their country ditched to the curb, yup that's an individual choice because they decided to serve their country and then their country said "get lost". The ones who end up on the streets because they couldn't get treatment or help for their mental illness. Why that was an individual choice to go mentally ill in the first place! The Elderly who can no longer afford to pay the constantly increasing rents on whatever fixed income they have, totally an individual choice to not some how make more money at the age of 80+.
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So most us adults are idiots. Checks out.
And cherry on top: guess I am safe to say they are so very not alone
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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 think that from my personal observations, a lot of women tend to want to be with wealthy men.
The reasoning for this is pretty simple: A lot of people try to improve their situation of living. This includes having access to more resources, and so it's quite natural for women to want to be with wealthy men.
I have also heard the following neat explanation: People (when grown up) tend to desire things that they had too little of when they were young. So, people who have been born in povery might desire money when they grow up, while people who have had a lack of affection from their parents or social context might desire intimacy and such. In this context, i think that desiring money is especially widespread today because so many people grow up with a constant shortage of money. In other words, if people didn't grow up with a shortage of money, they wouldn't desire it so much later in life, and rather seek out for other things in life.
I don't know whether this answers your question at all.
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That's about as dumb as you get right there. It's not even tricky to see that's wrong.
The proliferation of Randian Objectivism as a personal belief system has damned society.
I would say it's a lack of universal basic income
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