Chattel slavery was abolished in the US in 1865.  This might sound long ago but has significant influence on current American society.  When early socialists presented the idea of conflicting goals chattel slavery was still widespread.  Most American slave-owners could not grasp the people working for them even having a different point of view.  Their position of absolute power over loads of others had prevented them from learning this.  As such a considerable number of the rich and powerful refused to accept the idea of conflicting goals.  These slave plantation owners lost their wealth at the abolishment of slavery.  Yet within 20 years they had regained it due to their contacts.  The influence of such individuals might explain legal opposition to labour unions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Former slave-owners denying the problems and lack of strong labour unions had a significant effect on American employment laws.  Systems for keeping employers responsible for the situation of their employees become insufficient.  This worked as long as there was a shortage of manpower.  However, when the baby-boomers started to enter the workforce, this was no longer the case.  Then the first oil crisis caused a recession which made the profits of employers drop.  A lot of them fired employees and acquired new ones on considerably worse conditions.  No-one prevented them from doing so.

The growth of American GDP in the last 50 years has not benefited the majority of the population.  Instead, it has been largely gulped up by CEOs and their boards of directors.  A disproportional part of the county’s economic resources is now owned by a tiny group of super-rich.  I don’t think that many of them have any idea of what life is like for their employees.  Most jobs have had no increase in wage or salary in the past 50 years.  Some have even had a decrease compared to inflation resulting in lowered standard of living.

Once upon a time it might have been possible to get out of poverty by working yourself ill.  Now, people in the US are working themselves ill and are still dependant on welfare to make ends meet.  The only legal way they could avoid this would be having them work themselves to a premature death.  When such a person then dies from overwork his or her family would be even worse off.  With such prospects I would not blame them for prioritising sleep over money.

One of the things making this situation worse is poor education.  A lot of Americans have never learned how their own society works.  At least not in anything more than idealised form which no society has ever attended.  Such a person is likely unaware of the better solutions developed by other societies.  Add someone never having come into immediate contact or read about the problems of American society.  He or she would assume his or her society to already live up to ideals which can’t be attained in practice.

The same defiance in education also leaves the chronically poor without a proper explanation of their situation.  All they have are religious doctrines and distant rumours.  The former tells “there is an intention behind everything”.  The later have resulted in conflicting goals being corrupted into a belief that “the others” benefit from everything harming “one’s own” group.  Such people would likely believe other groups to deliberately destroy for them.

A statistically significant part of the American population now believes entire groups in society to be out to get them.  Most members of such groups see no reason to harm the ones believing this.  Yet they are supposed to benefit from whatever harms the group the believer in this myth identifies with.  This is not how conflicting goals work!  One-sided exploitation – such as chattel slavery or wage slavery – is one thing.  But if one harms the exploited to the point of making them less exploitable one indirectly harms oneself.

Uploaded on the 24th of September 2023 .