My understanding of what is going on is that they’re suffering from the same precarity (food, rent, housing, work, family, etc. all in a state of precarity) that the rest of us are, but rather they don’t challenge their own values. The don’t challenge the traditions or the decades of pro-capitalist, pro-nationalist, anti-communist propaganda they’ve been spoon fed. Instead, it’s much it’s easier to blame those in the society they already don’t like because they’re creepy or weird. (And it occurs to me, this may be instincts – called or related to Fixed Action Patterns – from migratory tribes to combat infectious disease. When things feel wrong, you shun or stay away from the members that are looking zombiesque.)

And the ownership class is fueling its propaganda engine (financing it directly, often) to continue to feed them hate rhetoric, the notion that their fellow citizens (or immigrants) are the enemy within causing them grief, and not the deep abuses of the ownership class.

This mythology runs deep, it’s why all our stories point to ramblers, gamblers, adulterers and thieves as sinners and criminals, rather than war profiteers, pharmaceutical companies and tobacco moguls pushing their respective addiction epidemics, or fossil-fuel billionaires pushing an automotive culture while burying data about the climate crisis. Even though all of the former category cause only a tiny fraction of the death, destruction and economic cost that the latter category does.

If we investigated and prosecuted white collar criminals and set all serial killers and bank robbers free, we’d have a lot more people living and a lot more money. And so decades of copaganda have absolutely figured into redirecting that outrage towards the marginalized.

And yes, the ownership class would rather see human extinction than give up their money and power. So I don’t know how we’re going to navigate through this great filter.