clear spot

thanks for writing back. my beef with seeing the Terry Pratchett quote is a cumulative exasperation with onlookers who either demonize or glorify the manifestation of a sort of zeitgeist response to systematic oppression. people are labeled as thieves looting for their own self-interest… but the entire capitalist system is structured to encourage people to function on their own self-interest. they’ve been taught their whole lives, by example, that anyone with power will, and does, steal from them. Within a society that maintains such a message, the only way to contain people who have been constantly stolen from, is to corral them by fear. and when that tension of fear dissipates or is broken, a lot of pent up shit comes out. treat people worse than children, take away their agency, tell them they have no power, dominate them into submission, and fucked up shit will happen. It’s frustrating to hear “comfortable” onlookers (I think Terry Pratchett is doing just fine financially) say condescending or reductive statements about riots that are happening for legitimate psychological reasons, on a slightly more macro-level than what western countries are used to seeing. [add on: it’s depressing to see people, on an increasingly largescale level, taking out their frustration on their own neighbors, instead of strategically targeting the source of the injustice. But that is kind of…an old story I guess. Dominating authority does it’s thing, sucks out resources from impoverished people in order to feed its own belly, the people smell a rat, feel disempowered, and usually end up attacking each other, or attacking their wives and children in order to regain, temporarily, some blind sense of being empowered.]