Never Mind Trump, It’s Time for Citizens to Exit The System

And no one famous is going to help you.

You know, asking your social media buddies if this or that celebrity or rock star is “on our side” is the wrong question. Now that the system is this hopelessly broken, the right question is “Would that celebrity be happy if the ‘glorious worker/social-justice/whatever revolution’ happened and they were suddenly plunged into the same socioeconomic class as mine?”

You know they wouldn’t. And that means that nearly all celebrities (except for maybe Susan Sarandon and a handful of others) aren’t actually going to help your cause. Why? Because they don’t care. As I wrote in my last book [the footnotes are removed], “For years, scientists have known that social class directly influences how deeply one cares about the well-being of others. It boils down to how free and independent we feel, as one study found: The less we rely on others for help to survive, the less we care about what others are going through. The scale of selfishness (and greed) peaks at the billionaire class, of course, a group thickly populated by people possessed of disturbed personalities that psychologists have described as a ‘dark triad of dysfunction’ combining elements of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.”

Y’all. I’m way past the point where I can take anyone or anything in the current sociopolitical context seriously, especially some wealthy movie star who’d never ever risk losing their studio contract by tweeting a single syllable about the general strike UAW president Shawn Fain has proposed for 2028 (lol, if we live that long). Celebrities know we’re not ever going to have a “violent worker revolution” because the 400 people who own this entire country simply won’t have it. They own the military, the drones, the media and everything else.

Plenty of U.S. citizens are doing better than the people who are in the broke and terrified economic majority, so they’re happy with the system the way it is. That spells stalemate, which means that basically, there’s no “right way” for us as citizens anymore. If you’re doing okay, sure, you’ll yell about Trump or Chuck Schumer or Luigi or Elmo or Taylor Swift on social media, but you don’t really want any of the structural change that the “enlightened” corps of the majority wants. And that goes double for celebrities.

What “enlightened” citizens who are feeling economically abused should be doing is giving up and exiting the system. Throw in with some friends to start a co-op business and/or buy some land and build an affordable housing community. Economically, through greedflation and destroying the New Deal’s safety net and whatnot, the capitalists have literally nuked us back to the Stone Age, so just do it: If your life hopelessly sucks, find your peeps and start organizing stuff. Celebrity/consumer culture inspires us to be “successful” self-centered individuals, not members of groups that leverage the economic power they get from their numbers.

The elite capitalists aren’t going to do anything for us, and neither are celebrities. Y’all need to start thinking about who your real friends are, meaning you need to find them. I’d suggest you start by getting to know they guy who lives across the street. Have you ever actually talked about anything other than the fact that the dude down the street whose yard looks kinda shitty is lowering your property’s value?

I’m saying we need to abandon consumer culture and celebrity culture and start our own thing, en masse, whatever works for you. The capitalists can have this dung-heap of a country for all I care. If you work for them instead of yourself, you don’t have any say in anything. Let the capitalists have this place and try to run it themselves. This place is totally friggin glassed, like they say. Just say no.

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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).