[mellow2020]

It's easy to explain -- just not to people whose salary whose salary depends on not understanding it, who keep shaking their heads as the predictable results of the boat they won't rock roll in.

> people want some understanding of what's happening, but they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government

[..]

> it's happening all over and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effect of neo-liberalism. It had a goal remember: the goal of neo-liberalism was to transfer decisions away from the public to the hands of private power and to atomize the population.

-- Noam Chomsky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCeqySVhCE&t=20m55s

> the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...