Ask Lemmy

The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture

I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"... then got old enough to see through the nonsense

Google. It was once a good search engine. Now I find myself getting only the most irrelevant results based on my keywords and more often than not an advanced search turns up nothing of value

The United States government and the United States citizens.

Growing up I was taught about all these checks and balances. How the government is slow and that's good because it makes sure people get what they really want. Come to find out in just one presidential term, this one guy just executes executive orders left and right and just gets things done.

I thought U.S citizens would vote in their best interests but they would glady vote for a facist who's against their best wishes.

Republicans. When I was a child, slogans like “fiscally responsible”, “family values”, “smaller government “ sounded like good things. Republicans always claimed the moral high ground. But they’ve spent my entire adult life proving it as manipulative bullshit for personal greed and power, holding themselves above the law, the worst in humanity, rising to our current flirt with fascism.

vaguely gesturing at everything

Grown ups.

America.

And my dad.

Elon. Turns out he was always a conman and liar.

Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.

Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.

Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn't throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.

For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you're out of luck.

Law. I was pretty hyped up when i went to university to study it, but the more i learnt on the foundations of it and discovered the people it created, the more i hated it. Now I'm doing completely different things, and i'm glad my parents didn't force me to keep doing it.

Capitalism.

This is something that bothers me. Every time something like this come up, there is a non-trivial crowd of people saying things like "no shit. In the right circle, everyone known for a long time". Often they come with specific anecdotes that should raise all the red flags.

Well, I had no idea. Not a clue. And it's not like I was not interested. I was fallowing his work, social media... live in general. He was a very close friend with a woman who was vocal about being an abuse victim. Nobody told her?

Even in the power of hindsight, when I was looking for articles or comments from the past, there was not a lot. I found like one, "there is nothing he wouldn't do to lure a goth girl" (paraphrased), that got zero traction.

If there were signs, why did we let that happen? What can I do, not to fall for something like this again?

I took to kindly, although I was not entirely onboard with, the idea of American exceptionalism.

Liberalism