A line of people waits that an arrogant banker finishes eating the planet. Adobe Stock photo.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Aug. 16, 2026
Reading by Tim Foley:
The capitalist empire blames all systemic problems on the individual.
The problem isn’t billionaire mega-corporations polluting the planet, it’s that you drive a car.
The problem isn’t that it’s getting harder and harder to afford to live as the ruling class extracts more and more value from labor, it’s that you’re not working hard enough and you’re making bad decisions.
Soaring police brutality isn’t a problem, the problem is that the guy in the current viral police brutality video didn’t obey orders correctly.
Israel’s not an irredeemably racist endeavor dependent on nonstop violence and apartheid, it’s just some naughty settlers and a few bad apples in the IDF.
We don’t live in a highly controlled oligarchy where both parties inflict war, ecocide, injustice and tyranny upon the rest of humanity on behalf of their wealthy donors, the problem is that you haven’t been voting for the correct candidates.
We don’t live under an evil empire that feeds on human blood, it only looks that way because some individuals in charge made some unwise foreign policy decisions at certain points in history.
The blame always lands on the individual, not the system, and you can recognize this as the cynical manipulation that it is because the blame only ever goes one way:
• The individual business executives whose decisions are destroying our ecosystem are never held to account.
• The individual government officials whose depraved foreign policy decisions destroy countless lives are never imprisoned for war crimes.
• The oligarchs who are reaping massive profits expanding the surveillance state and profiteering off war, tyranny and sickness are allowed to keep buying politicians and private islands without suffering any consequences.
Notice how “blame the individual” never applies in these cases. If you want these individuals to be treated like a problem, then you’re a radical. You’re an extremist. You need to be put on a terrorist watch list. You and your friends need to be monitored and infiltrated by federal police. When it comes to those who prop up and profit from the system, blaming the individual is strictly prohibited.
Jailing an impoverished man for periodically shoplifting to survive? That’s fine; he should have behaved himself. Jailing a billionaire for buying elections and poisoning our planet? That’s evil. Shame on you for even thinking that.
Jailing a worker for stealing from her employer? That’s as it should be; thieves should be punished. Jailing a wealthy business owner for stealing wages from thousands of employees? Get outta here, Stalin, that’s a civil case. They can have their paychecks when they’ve won their class action lawsuit.
Under the capitalist empire, we are taught that all we can do is make sure we’re not a part of the giant permanent underclass who must suffer and toil for meager wages while always one mistake away from destitution. It is taken as a given that the underclass must always exist, and that all we can do is make wise decisions as individuals to ensure that we’re not among the unfortunate riff raff our society is built on top of.
It’s like we’ve all been trapped in a crowded room by some psycho who is flooding the room with water, and he’s telling us over the loudspeaker “Now you’d better make sure you climb on top of the others, or you’ll drown!” In that scenario the psycho is clearly the problem, but we’ve been trained to see the individuals who can’t get their heads above water as the problem.
Whenever anyone goes online to complain about how hard it is to keep their bills paid or buy a house under the current system, they are swarmed by capitalism apologists telling them to work harder, spend less, and try to get a better job. Which is a lot like calling the fire department when a crowded building is burning and being told “Well I guess you’d better stay away from the flames then.” No matter how well I as an individual stay away from the flames, there are still people trapped in the burning building who need help. Making the conversation about my actions as an individual is just an excuse to avoid addressing the large-scale nature of the problem.
People consent to this nonsense because we’ve been indoctrinated into it our entire lives. Propaganda isn’t just there to get us to consent to wars, it’s there to get us buying into the entire system.
The pop music is about owning stuff and having a good time.
The TV shows are about people who are thriving so much under the current system that they have time and energy to get into hilarious hijinks.
The movies are about protagonists applying their willpower and working hard over musical montages to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals as individuals.
The news stories fixate on the latest attention-grabbing controversy while ignoring terrible things like homelessness and industrial ecocide.
Our schooling tells us that communist countries have always been oppressive totalitarian wastelands and that capitalism offers us freedom and happiness.
At no time are we ever offered the suggestion that things could be better than they are. Over and over again in innumerable ways throughout our lives, we are told that the current order is the only way things could ever be.
Our minds have been carefully groomed to accept the imperial status quo as normal and healthy, and to see every failure of the system as a failure of the individual. We need to reclaim our minds from the social engineers who have conditioned us to think this way and begin cultivating unorthodox, unauthorized worldviews. We need to stop blaming each other for the failures of the system, stop scrambling to climb on top of each other to keep our heads above water, and start working together to eliminate the psychos who have trapped us in this room.
