Short —if rather cryptic —answer: nobody’s getting rich off the Amish. ( Ok, I don’t know that for a fact, but look at how they live; it’s hard to imagine. ) It might be categorically impossible. Unlike the absolute slavery/no slavery binary of the Civil War, this time the sides aren’t at all clear. Oligarchy v. people can become extremely wealthy and wield enormous amounts of power—up to a nebulous point and not one step further? Isn’t every instance of a white collar criminal getting away with using their power to skirt the law a sort of mini-coup, perhaps a proto-coup, a step toward oligarchy? We’ve been allowing this for decades, as you know. The cheats and criminals well know that as long as we can get cheap stuff with one day free delivery we will look the other way because we do. We are. Those who oppose these forces of evil ? What is the “prize” we’re keeping our eyes on? What does “vanquishing the enemy” look like? We don’t even agree among ourselves. We average Americans want all the conveniences that have made for the insane wealth of the very few and just pray they’ll behave themselves. That has never been their intention, however.
The reality in which we currently find ourselves seems to me not so much like the dawn of a second civil war. Rather, it feels like a Matrix we need to break out of. The only way of doing that, as far as I can see, is for a sufficient percentage of us to stop underwriting our own rapidly increasing political and economic oppression with our purchases. In other words, live like the Amish. Until capitalism implodes and the people have no interest in allowing it to rise from its ashes, we are acting in their best interests and not our own.
Short —if rather cryptic —answer: nobody’s getting rich off the Amish. ( Ok, I don’t know that for a fact, but look at how they live; it’s hard to imagine. ) It might be categorically impossible. Unlike the absolute slavery/no slavery binary of the Civil War, this time the sides aren’t at all clear. Oligarchy v. people can become extremely wealthy and wield enormous amounts of power—up to a nebulous point and not one step further? Isn’t every instance of a white collar criminal getting away with using their power to skirt the law a sort of mini-coup, perhaps a proto-coup, a step toward oligarchy? We’ve been allowing this for decades, as you know. The cheats and criminals well know that as long as we can get cheap stuff with one day free delivery we will look the other way because we do. We are. Those who oppose these forces of evil ? What is the “prize” we’re keeping our eyes on? What does “vanquishing the enemy” look like? We don’t even agree among ourselves. We average Americans want all the conveniences that have made for the insane wealth of the very few and just pray they’ll behave themselves. That has never been their intention, however.
The reality in which we currently find ourselves seems to me not so much like the dawn of a second civil war. Rather, it feels like a Matrix we need to break out of. The only way of doing that, as far as I can see, is for a sufficient percentage of us to stop underwriting our own rapidly increasing political and economic oppression with our purchases. In other words, live like the Amish. Until capitalism implodes and the people have no interest in allowing it to rise from its ashes, we are acting in their best interests and not our own.