Comment on Why does the media print rags to riches stories?
ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Capitalist propaganda.
“Aspiration” to be more precise, it’s one of the ways capitalists convince large segments of the public that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who just need to pull their bootstraps up hard enough, and they will make it, like the people in the programme did (conveniently they never address things like racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and other barriers that many people have to face just to survive, never mind thrive, and the fact that all of these barriers are artificial and created by people who benefit just as much from dividing society up and pitting us against each other, as they do from selling us rags-to-riches bullshit to get us to work harder to make them money).
Kintarian@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’ve never understood “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” which is impossible. No matter how hard you pull, you can’t, say, jump a fence. The rich are inadvertently telling poor people that becoming rich by working hard is impossible.
ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I think that’s the point, just like with “a few bad apples”, the original intent of the saying has been subverted to help those in power keep the rest of us down (if you just do this impossible thing, you’ll be just like us! Why don’t you just do that impossible thing already, you useless lazy bastard? And so on. It’s part cognitive dissonance to make themselves feel like they’re “self made”, part gaslighting convincing us we’re just not trying hard enough).
reksas@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
I think it may be subtle way to say fuck you