"Although you're by yourself, you're not alone. That is, your same isolated condition is replicated hundreds of thousands of time throughout the system. You are part of a huge class of exploited persons. You just don't talk to each other. Each of you is in your own cubicle worrying about your own boss and your own workload and your own lack of pension."
"Strangely, this overworking of people, this destroying of workers' lives, is happening to many hundreds of thousands of people and yet in some sense it is not happening to a group; in every instance it seems as though it is happening to you alone, and it's a problem you alone must solve. No matter that macroeconomic and cultural forces are at work to replicate the same crushing, inhumane circumstances from coast to coast. Still, we think it's we as individuals who are at fault, and it's we as individuals who must solve our problem -- even though it is systemic and replicated throughout society! Why do we think that? Because we are stupid? Maybe. We might be really stupid. It kinda looks that way sometimes. Or maybe we're just scared."
Wow! I mean WOW! Does it get clearer than that? A structural, macroeconomic, cultural process that hundreds of thousands (a vast understatement) see as something happening to them alone. Need a theoretical treatise on the structural problem? They're out there... Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck, Andre Gorz... and many more.
So why do YOU think folks focus on the "advice" Tennis gives or on some inept aside he makes about roofers? And I'm not just talking about LBO. I looked through the table talk responses on Salon and people commented about house prices, whether the couple had really done all they could to cut their expenses (so they wouldn't need the second job so desperately) and what would be the likely consequences of various other PERSONAL strategies. Is it because the point about it being a collective problem not a personal one is too obvious to merit comment? Or are people that stupid that they couldn't grasp out what Tennis had said? Or are they scared to engage the issue on a level that might have real consequences -- that might actually address the problem directly rather than pick at its scabs?
The Sandwichman