This is pretty much what The Last Psychiatrist is about. Nearly all his late blogging is a combination of: (1) Poor people are assigned disability status and drugged to stop them from rioting because their lives are shitty and society doesn’t want to (or perhaps can’t) spend the resources necessary to fix the problem. (2) The rest of us have been raised to be narcissists in a way that would have been genuinely exceptional a couple of generations ago, and are desperate to have our narratives affirmed by someone else with the right to pass judgment.
Number 1 is the politically correct thing to say, but was not what I actually observed when working with Medicaid patients. People complained far less about poverty than I (who come from a middle-class upbringing) would have anticipated. People adjust to what they are used to. It’s the middle class, with the constant fear of downward mobility, which really suffers from monetary issues. There were some interesting interactions between race and class, which are hard to express without the internet eating me. Being hispanic and poor is very different from being black and poor, which is different still from being white and poor. And I’ll leave it at that.
2 just sounds correct. America has reached the apotheosis of individualism. We can’t all be the star of the show, and it hurts when you find out you are not.
This is pretty much what The Last Psychiatrist is about. Nearly all his late blogging is a combination of:
(1) Poor people are assigned disability status and drugged to stop them from rioting because their lives are shitty and society doesn’t want to (or perhaps can’t) spend the resources necessary to fix the problem.
(2) The rest of us have been raised to be narcissists in a way that would have been genuinely exceptional a couple of generations ago, and are desperate to have our narratives affirmed by someone else with the right to pass judgment.
Number 1 is the politically correct thing to say, but was not what I actually observed when working with Medicaid patients. People complained far less about poverty than I (who come from a middle-class upbringing) would have anticipated. People adjust to what they are used to. It’s the middle class, with the constant fear of downward mobility, which really suffers from monetary issues. There were some interesting interactions between race and class, which are hard to express without the internet eating me. Being hispanic and poor is very different from being black and poor, which is different still from being white and poor. And I’ll leave it at that.
2 just sounds correct. America has reached the apotheosis of individualism. We can’t all be the star of the show, and it hurts when you find out you are not.