Perpetual Betty

Our minds don't function at their best when plagued by an immediate emergency; sometimes, as a defense mechanism, it falls back to a state of "shock". Governments know this, corporations know this, and they use this knowledge to further their evil objectives.

Crises are unwelcome if you're a regular citizen; most of us just want to live our lifes without too much hassle, and we like to keep major problems to a minimum if at all possible. When faced with major problems, our minds become preoccupied by them, leaving less room for the normal planning and execution of the things that make our lifes functional and productive. One circumstance that leads to a perpetual state of mild shock, keeps us in a constant "crisis-mindset", is poverty. Here's where the tired old right wing conservative conviction that the poor would be better able, or better incentivized, to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps", falls apart: contrary to the refrain that bad decisions lead to poverty, data indicate that it is the opposite, that poverty leads to bad decisions. Quite simply put; if your mind is constantly preoccupied by the problems of paying the bills and putting food on the table, its capacity for planning, organizing and reasoning is hampered. If you're interested, you can read How Poverty Changes Your Mind-Set.

This is true for any crisis, and I think we're all familiar with the phrase "never waste a good crisis". This is a truth as old as civilization. One man's loss being another man's gain and all. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman general and statesman, is often called "the richest man in Rome". He became rich by leading the first Roman fire brigade:

Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
_{source: Wikipedia}

A modern example is Amazon, among other mega-corporations, who gained billions of dollars during the COVID crisis. When people stay at home, they have their goods delivered at the door even more often than when they're able to get out and go shopping. But even businesses that by all means should have been hit hard by this crisis managed to pull out something extra. That is with the government's and taxpayers' help of course, and only if you're big enough, like airlines and cruise-ship companies. If you're big enough, and powerful enough, a crisis becomes a thing you don't want to waste indeed. We can rest assured that the government has our best interests in mind, right? That was sarcasm, by the way.

Have you seen the lovely movie "Nurse Betty"? It's about Betty Sizemore from a small town in Kansas, a naive wive of a cheating car salesman who supplements his income by selling drugs. Betty is a die-hard fan of the soap opera "A reason to love", and one night, on her birthday and while watching her favorite soap opera, she witnesses the brutal murder of her husband by two criminals who are after the drugs. From that moment on she's in a state of shock, and her mind fools her into believing everything in "A reason to love" is real, and furthermore that she's an ex-girlfriend of the show's star. What unfolds after that I invite you to see for yourself, but I'll say that Betty will travel to Hollywood, California, to find her lost love, chased by the criminals who are still after the drugs. It's an extreme example, but this film perfectly illustrates how the human mind assumes an altered state when faced with an immediate crisis. Tt's a great, and severely underrrated movie to boot, with great performances by Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart as the unfaithful husband.

In a sense, we are Betty Sizemore, and like her, we've left Kansas, just as Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz. Only we're not returning home; our leaders are set to keep us in a constant state of emergency. Every chance they get, they'll use, maybe even create the crises they need to keep us down. Terrorists, diseases, pandemics, far away countries making Weapons of Mass Destruction, Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D), "Red Scare" "Wokeism", transgender child-groomers, China, the economy, THE ECONOMY! There's no end to the moral, geopolitical and economical panics they'll use to keep our minds preoccupied, just so we'll vote against our own interests in the next elections... Anyway, I'll leave you with some scenes from Nurse Betty; go watch the movie if you haven't yet.

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