It's all they've ever known. We're taught fairy stories from birth that reinforce the status quo. By the time we need answers to explain the contradictions in capitalism we've been prepared with all sorts of ways to rationalize them. I can remember being told a parable at school that painted welfare recipients as scroungers. Thanks, Thatcher.

I was unequipped to properly interpret my own experiences with poverty for a long time. When I was young I had all the same misconceptions about the alternatives to capitalism that you see people bring up now. That only changed because I wanted to better argue with people online and made the effort to learn what anticapitalists actually believe.

Even so, that didn't change my mind because I still saw property as an unquestionable fact, rather than the temporary social construct it really is. Getting over learned behaviour is really fucking difficult.

What eventually changed my mind was an encounter with an organization that (supposedly) helps the unemployed back to work. They treated us like children, making us perform juvenile tasks, answer weird quizzes that blamed the poor for systemic problems, and told us we weren't trying hard enough.

It was so bizarre, degrading, and obviously unrelated to my actual experiences that it seemed like deliberate cruelty. If I hadn't prepared myself with new ways of interpreting the experience, I might've come out of it repenting and punishing myself. I feel ill thinking of more vulnerable people going through that.

I feel like there should be some sort of "victims of capitalism" support group to give people advice and encourage them to see capitalism as a form of abuse. Or even better, give people these answers in advance. That would be hard to do without capital though.