Why Is “Socialism” a Bad Word?

Socialism is a bad word because the people who hated it got to define it first.

The term didn’t grow teeth on its own — it was given fangs. Branded like a warning label slapped onto an idea that was never dangerous at all. And once that branding stuck, it spread through generations like a family myth no one ever bothered to question.

Most people don’t actually know what socialism means.

They only know the ghost story they were told.

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The Ghost Story

For decades, “socialism” got stapled to images of authoritarian states, bread lines, and crumbling concrete.

Cold War propaganda worked so well it might as well have been scripture. Whisper the word and people would brace for communism, gulags, grey skies, misery.

Never mind nuance.

Never mind reality.

Fear was the product. And it sold.

The storytellers with the biggest microphones — governments, tycoons, media barons — won the narrative war. They taught a whole continent to fear a word that, stripped of all its slogans and distortions, simply means help each other more than you hurt each other.

Imagine being terrified of that.

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Who Was Afraid?

Follow the fear and you’ll find the rich.

If society shifts even a little toward fairness — workers supported, families secure, kids fed — someone loses leverage.

Spoiler: it’s never the poor.

So the wealthy told everyone socialism meant:

- your taxes will skyrocket

- lazy people will live off your hard work

- the government will micromanage your breakfast

- everything will collapse

Fear is political duct tape.

Cheap to produce, easy to distribute, sticky as hell.

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But Who Pays for It?

Everyone asks this like it’s a mic-drop question.

Here’s the real answer:

We all do. And we already do.

Socialism isn’t freeloading.

It’s the idea that we should be there for one another —

not just to pick people up when they fall,

but to prevent the fall in the first place.

A good system doesn’t let you face-plant so it can heroically scrape you off the floor.

A good system says: let’s fix the floor.

We can have that.

So why don’t we?

Because someone, somewhere, convinced us that helping each other makes people lazy and unproductive.

Ask yourself:

Who the hell benefits from that lie?

Not you.

Not your neighbour.

Not the single mom working two jobs.

Not the teenager choosing between school and a paycheck.

The only people that lie protects are the ones flying between their houses on helicopters.

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Eat the Rich

Why do you think “eat the rich” caught fire?

Because even our so-called “good billionaires” —

the Cubans, the Gateses, the ones we pretend are harmless —

own boats that cost more than an entire neighbourhood’s lifetime earnings combined.

People aren’t jealous.

They’re bewildered.

The working class can’t even conceptualize that kind of wealth.

Not because they’re stupid — because the system kept them too underfunded, too tired, and too undereducated to do the math.

Schools without pencils.

Teachers underpaid.

Kids told to sit down, shut up, memorize, test, repeat.

And then we dare to say:

“See? They just don’t understand economics.”

Of course they don’t.

They never got the tools.

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Who Really Deserves What?

A CEO can make tens of millions for “steering the ship.”

A teacher shaping the next generation?

A nurse saving your mother’s life at 3 a.m.?

A paramedic scraping someone off the highway?

A childcare worker raising half the country?

Suddenly their value becomes negotiable.

Suddenly we have to “tighten the budget.”

Funny how fairness is always too expensive —

but yachts never are.

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And the Media

And here’s the part people pretend not to notice:

Who controls the media?

The same bastards with the yachts.

The same tiny handful of owners who decide which stories matter,

who the villains are,

what you should fear,

what you should want,

who you should worship,

and who you should blame.

They train us to hate ourselves,

to worship money,

to worship them like gods.

But here’s the truth:

You don’t get to be a billionaire by running on empathy.

You don’t build that kind of wealth by nurturing, caring, and sharing.

Could there be an empathetic billionaire?

Maybe.

But if he exists, he’s hiding like a cryptid.

And me?

I’ll never be one.

Too old, too broken, too loving to ever believe I deserve that much while others have so little.

Most of us feel that way.

We buy dreams in the form of lottery tickets,

and what do we dream of when the numbers hit?

A Lamborghini?

A villa?

A forty-foot golden statue of ourselves?

No.

We dream of who we’re going to help.

Where we’re going to give it.

Who finally gets a break.

Who gets lifted up with us.

The richest dream of owning the world.

The rest of us dream of sharing it.

Because the richest in this world are also the most selfish.

That’s the part no one wants to say out loud.

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So How Do We Get It?

It’s not complicated.

It’s not mysterious.

It’s not locked behind some economic wizard’s vault door.

We get it by paying attention.

We get it by taking our education into our own hands.

People living in mud huts have computers in their pockets —

wait, do they even have pockets?

Doesn’t matter.

They’ve got the same supercomputer the rest of us have glued to our palms.

And the greatest irony of our age is this:

The same technology they used to distract us, divide us, and steal from us

is the same technology we can use to take everything back.

Education.

Knowledge.

Compassion.

History.

Strategy.

Solidarity.

All at the touch of a screen.

Everything the powerful used to hoard —

books, libraries, expertise, gatekept information —

now sits right there in your hand.

But you have to get past the yelling.

Past the noise.

Past the algorithmic sewage designed to keep you stupid, angry, exhausted, and easy to control.

The political screamers.

The fake outrage.

The rage bait.

The Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Fuck.

The porn loops.

The get-rich-quick schemes.

The endless dopamine drip.

You have to pull your mind out of the gutter

and look for the pools with no piss in them.

They exist.

Quiet corners of the internet where people are learning, thinking, questioning, growing.

That’s where real power hides now.

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The Tools Are There — So Use Them

The tools are there to make you smarter.

Haven’t you always wanted that?

Haven’t you ever sat alone and thought:

“Fuck, I wish I was smarter”?

I have.

Everyone has.

And now here you are —

reading the words of some dumbass guy who probably thinks too highly of himself simply because he wasn’t afraid to use the tools sitting right in front of him.

I’m not special.

I’m not chosen.

I just wasn’t scared to learn, grow, screw up, try again, and sharpen my mind.

If I can do that, why not you?

This is what the gatekeepers never wanted you to figure out.

They want knowledge sealed behind ivy-covered walls,

thousand-dollar tuition,

degrees that tell the world you’re allowed to know something.

But fuck the gatekeepers and their institutions.

I don’t need their permission.

I don’t need their authority.

I don’t need a certificate on a wall to validate what I’ve learned with my own two hands and my own stubborn brain.

I fact check myself.

That’s the part you’re missing.

And if I can do it —

if some guy who stumbled his way through life can learn, question, and grow —

then you can fact check me too.

You can fact check anyone.

You’re not powerless.

You’re not locked out.

You’ve got the same tools.

The same screen.

The same endless library of human knowledge.

All you have to do is reach for it.