Yes they can...
Future observers will look back and wonder how so many people bought into this delusion of a virtual economy. The central bank Jedi Mind Trick that has kept asset prices inflated while the real economy imploded in broad daylight. Now, all that's left of the virtual economy is a collapsing Tech bubble. Japanification has taught us that an aging population has an extreme preference for return on capital over return on labor. In today's situation, at the expense of return on labor. Which is why so many people are oblivious to the decimation of the real economy under COVID.
Today's sheeple are on 100% auto-pilot. When people are historically illiterate and amnesiac it's clearly impossible for them to recognize the disintegration of society taking place on a day to day basis. Like frogs in boiling water they continually adjust to their new circumstance. A much more intelligent society would have revolted a long time ago. However, today's sheeple are of the well-cultivated belief that strip-mining the middle class while bailing out billionaires, is proof of the superiority of capitalism.
Some people tell me that I should not be angry about things beyond my control. These people believe that we should all just try to be fat and happy with whatever comes our way. However, history is made by people who know right from wrong, not left from right. By people who believe in absolute morality not relative decadence. What we are witnessing is the ubiquitous belief that if enough people are doing something wrong, then it must be right. Monkey see, monkey do.
I can't live like that. I want to face my grandchildren and say I was against this corruption the entire time. Revolutions begin with ideas. Beginning with the idea that exploiting people for zero sum gain is immoral. We live in a society that believes in caveat emptor, meaning buyer beware. A belief that has morphed into a con man's paradise.
COVID 2020 has pulled back the curtains on this failed model. Not only do we have an aging society riddled with bad lifestyle choices, but we have an exorbitantly priced private healthcare model that is bankrupting people at a staggering rate. The combination of "consumer choice", corporate frankenfood, and widespread healthcare coverage gaps, is a death sentence for millions of people who will die young and bankrupt. For most of human history, eating whole foods was the only choice available. Today, eating whole foods is considered an elite extravagance. The people with the worst healthcare coverage are the ones forced to eat a toxic diet. Expendable guinea pigs to the corporate meat grinder.
At some point along the line, the conservative movement jumped the shark from doing what's right, to doing what is expedient. While adopting a delusional fantasy of returning to the fictional past. A movement that is now obsessed with pro-life at the expense of pro-living. A movement that has become far too comfortable with embracing human squalor as the price to pay for failed capitalism.
They have Third World values. Which is good because that is their destiny.