Now I’m really ruminating on it and the abusive relationship angle you talked about and if we combine them we can see how, for example with this gambling thing, it’s totally the behavior of a person who is hoping they aren’t a victim. They can’t be a winner, not a real winner, the house is the real winner and they know that but they think they can manage to not be the 99 suckers that get fleeced so the house can kick out one jackpot. They’d rather roll dice on those odds. It shows how narrow they think the future is. The closing of the horizon is the thing I’m fixated these days, Mark Fischer’s Capitalist Realism talks about this too, maybe that’s what planted the seed but the psychology of the moment we are in is fascinating.
“Well of course he doesn’t let me own a car, but he lets me go to the store to shop.” Closing the horizon is the first step of an abuser. We recognize that sentence for what it is, now, but it was once a sentiment that was common in society when women had less rights. I can’t not see these parallels between how we are twisting ourselves into shapes under capitalism and the way for millennia women twisted themselves into shapes to conform to patriarchy, including the self-rationalizing of the victimhood.