Living in the US and having any trust of institutions at all feels like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football on repeat forever. I mean, it’s not that they’re all 100% malicious or something. If it was that straightforward, there’d have been several revolutions by now. There’s actually this consistent trap to it, where you can get taken in by how nice and sincere the everyday employees are, or think the general policies will protect your interests, and miss the exploitative financial tendrils of the institution (or industry) as a whole; the process seems designed so that by the time you notice a problem, it’s either too late to fix it or you are more likely to blame yourself for not catching it. If I didn’t have dialectical materialism / class analysis / etc. to ground me, I’d probably become vaguely anti-institution/anti-establishment over time.

And “it’s your fault” works hand in hand with “liberty” narratives; personal choice, it’s your decision, it’s up to you. They love to promote this kind of stuff because not only does it legitimize the idea that the US is “free”, it also means that if something goes wrong, it must be because you decided wrong, not that the institutions failed you (or worse, intentionally exploited you).