It's easy to cheat and exploit people when they constantly cheat and steal from one another. Such behavior becomes the norm, and bad behavior by elites is perceived as in line with convention. Maybe getting a handle on street crime could help break this norm, and free up popular mindshare for engagement on more-abstract structural issues.

Most would say the same of politicians and elites who are constantly robbing us. Worryingly, in public discourse, it’s expected and accepted that they will do so.

So, is it /really/ just the poor crime that creates this culture?

I agree that it goes both ways. Fixing one should help fix the other. It's easier to start small.

It takes significantly more effort to constantly catch hundreds of small time unknown criminals versus the handfuls of elites in the public limelight or government positions.

It can be both. It's not one side or the other. Elites are exploiting the problem for political points.

Both yes but there is a matter if degree, which they are not same.

Yes, but if you only willing to ”fix” the poor people and let the rich elites continue, then it is like picking sides.

>people with nothing in their lives...[are]...the ones “fraying apart society”

You misread. The ones who are letting society come apart are all of us who let ourselves be apathetic enough to be deceived by people who think a total lack of morality is the way to run society.

To the rest of your response, my post could be generalized to any social level. No need to whatabout wage gaps and inflation. Everything I said applies there too: lack of morality and lack of deterring punishment.

If you truly believe that lack of morality is the issue, then we should immediately start prosecuting rich/elite corruption. It harms everyone, it eats away at societal wealth and trust, and leads further to facism.

Yes, we should be punishing rich/elite corruption. Is this a trick question?

Yours is a trick answer, because we aren’t - at least not on the same scale nor with the same public outcry.

> We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace.

this is just a plain old run of the mill conspiracy theory.

reality unfortunately is never black and white, and that’s because modern societies are extremely complex systems:

https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

What’s the conspiracy theory? You’ve literally just linked to the Wikipedia article about socioeconomic mobility (which I never argued can’t exist) and an incomplete income inequality dataset. Neither of which disprove that the elites are exploiting the poor.