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Structural vs. Individual Explanation

Not every bad outcome requires a villain in a room making plans. Most of the time, the structure is the plan.

When something goes wrong in society — inequality grows, media becomes unreliable, governments serve the wealthy — people tend to look for someone to blame. A shadowy group. A secret meeting. A mastermind. And sometimes those exist. But far more often, the damage comes from systems working exactly as they're designed to. No conspiracy needed. Just incentives.

A news outlet doesn't need a memo from a billionaire owner telling reporters what to say. Reporters learn quickly which stories get approved and which get killed. They self-censor. The structure — ownership, advertising revenue, access to sources — shapes the output without anyone giving direct orders. Herman and Chomsky called this the propaganda model: not a conspiracy, but a set of filters that reliably produce a narrow range of acceptable views.

This distinction matters because if you only look for individual bad actors, you miss the machinery that produces bad outcomes even with good people inside it. Replace every corrupt politician, and the system that made corruption profitable will simply corrupt the next batch. Structural problems need structural solutions — and those are harder to see, harder to explain, and harder to sell than a good villain story.

The question isn't just "who did this?" It's "what made this the likely outcome?"

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