Manufactured Brokenness

How Systems Create Failure — Then Blame the Wounded

By Cliff Potts
Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Comforting Lie of Personal Failure

We talk about “broken people” as if they simply appear—malfunctioning individuals who failed to work hard enough, plan well enough, or want success badly enough. This framing is comforting. It absolves institutions. It keeps power clean. It turns structural harm into personal shame.

But brokenness is not an accident. It is manufactured.

Extraction, Defined Plainly

Modern economic and political systems are remarkably effective at producing people who feel depleted, unstable, and inadequate—then convincing them that the damage is their own fault. This is not a mystery, and it is not a moral failing. It is the predictable outcome of systems designed around extraction rather than care.

That word matters, so let’s be clear about it.

By extraction, I do not mean theft in the dramatic sense. I mean the systematic removal of value from people while returning as little as possible in stability, security, or dignity. Extraction looks like wages that stagnate while productivity rises. It looks like work schedules that demand total flexibility from workers while offering none in return. It looks like healthcare tied to employment, housing treated as a speculative asset, and education sold as opportunity but delivered as debt. It is time taken, energy taken, health taken, attention taken—without regard for the human cost.

Extraction is what happens when systems are designed to pull until something breaks, then move on to the next source.

Pressure Without Stability

Once this lens is applied, the mechanics become obvious. Wages fail to keep pace with living costs. Work becomes more precarious while expectations increase. Healthcare is fragmented, expensive, and conditional. Housing becomes unreachable. Safety nets are thinned, moralized, or withdrawn altogether.

Each pressure point can be explained away on its own. Together, they form an environment of constant strain without stability.

When Signals Are Rebranded as Defects

People respond to this strain in rational ways: anxiety, exhaustion, resentment, withdrawal, anger. These are not character defects. They are signals. But the system does not interpret them as such.

Instead, it reframes the response as evidence of personal failure. If you are struggling, you must be irresponsible. If you are angry, you must be entitled. If you are exhausted, you must lack discipline.

This reframing is essential to the system’s survival. If brokenness were recognized as an output, responsibility would flow upward. Incentives would be questioned. Policies would be interrogated. Power would be required to justify itself.

So blame is pushed downward instead.

The Psychological Trap

Psychologically, this produces a corrosive effect. People internalize the failure narrative. They don’t just suffer; they believe they deserve to. Shame replaces analysis. Self-doubt replaces critique. The energy that might have fueled collective reform is redirected inward, where it burns off harmlessly as guilt and despair.

This is not incidental. A population convinced that its pain is personal is easier to manage than one that understands pain as systemic.

When Brokenness Becomes Useful

At a certain point, brokenness becomes useful. A population under strain is more susceptible to manipulation. Fear simplifies thinking. Exhaustion narrows horizons. Anger seeks targets.

When systems fail to meet basic needs, people do not automatically blame systems—they search for stories that explain their pain quickly and emotionally. That vacuum does not remain empty for long.

Media ecosystems and political operators step in to translate diffuse suffering into narratives that protect the underlying structure while redirecting blame elsewhere. The system remains intact. The extraction continues. The broken remain broken.

Brokenness Is an Output

None of this requires secret coordination. It emerges naturally from incentives that reward short-term gain, deniability, and narrative control. Brokenness is simply the waste product of a machine optimized for something else.

This essay is not an appeal for sympathy. It is a refusal of a lie.

People are not failing at scale because millions simultaneously lost character. They are responding, predictably, to environments designed without regard for human limits.

Brokenness is not a mystery.
It is an output.

And once we admit that, the question stops being “what’s wrong with people?” and becomes something far more dangerous:

What kind of system needs this many people to break in order to keep going?

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com