I'm someone who believes that above all, people should have a commitment to the truth. As Picard put it, “…whether to scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth.” The best way to go through your life is to acknowledge the hard facts and base your beliefs and factions off of those facts even if it might slaughter a sacred cow of your worldview because a problem does not cease to be if you ignore it. Reality does not conform to philosophy.
So looking at the entirety of working society, I see basically the exact opposite from top to bottom.
-When applying for a job, you basically need to stretch the truth or even outright lie about things in order to get hired, and don't you dare answer honestly to questions of what your weakness is and other such matters. Perhaps it's more fun to find out the facts of that matter later when there's something at stake rather than two people sitting down chatting.
-The existence of regulatory bodies like OSHA or the FDA shows that if businesses can get away with putting lives at risk to earn an easier buck, they would, and there is a constant arms race between businesses bending or breaking the rules and trying to cover it up, and the government trying to weed out these people.
-Because hard work is rewarded with more work, the optimal strategy for any employee is to be as lazy as they can get away with. The best case scenario is to look busy, not to be busy, which does not promote drive or innovation. Hell, many an anecdote posted on this very subreddit is that people who barely do the minimum are the first to be promoted, which means businesses are ever increasingly getting the worst possible candidates on higher levels.
-Managers and bosses will be two-faced about companies making record profits and then saying they can't afford to raise employee wages or give them vacation time. Every employee might not be able to see every bit of info about income, but they certainly know enough to know that more money is coming in than before.
-Prices on goods have been raised despite so many companies claiming record profits, and they're blaming inflation as if that's a fact of the universe and not a bunch of numbers we've made up.
-Places will obscure their wages as much as they can so they can lowball employees, and now the strategy if places ask about their previous wages is to lie and set a higher bar and hope that employers don't do the minimum amount of effort to verify that.
-Companies will put on progressive personas while utilizing literal slave labor to create their products, and if a country isn't enthusiastic about left-leaning social views of 21st century American/European views, they're not going to stick to those supposed values. Of course they'll hide the fact that they use slave labor. I know there's no ethical consumptions under capitalism, but Jesus Christ they don't have to TRY and be evil.
-Companies will lie to their employees about their rights, such as the ability to communicate with one another about wages or about forming unions. They will break any law like that they can because so often, the employees are ignorant about their rights, and that is by design.
-The less I say about politicians the better, but Diogenes would be swinging from a ceiling fan if he so much set foot within a hundred mile vicinity of the Capitol.
I don't see how any of this is sustainable for a nation to run on. The more corrupt a place is, the less it would take for something to completely topple it, and it genuinely seems like society is running on borrowed time even if total ecological collapse isn't on the table. We've seen with the pandemic that every single company could not survive without people on the lower rungs and yet, rather than wake up to that and try to strengthen the foundation so that everything doesn't collapse, it seems like they're speedrunning The Deline and Fall of the Roman Empire, United States DLC, any%.
If nothing else, subreddits like this does give me some hope because it is a collection of people who are doing what they can to expose misinformation and try to make the world a better place. I'm a transhumanist. I think often about the future, and I know that what stands between Star Trek and the entire genre of cyberpunk is how economics is handled, and the bones, muscles, and organs of the economy is the working class.
So I suppose it's fair to say, thanks for being willing to tell the truth.