Because the status quo is maintained by bad people and those that are afraid of any kind of chance.

Because those in power want the average person in the delicate balance of being stuck in survival mode.
No time to protest because you've barely enough to scrape by, but not so poor that you've nothing left to lose to do much more than just protest.

100℅ this.

Because mentally diseased sadistic, psychopathic and sociopathic, malignant narcissists require the world to conform to their delusions of grandeur, and our entire society is built around worshipping them.

Capitalism is their theology.

In the old days, they just made up (or had scribes make up for them) religions, take what magical or supernatural ideas were floating around the society, and formalize them into a narrative that placed regional or city state rulers/tyrants as god kings, placed in their social roles by fantastical supernatural personalities/powers.

Court sponsored propoganda, legitamizing itself, describing and perscribing the bounds of thought and action for different people in that society.

We are still doing the same thing for the same kinds of people today, the theology is just more complex, often disgusing itself as secular.

Its still all a grand delusion, built and acted out to glorify violent psychopaths.

Tech oligarchs own all corporate news media. They operate it on behalf of the republican party. The GOP was infected and then inhabited by the trump cult.

That’s how. More or less.

There used to be about 40 workers per retiree in the US, now it's down to around 2 or 3 IIRC.

People over 55 own 73% of all the wealth. Boomers alone over 50%.

That's just the US as an example because statistics are easy to find and it's one of the most unequal western nations.

Put simply, there isn't enough productivity to keep the olds happy and nobody wants to be the first generation to retire multiple years later than the previous one, although it really should have been the boomers and we should all be retiring progressively later until productivity vs upkeep costs are in balance. Us millennials probably at around 75-80. Unless there's either massive improvements in productivity per worker or we all start letting more immigrants into our countries to increase the total productivity feeding the retirement machine.

The billionaires are but a single, albeit big, bad cog in a machine that's mostly rusted through. Deal with them first because that creates measurable instant relief for low effort, but don't forget the bigger issues.

The last part started with Reagan.

The rich never want us to have a fulfilling life. That would mean less people to exploit.

They want to make us fight each other on every turn fo their infinite weatlh.