What I learned living in a trailer in the Utah desert for two decades

After serfdom was abolished, these people mostly hard very little capital and no education (illiteracy was the norm). Over generations, they tried to slowly crawl out of their miserable state (incl. millions who emigrated to US around the turn of the XX century). but it was not easy in a country that was, until 1914, partitioned by foreign powers who didn't want to invest in local population and were happy to keep them weak and ignorant. Add two absolutely brutal world wars on top of that, the great recession between them (Poland was one of the hardest hit countries in the world, through the thirties constant hunger was a sad norm across the country), and later Stalinism and less ominous forms of Communism, which, while lifting people out of the depths of misery, planted some very harmful ideas in their heads along the way.

After all that, came 1989 and introduction of radical free-market ideologies straight from Chicago School of Economics (as advised by Washington "consultants"), killing state-run mass agriculture which was the only employer in many rural regions of Poland. The people who worked there mostly never recovered and are those angry, resentful, ignorant alcoholics that could be your neighbors if you move there. Of course it's not their fault, they were just unlucky to be born in a shitty place at a shitty time - like the majority of regular people throught the history of humanity.