1. Cynical corporate leaders, who got to their position because they were both sociopathic and paranoid, fund the $1bn required to elect a President who is sensible enough to appeal to both lobbies. Proles and middle classes seem to think this will work, but the rich are too busy soliciting bribes.

2. Because social problems are rife, a paramilitary police force is required. Each time crime rages out of control, The People demand more. Proles and middle classes seem to think this will work, but the rich are busy in gated communities with private security.

3. The empowered electorate watch television, seeing shadows on the wall of a cave, and presume that what they see is absolute truth. They feel empowered because they are able to take one of two general sides, the first being "winner take all" and the second being "if someone has something I don't, I deserve it, because I'm just as human as he is." Proles love this, middle classes are unsure, and urban hipsters and cosmopolitan underpaid "opinion worker" sophisticates think it's great. So do the rich, who don't generally watch TV because they have more interesting things to do.

4. For the same reason good people join police forces, good people join the military, in addition to the criminals and low performers shuffled in there to keep the numbers up. They find themselves fighting wars for the symbols seen on television, like democracy and freedom, when actually they're trying to sustain an overseas empire so other nation-states don't manage to clobber us. Proles and the middle classes seem to think this will work, and the rich keep their kids out of the goddamn Army.

5. The rest of the world sees only a wealthy nation, wealth they'd like to have, and so they adopt viewpoint B, which is "if someone has something I don't, I deserve it, because I'm just as human as he is." They wage guerrilla wars with little real success, but big success in the self-hating portions of the media, who manage to get people to cry over their losses but ignore their overall lack of success in stopping the process. Eventually, the nation will decay (see steps 1-4 and their unsustainability) and collapse into an environmental wasteland in which wander the generic, cultureless, low-IQ people left over when all the smart people have been driven insane. Proles and the middle classes are clueless, but the rich believe they'll prevail, and they will until the final spasms of revolution have them executed.

It's not America -- don't blame the Americans. It's modern society, that combination of liberal democracy and capitalism, which "empower" the individual, and a dogma of conquest in the name of moral right with the technological superiority to do it. This has happened in some form to every dying empire from Greece to the present day, and it's happening in Europe and Asia, too. It's a process, not an institution or a nation. The Americans got to it first but it's coming to you, wherever you are, and like all parasitic illusions, its ultimate outcome will be the reduction of the human species to angry apes with machetes. Fight modern society. Fight it hard.

- Corrupt.org