The American dream is ending in a psychotic breakdown
A rising tide of political violence and the rejection of legal norms suggests the America of the Founding no longer exists
That's how all wealthy civilizations end.
The central problem is that hierarchical systems reward and thus select for psychopathy.
People with principles, morals, ethics, empathy and/or integrity will have choices they will not make - courses of action they will not follow, no matter the potential rewards. Psychopaths and sociopaths are not similarly constrained - they're willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed. So they will always have an advantage in hierarchical systems.
Additionally, once they gain power, they will generally arrange things such that it's easier for them to hold power, which not coincidentally makes it easier for other psychopaths and sociopaths to gain and hold power.
Of course, with psychopaths and sociopaths in power, the civilization begins to decline. At that point, there are two broad choices - to reform the system or to warp the system to protect the privilege of the psychopaths. Naturally, the psychopaths choose the latter.
So they find themselves in a situation in which the civilization is in decline due to their actions and they're determined to keep doing what they were already doing. So they need a diversion so that they avoid the blame for the damage they're doing. And that's actually fairly easy since there are a great many people who can sense thst the civilization is in decline, but who are too stupid and angry to sort out who really deserves the blame. And all the psychopaths have to do then is isolate some unpopular fringe group(s) and tell the stupid and angry peiple that it's all their fault, then the psychopaths can stay their destructive course while the stupid and angry people fight with whichever group(s) they've been pointed at.
And that's exactly where the US is today.
I'd argue this isn't limited to just the US.
that's exactly the opening thesis
And I'd agree.
So what's the alternative? Non-hierarchial societies don't really exist, and if they do, in smaller tribes, they get infiltrated or destroyed by larger societies.
GET RID OF BILLIONAIRES
Create a society where you ban extreme wealth.
You allow people to gain wealth, as much as they want but you create an upper ceiling .... like say 100 million. Beyond that, any further wealth you create is just sent to the government as taxes and spent on public services and infrastructure and on other less fortunate people.
Wealth is also not inherited and when you die, a small part of your wealth is passed to your descendants but the majority is given over to the government to again be used for taxes, infrastructure and public services.
Humans will always be greedy bastards and there will always be people who will game the system in their favour for whatever psychotic or manic reason they have (similar to people with hoarding mentalities or people who collect cats or bottle caps) ... in this suggested society, people would still be allowed all the freedoms to fulfill their fantasies or manias within a controlled environment and not to the point where they are degrading all of humanity in the process.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
And as you create an upper ceiling of wealth, you also create a lower floor of poverty ... you use all that extra money and institute Universal Basic Income and allow every able bodied human an equal opportunity to become as much of a greedy bastard as they want and start to gain their own wealth. Or they use their good start in life, generate a bit of wealth, get an education and find the cure for cancer. Imagine if we had thousands or even millions of scientists who no longer have to worry about making rent and instead spend their time trying to find cures for things or finding new solutions to the energy crisis or environmental problems like global warming.
Instead .... we have a world where we funnel all the wealth of the world to a small group of people who sit on it, defend it at all costs and send humanity to its doom while billions of people either starve, near starve or spend all their time and energy just barely getting by.
Good education is the main bulwark against this type of decline. Any political party that starts banning books, denigrating teachers, or cutting education funding should set off major alarms. Making people stupider is step one in the long game of authoritarian takeover.
So what’s the alternative?
Constantly improving the big compromise. No one size fits all. Constant work. Not only in the government, but also in people's heads.
Keeping the checks and balances in place. Finding loopholes and fixing them - if need be with more checks and balances.
Yes, a stable and relatively just state will always require administration. Be sure it doesn't all fall into one person's hand.
But the USA lost all this decades ago. Frankly, it's a miracle that it took so long for a president to take full advantage.
Democratic socialism
If humanity survives long enough (that's a big if), I believe that the establishment of non-hierarchical systems is inevitable.
Humanity, as it matures philosophically, sociologically and psychologically, will outgrow the desire for hierarchy exactly as individuals outgrow the desire to be parented.
For the time being though, there is no alternative. Virtually every civilization that's ever existed on Earth has already died in more or less this same fashion, and the ones that haven't yet will.
As a bit of an aside though, my opinion is that the first step has to be a dedicated public health effort to diagnose antisocial personality disorder and ensure, by whatever means necessary, that society is protected from those who suffer from it.
Hopefully that's something our descendants can do when they build whatever they're going to build out of the rubble we'll leave behind.
As a good first step, the means of production must be controlled by the people, not by individuals, so that the fruits of our labor benefit everyone. As a second step, those of us aware of the problem must band together to create a strong vanguard (if you will) that can defend the people from infiltration while we all figure out how to make a non-hierarchical system.
There, we’ve just come up with Marxism-Leninism.
I have a thought experiment on this that I am developing. It's still to complicated to properly convey but it's basically an immutable set of axioms upon which we can individually build our personal social contract.
From the axioms we declare addendums, every addendum id public and is opt in at that personal level. Everyone's adopted addendums are public so we can choose who to associate with based on shared addendums.
Create these as mathematical proofs that are essentially contracts that have predetermined but immediately executable penalties when the person fails to adhere to their addendums. The penalty is paid out directly to the damaged parties.
For example I say X is true backed by Y value, if it can be determined X is false anyone that I promised X to is owed Y. If I overextend and cannot pay, others will know I am untrustworthy and unable back up future claims.
If you took X and passed it off as true, I would also be responsible for resolving that value.
People will quickly learn not to make up bullshit and keep their word. Society will quickly learn what Y values are appropriate for given assertions.
I agree with all the points you've made, but I vehemently disagree with your rhetoric in calling people stupid.
A large portion of the people you are denigrating have been raised in areas with poorly funded and under-valued education. Some are willfully ignorant, yes, but most of those people have never been given the opportunity to learn or to appreciate the value of education.
Calling people stupid is an insult that will alienate and propagate the "us vs them" mentality we need to overcome. They are humans that have had many disservices done to them by the government and thus distrust it. We have to figure out how to work with those who have been failed, those who haven't fallen into hate but are ignorant or apathetic. Teaching literacy would go a long way.
Except that they are in fact stupid.
Yes - that's largely due to an educational system and a culture that (not coincidentally) fails them, and yes - it's an insulting term. But it's true, and bluntly, I don't give a shit if stupid people are offended by being called stupid, and particularly when those specific stupid people are responsible for electing and supporting a government that's on a direct parh to bringing needless suffering and death to millions.
They are going to destroy everything that was ever good about the US and kill millions of people along the way. It's far too late to worry about them maybe getting their feelings hurt if we say something mean about them.
Very well said.
the America of the Founding no longer exists
That's precisely their plan. The only reason they fetishize the founders so much is because they want to tear it all up and become the new founders, who they will then bind generations to listen to.
They are admitting that that is the end goal of Project 2025.
The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Taking my content back, fuck Lemmy 👎
He knows, but he's saying that on purpose, to make sure everyone who doesn't agree is lumped into the "other"s and ostracized. It's the same reason Trump is still blaming the "radical left" for Kirk's shooting, even though the shooter is by no means leftist.
Whenever you hear "the left", think "Emmanuel Goldstein", except less Jewish (because somehow the Israelis are on the same side as these people)
"It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
... I think Americans are waking up with a terrible hangover
I think we are closer to OD'ing.
fentanyl and now carfentanyl are ravaging rural america. the repuplicans are trying to say its flowing across the border into our country. the truth is it is domestically manufactured. it originates in the core of appalachia and is then sold everywhere else. militarizing LA, DC, Chicago, Charlotte, or Memphis won't fix it, nor will 1k daily deportations. the only fix for these problems is to meet the needs of the people. rural americans are desperately poor. if we want to address crime, we should address their material needs.
but none of this is about preventing crime. it's all about supporting crime.
That's all? From here, it seems like it's more of a "terrible hangover" from rotgut liquor & overly-cut drugs, with a spent condom hanging from their collective ass and Cheeto-crusted santorum painted everywhere -and then some. 🤷🏼♂️
We've had a bit of help, this is from 2020:
Study: Russian Trolls Supremely Effective At Exploiting American Fear, Anger Online
Of course, the main purpose of posts by Russian trolls is to incite arguments among different groups or ideologies: conservatives versus liberals, pro-life versus pro choice, pro-immigrant groups versus border wall enthusiasts, etc. Researchers say as outrageous as much of this content appears to be, Americans can’t help but to click.
After analyzing over 2,500 of these Russian posts, researchers discovered they generated clickthrough rates as much as nine times higher than the norm in digital advertising campaigns. In a rather poor reflection of human nature, it seems that controversy, lies, and fear mongering do very much equal clicks.
The American dream ended with Reagan.
It's been a tramplefest ever since. And TV and the internet has been a better opiate for the masses than the printed press could have ever imagined.
Time is a flat circle.
There never was an American dream. There is - or rather, was - an American fantasy entertained by immigrants, that turns into a rather bland, if not unpleasant reality check when they arrive in the US and don't strike it rich, which is the overwhelming majority of them.
Even the Pilgrims sailed to the New World with that fantasy in their minds, and then were confronted with the pretty awful realities of their miserable voyage and even more miserable life in the Plymouth colony. This is nothing new.
also. can we stop mythologizing the Massachusetts colony as being our national origin. the first english speaking colonists in the Virginia colony trying to make a quick buck through violence and deceit. yeah, the Massachusetts played a role in our modern christofascist imagery, but this whole thing has from the outset been about money and we can't do anything about that until we confront that
Another eulogy for something that never existed expect in the fever dreams of propagandists and politicians.
The American dream has been dead a long while ago, stolen by a few very wealthy people. The breakdown is just the result of decades of distraction from the real authors of this theft.
Turns out, the American Dream is just a ginormous shopping mall in New Jersey
This article links here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/12/killing-charlie-kirk-poisonous-left-wing-politics/
Which is written by a fucking chud trying to justify how "the left" has abandoned discourse in favor of violence and groupthink. Is the telegraph owned by some asshole billionaire too?
The telegraph is a conservative newspaper, yes.
Hint: Its nickname here in Britain is the 'Torygraph'
concentrated wealth does that
[The USA has always had] a perennial problem with violent crime. [...] And the reason it cannot be stopped is that the people, both the population at large and those who are supposed to be in charge, do not want it to stop whatever they may claim.
If they sincerely wanted to put an end to it, they could do so in a moment of reasonable consensus. [...]
100% exactly. This is all an expression of the people's will, at least of those people who are even active at all. I've written a comment recently that a large part of the US see themselves as warriors who would rather die on the battlefield than rot away in Hel, the place of eternal boredom where nothing ever happens.
The same is happening in the US today. People lose a sense of vision for the future, and without that vision, people are left to rot in their own non-meaningful life. We need to find a new vision for the future, and fast.
Emperor Manicula is likely to be the first in a long line of autocrats. The dream is over but the country won't collapse, it will just become a dangerous belligerent and an impediment to world peace, with naked assertions to power. It does not look good for us avoiding a world war.
Rome 2.0
It's almost like we finished our expansion as an empire ... colony ... state.
There's a difference: Rome took a thousand years to fall. America has gone back from going to the moon to medicine by leeches in half a century.