zhang.dianli

Oh. Wow.

I found this rant on another site. I thought I was good at rants, but ... this takes me out of the race entirely as an amateur.

The author goes by the name Tangent on a board I infrequently poke my nose into, and that's as much credit I can give. I know little to nothing else about the author beyond what they say in the rant itself.

I've been sitting on a rant, so hear I go. I've boiled down my frustration and anger into words as a vehicle to why I think I can't really find anything enjoyable in my life anymore. So I just need to get this toxicity out and hope that it changes something. Part is taken from my own words and part is taken from things that I've read elsewhere that I've asked for permission to post.

I feel that people are simply not taking the time to recognize the irresolvable fracture that has befell the United States. This is not just

• Red vs. Blue.
• Rich vs. Poor
• Patriots vs. Immigrants
• Young vs. Old
• Educated vs. Uneducated
• Employed vs. Unemployed
• Employer vs. Employee
• Insured vs. Uninsured
• Urban vs. Rural
• Metropolitan vs. Provincial
• Proletariat vs. the Bourgeoisie

…. And that list? It can keep going on and on. The point being, there is no longer any sense of a shared identity in the United States, not on any level except (arguably) “Angry vs. Downtrodden”, and that is a recipe for violence.

The US has so clearly divided the nation (we can thank decades of corruption via politics, billionaire acquisitions, and media control + propaganda + censorship) that there is simply no “going back” to the way it was. This is the deliberate product of the US government, only now that they have succeeded at “Divide and Conquer”, they don’t know what to do. We’ve been sold “Hope”, we’ve been sold “Yes We Can”, we’ve been sold “Make America Great Again”, and now we’re being told to “Build Back Better”; all of these represent ideals rooted in the inevitability of a nation in decline, acknowledged and framed by our Congressional and Presidential leaders.

30 years later, America isn’t great, we aren’t even able to muster the support to “build back better”, it turned out “No, we couldn’t”, and all hope has been abandoned.

Civil war might not be the outcome, but the United States will never, ever be United again…. Unless it is under a fascist regime. We have lost the ability as a society to act, dream, respond, or think collaboratively, and we won’t get it back until “they” (whomever that means to you personally) aren’t around anymore.

If you read history it's precisely how nobility destroys a country to turn it into their personal fiefdom.

Let's take Poland for example(as half of my family is Polish). From the country's collapse and ultimate takeover – first by Russia as a military protectorate, and then by Russia, Prussia and Austria through direct incorporation into their empires – is an excellent example.

Societal structures are independent on technology level. They reflect evolutionary dynamics inside the socio-biology of human species. Caveman society or modern day America – these dynamics remain identical – they only speed up or slow down, are more or less complex in their architecture.

So what am I getting at.

History shows that either you have a strong central government – the “king” that hold the “nobles” in check by repressing their independence, or you will lose the society for “commoners” and instead will turn into a society creating a “slave” caste.

Now the interesting part is that who the “noble” or who the “commoner” or who the “king” is – is decided not in superficial arbitrary terms but by relative position in society. It also doesn't matter if the “king” is a single person with hereditary rule or a collective body of elected bureaucrats. It can be the prince of Liechtenstein or the European Commission. Doesn't matter.

What matters is that the “king” responds to the “commoners” and represses the “nobles”. This is key. If the king represses the nobles he needs the commoners on his side. That usually means good times for the country. If the king joins the nobles in repression that's when we get tyranny that usually ends with a bloody revolution down the line where some kind of “king” will represent the commoners to restore balance.

But when the nobles gain the advantage over the king then the commoners are fucked because they have no “king” to restore the balance unless the nobles wage a long and bloody war that makes one of them as the king and that is worse than the bloody revolution – because those wars can last for generations. And so in most cases the nobles perpetuate the system of oppression until the society becomes so backward compared to its rivals that it's taken over (Something something Arx something lol).

This is exactly what happened in Poland that I can remember my a relative of mine talking about as she immigrated to the US during the 50s. During the period of 14th to 16th centuries Poland had its “golden age” during which the nobility gained tremendous privileges at the cost of the peasantry/commoners. That led to the emergence of a “magnate” class – very powerful barons and dukes who did all they could to make the Polish state as decentralized and indecisive as possible. In the end when the dynasty ended they did not agree to another dynasty but rather chose to elect the king, somewhat in the style of the Holy Roman Empire, with the exception that the kings could not be hereditary. This meant that as every country in Europe slowly centralized monarchical power Poland decentralized it, or rather made the monarch impotent both by limiting the area where king has power and the time during which any given king could plan the political strategy.

The consequence was tremendous economic regression of the country, weakness of the middle class, and finally takeover by foreign powers which were invited as “protectors” ... by the “magnates”.

So what do we have in America?

We have the highest Gini factor in the western world which indicates how far the nobility is from the commoners. I'll take a moment to expand just how bad it is.

The US has Gini of 41, between that of Haiti and Argentina, according to World Bank. According to CIA it's worse – 47 (27th most unequal) between Madagascar and El Salvador. It's worse than Russia's and China's. Switzerland – a country that is in many ways similar to the US (federal system, huge decentralization, low taxes, gun culture) and known for great wealth, standard of living and banks hoarding Nazi gold has 28 and is 124th not far from such welfarist and socialist countries as Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria or Slovenia and Czechia. (by WB measure US has 41 and Switzerland has 32 – still bad)

Continuing...

We have the least democratic system in the western world – de facto an oligarchy with a political system that is incapable of introducing change that benefits the majority and protects a system established in the 18th century. It's a system that limits political expression by forcing people into big-tent platforms which then compete in a first-past-the-post system where extremes and negatives decide the outcome, and where disenfranchisement is a key tactic.

We have fragmentation of the country into many political entities that can be easily manipulated against each other (not just states) and a situation where the only unifying factor historically has been a war against an external threat. It's gotten to the point where programs marketed as major societal reforms are called a “war” – but probably this is a Freudian slip more than anything.

We have a lot of the wealth of the nobility offshored and locked into enterprises in other countries meaning that the commoners in America can't keep it hostage and demand change. Those enterprises pay low taxes in other countries and the profits are hidden into convoluted investment schemes all the while these enterprises earn primarily because of their influence over the American political system and through use of American military power – since that's how they enforce that other countries' commoners don't take over their investments as hostage. So Americans are paying taxes to support a military that guards the nobility's wealth without any of the taxes coming back to the country.

We have a monetary system that increasingly impoverishes the commoners and enriches the nobility especially as key goods like housing and education become ponzi schemes or investment bubbles crowding out regular people and limiting social mobility which is among the worst in the developed world.

We have a mentality of “enrich the military and scorn all other men” from the Crisis of the Second Century in ancient Rome while at the same time regular military personnel is somehow underfunded, kept as hostage through bad healthcare and education systems which often force poor people into military to be able to fund those and rewarded with “thank you for your service” and Veteran Affairs.

Finally...

We have a king that is dead and has been for a time. Every now and then some senile puppet comes out and mumbles something ineffectively to the thundering applause of one group of nobles and angry grunting of the other group of nobles but its all for show so that the commoners think there's still a king. That king is elected by a rigged dog-and-pony show that even more than the overall political system sardonically laughs in the face of the population no longer even trying to hide it's corruption.

And that's not counting a certain two strata in modern American society – the illegals who are de facto “slaves” who only exist thanks to the good will of their masters not ratting them out to the authorities, and the legals who are so in debt or so close to being in debt that they might as well be slaves.

History tells us that situations like those are beyond fucked up.

This is modern day America.

And what's worse American nobility really really wants the same to happen in Europe – which really terrifies me, because we have fought too many wars and revolutions to try and be just a little bit better and we know just how difficult it is.

And as a concluding remark:

Long time ago when Ronald Reagan was talking about “Evil Empire” – I'm old enough to remember that – he always claimed that he meant the Soviet Union. But that's not true.

And that's because Soviet Union couldn't be the Evil Empire. No empire in the process of slow agony which leads to peaceful dissolution can be called “evil”. Maybe it once was, but not when Reagan spoke about it.

Reagan made a Freudian slip. So when he was talking about the Soviet Union he was thinking about his beloved America.

And just to drive one more point.

In the 1980s the USSR had gone through death throes of the Soviet system. Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko – 70-somethings died within a year or two of each other replacing the Secretary General's seat. Gorbachev was of the “young guard” being 50-something. Then he led the country into its dissolution, although not intentionally.

In 2016 the US president could be a 70-something, an almost 70-something and another almost 70-something. This was repeated in 2020, only worse. What do you think is coming in 2024?