Watching this embarrassment of a TikTok congressional hearing has made me want to put into words something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Specifically, it makes me want to articulate why I think American society is quite literally about to collapse. And no, it’s not 9dashline’s EROEI take.
Part 1: Laziness and Priorities
I think it’s clear to anyone who’s observed American society in any shape or form that the number one motivator for Americans is wealth. As in, Americans want to make the most amount of money possible with the least amount of effort. Now, this isn’t really an American-specific thing, as I’m sure that we can all agree that every person of every culture wants this as well, but what makes this killer to America is how conducive society is to this mindset.
Let’s take the whole semiconductor farce as an example. Grandpa Joe wants to bring semiconductors back to America by giving companies like Intel money. What’s the most important part of Intel? The research division, no doubt. Then, you would think that these people, whom Grandpa Joe terms as “vital to national security” would be paid the big bucks, right? Well, let’s quickly take a look at the salaries! 100k-300k, not bad…. Until you literally realize that working a coding desk-monkey job at Amazon or Google without any sort of college education and only a little bit of skills would net you just as much or more. Or if you’re a bit smarter you go work for a prop trading firm and make almost double the max salary of a semiconductor researcher as a starting salary.
Did I mention to do semiconductor research you need a PhD? In other words an entire 4-8 extra years of schooling to end up getting paid the same amount or even less? All while working more hours? Did I mention some people at Google literally get paid 500k a year to work 20 hours a month? Lol. Lmao even.
The craziest thing to me is that this is all just in the open. Something like 50-75% of PhD students in the US are foreigners. Why? Because these people are much easier to exploit. Americans can just screw off and go get that desk monkey job while that option isn’t as open to an average student visa holder.
The most important thing is none of these companies that pay this much salary truly contribute that much value to the advancement of society. Why does China crack down so much on tech companies like Tencent? It’s because top leaders correctly don’t see these companies as innovators. Tech companies like Amazon and Google just look for the best way to extract money out of consumers, what do they actually contribute to society? Prop trading firms are even more ridiculous, their goal is just to scam each other as hard and fast as possible in a cooperative masturbatory game they call "market making." The truly impressive of American society usually end up at these places, contributing little to no actual value to society.
To be honest, this isn’t even the most egregious example. As in, semiconductor researchers are unpaid compared to tech and quant workers, but they’re still paid handsomely and aren’t exactly pitiful. However, these sort of prioritizations show the institutional rot in American society.
An illustrative example of this is the teaching profession. Compared to the education required, American teachers are paid extremely poorly. American culture, furthermore, encourages children to disrespect and look down on teachers and other people of authority (I’ll expand on this aspect of American “dissidence” later). In short, these conditions end up forcing out teachers that are actually good and end up only producing uncaring and poor teachers. This perpetual race to the bottom ends up degrading every aspect of American society. Poor conditions create poor teachers which create uneducated masses which leads to a degradation of American society.
In essence, my advice to anyone living in America is to game the system, make your money, and GTFO.
Part 2: Accountability
Pretty much everything I talked about in part 1 can actually be fixed rather simply. It literally just requires the government to put down money with specific goals in mind.
The true problem is that Americans have no accountability.
One of the most hypocritical things I’ve seen out of this Ukraine war has been the two-faced way Americans look at accountability.
Americans keep screaming about making ordinary Russians suffer with sanctions so they maybe overthrow their government. Or screaming about banning Russian athletes from events for their government’s actions. Yet, whenever the American government’s crimes come up, it’s always “oh, it’s Trump’s fault” or “oh, the CIA is so evil!” But isn’t America the “democratic” society? As in, shouldn’t they hold themselves even more accountable as compared to the people of the “dictatorship” that is Russia?
But nope! Americans shirk from it. They don’t genuinely believe anything their government does is actually their fault. And as an extension, they don’t believe in any personal accountability. They complain about how their companies “privatize the profits and socialize the losses,” but don’t they do pretty much the exact same thing? They take all the benefits of being American but don’t take the losses. In other words, America is a society of HYPOCRITES.
The so-called “liberals” in the United States love to talk about homeless people and how they should be helped. But, when you want to build any sort of housing anywhere near them, these so-called “liberals” will deny it because “not in my backyard!” (NIMBY). This is literally why San Francisco is the utter shithole that it is. Because of complete hypocrisy by even the most “left-leaning” people in the United States. I don’t even want to talk about the “right-wingers.”
Americans love to act tough and pretend like they have an impact. “Oh, we would totally overthrow our government if they became tyrannical and stuff.”
But, they don’t. There’s this sort of indescribable fear in American society. They’re too scared to do shit. Every single American has been brainwashed into thinking that they have to be peaceful, and they’ll totally have an impact! How much impact did stuff like BLM protests/riots actually have on American society? Literally none. On a tangent, there’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy about how these “protests” are viewed. A group of protestors literally escorted into the Capitol by the police getting a bit rowdy is somehow an “insurrection” and a “devastating attack on the country.” Lol!
It’s totally systematic, too. There’s a reason why doves like Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are glorified while the numerous radicals that did a large part of the work are totally ignored. Oh and on a side note, how much did the protestors actually achieve in getting civil rights for black people in the United States versus how much was it just the government wanting to draft more people to go to Vietnam? Remember the Americans freed the black slaves so they could get more soldiers during the civil war, too.
This fear of accountability is why the elites, including those in the American Congress, can literally pillage the country and nobody cares. And also why the lack of priorities I mentioned above will never be fixed.
Perhaps the fear of accountability is because Americans are too afraid to admit that they themselves just suck as people. I don’t know anyway, but there’s no fixing it.
Modern day America reminds me of the last days of empires like the Romans, the Qing, the Song, and so on. In other words, I think they’re fucked!
Sorry, for the rant, maybe I’ll go over this again sometime and revise it into a more coherent argument.
