'When the American empire finally collapses, historians won't be stunned by the greed of the elite'

[sop]

21. Your post brought to mind something Aldous Huxley said:

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." The quote is from a 1962 speech ('The Ultimate Revolution') at the University of California, Berkeley.

Huxley believed that future dictatorships would not rely on brute force, but on psychological manipulation, propaganda, and "pharmacological" methods, like the drug "soma" in his novel ('Brave New World'), to create a society that is distracted, comfortable, and willingly subservient. At this point in history I would substitute "technical" (social media) for "pharmacological."