Taking the rewards of change for granted, Americans—like the Soviets at their time—do not understand what change entails. Gazing into the rear-view mirror (of religion, history, politics, economy) in the hope of seeing where change might take them, they get the illusion that they are in the driver’s seat. In fact, they relinquish control to the political class, which does the actual steering, per instructions of the “rich and famous.” In the most individualistic society on Earth, the individual gave up power. In a society emphasizing information and knowledge, machines get smarter and individuals grow stupid. The stupidity of assuming skewed values and of living beyond means scales up as a characteristic of the USA. Together with entitlement, corruption, and opportunistic engineering of reality, stupidity is the outcome of a system faking change because it is afraid of it.

“In America you have a right to be stupid — if you want to be, and you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.”
John Kerry, US Secretary of State, February 26, 2013
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