While I agree with the general sentiment, we should remember that while things might seem bad now, the general state of things for the average middle-class West

While I agree with the general sentiment, we should remember that while things might seem bad now, the general state of things for the average middle-class Westerner is unquestionably better than at any time in history. Just half a century ago we a decade of crushing world war, and before that (in America) crushing civil war, and not that long before that kingdoms and tyranny, and things go way downhill past that. Now that's not to say that everything is peachy, that things can't be improved, or that we shouldn't strive to do so. I guess Stross's question is, can things be improved given the current system? I don't know. Some days I suspect that human pettiness, fallibility, tribalness, and forgetfulness will doom us to forever repeating a cycle of violence and revolution. On a side note, sometimes I feel that America, despite our relatively prosperous position in history, is on the knife's edge of falling over into a blatant Minority-report-ish surveillance/police state. Look how fast it happened to other countries in history that didn't have the overwhelming military power and surveillance infrastructure that America has in place today. What would it take for the country to tip over the edge? Could we stop it if it happened? Would we want to? (Apropos: today on NPR they had a quote from Brennan at his hearing where he said, without a hint of irony, something along the lines of, "drone strike killings of Americans will never be used for people who have committed crimes in the past; only for people who pose a threat to America in the future.")