Sometimes you have to consider the processes generating the patterns. When it's millions of people, it's not so much culture or politics, as it is biology and physics.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
This is because a community has to function as a singular organism and that hive mind kicks in a lot more powerfully than our society is quite willing to acknowledge, with all the emphasis on the autonomy of the individual.
Consider that as the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking are like blood and the circulation system.
As such, the nervous system/government is centripetal, as it draws the focus of the community to issues to be jointly resolved.
While the circulation systems, of the body, or society, are fairly centrifugal, as resources are distributed around the larger entity, as well as absorbing and shedding energy and material with the larger ecosystem.
So these two dynamics play off each other. Too far to the extremes and one is tyranny, while the other is anarchy.
The problem of the West is that government was private once, but monarchy proved too centralized. Now the issue is private banking, given the feedback loop of compound interest creates a centripetal effect, by which those controlling the money can use it to extract ever more from the larger community.
The reality is that money functions as a contract, an accounting device, where the asset is backed by a debt and enables markets to function, as a medium of exchange.
Yet we have come to view it as a commodity to mine from the economy. The medium has become the message.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. Should they be mixed up, the system breaks down.
In order to save the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated. Long story short, but the capital markets could not function if the government didn't borrow up trillions in surplus investment money. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
That dynamic is what drives the West. The great flaw of democracy is there is no long term political vision possible, beyond the time frame of the next election, so it is the banks that have the real power and can buy all the politicians they need and scare off those they don't.
So the politicians and press end up as prostitutes to the banks and the military industrial complex is its trophy wife.
Which is not to say we should make government private again, but we need to make banking a public utility.
When all is said and done, in a couple hundred years, this age will be seen as private banking having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Remember, it wasn't so much democracy that finally killed monarchy, but the machine gun, in Work War 1. It will be messy.
