y'know what it's kind of giving for me? there's a bit in one of the hitchhiker's guide books where a planet's civilization goes completely belly up because they have the bright idea of shipping off into space 1/3 of the population that did "noncritical" sorts of jobs and then everyone dies because it turns out they were pretty important in the social ecosystem. like amerikkkan civilizational collapse won't be traceable to any particularly profound anti- -- from the western perspective -- messianic event in history but rather the simple fact that society relies on people codependently laboring according to correct institutional process knowledge.