This should have been obvious by now. Cash rules everything around me.
Serious question: Are you in the US? Any Western European country?
There's a tendency for people in corrupt areas to assume the whole world works like that.
There’s a tendency for sheltered and privileged people to be aloof to the corruption all around them.
In high school, everyone knew exactly who to call if you got a DUI. 10k was the going price to get a certain lawyer who gets the case in front of a certain judge and however that worked, the charge was dropped to a moving violation. Kinda sick how the system works.
We all know monarchy is tyranny, but in that category there is quite a difference between a cult ruler with a bag of shrunken heads who is getting his orders from God vs. a stable, well managed, system in which the institutions basically function, including to some extent for the poor, and yet in which which the ruling class still basically dominate and exploit everything and everyone in order to enrich themselves and maintain their power.
The latter is a social malady, the former is completely chaotic. I think people are concerned that the US is resembling the latter less and less, and resembling the former more and more.
The United States of America
> There's a tendency for people in corrupt areas to assume the whole world works like that.
Exactly. I live in a corrupt area and start with the assumption that most of the world is corrupt.
