> but things don't change because of injustice or a corrupt system

Not directly, but indirectly. Because people stop thinking about right and wrong, the reason not to commit crime is so you won't get caught. And you can't do anything at scale if everyone steals everything they think they can get away with.

Stuff like building the power grid, the highway system, or the telephone network is just ... forget it, that's a bygone era. The best you can hope for is to be able to maintain it, but even that gets more and more expensive as the stealing increases. People hire their friends and co-ethnics who are incompetent but who will back their interests, then you have a mix of thievery and incompetence together.

Then imagine this bureaucracy of incompetent and self-interested buffoons is tasked with determining how hard it would be to invade Iran - they're going to say it's easy because that's what their superiors want to hear.

And that's where things actually change, when the state is smashed against a foreign enemy that is able to consume them. US Navy loses control over international trade routes, dollar collapses as it becomes apparent that the treasury is not going to pay back the debt as they no longer have a military to rob anyone else. Then civil war.