The Compliance Machine: How Americans Learned to Stop Fighting

Americans are a usually defiant and sneaky lot. The national mythology celebrates rebellion, from the Revolution to the frontier to the counterculture. Yet something has shifted in the past fifty years, and the shift explains why domestic extraction has been so remarkably successful.

The marketing machine that built postwar America sold a specific vision: house, car, picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog. The American Dream was tangible, achievable, and just expansive enough to keep workers striving. It functioned as social control dressed in aspiration.

That dream is now thoroughly subverted by economic realities. Housing prices, car prices, food, healthcare, and a long list of other expense categories have put the traditional markers of middle-class success far out of reach for the majority. The median home price exceeds what median incomes can support. The average new car payment stretches budgets to breaking. Healthcare costs bankrupt families who thought they had done everything right.

The marketers adapted. When the big dream became impossible, they sold smaller ones. Eating Doritos. Drinking a Coke. The dopamine hit of a purchase, however trivial, replaces the satisfaction of building something lasting. Better yet, they use weight loss drugs like Ozempic to lure the overweight into a desirable body image at the expense of their last remaining dollars, or even credit card debt. The granular, individual view of success replaced the collective aspiration.

Education, once the ladder to prosperity, has become a debt-accumulation, stress-inducing life arc. Young people emerge with credentials and six-figure obligations, entering a labor market that does not value their preparation at the price they paid for it. The debt becomes a leash.

In all cases, the default setting being pushed by government and major corporations is sheepdog compliance with these adverse conditions. Continue working the low-paying job. Live in the substandard apartment. Drive the old used car, or finance something any reasonable person would say is out of your price range, because the monthly payments are small, even though you will pay for the car five times over the life of the loan.

Resignation and domination are the primary emotions driving the actions of daily life. This is not an accident. This is the domestic extraction model functioning exactly as designed.

South America's Long History of Imperial Interference and Cultural Suppression

South America currently consists of 12 sovereign nations, and Central America has seven. Almost all of their borders were established as a result of separation in the early 1800s from Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, while a few, like the relatively unknown Suriname and Guyana, gained independence later, in the 1960s and 1970s. Brazil is by far South America's most populous country, with approximately 213 million people, while Central America's largest country is Guatemala, with roughly 19 million.

[SUGGESTED IMAGE: Map of South American colonial territories circa 1800 showing Spanish, Portuguese, British, and Dutch possessions. Caption: "European colonial boundaries that shaped modern nation-states."]

Central and South America possess extremely long periods of indigenous development, with civilizations like the Inca, Maya, and Aztec representing tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution prior to European contact. The conquistadors who arrived beginning in 1492 encountered not empty wilderness but thriving societies with sophisticated agricultural systems, urban planning, and resource management.

The imperialist ambitions of greater resource control over populations viewed as "lesser" began with South America in the 1500s. European states had already concluded that the land they occupied could either be fought over, or truces called on borders between countries after centuries of war and conflict. With nowhere to go domestically, they naturally pursued exploration, and with exploration came extraction.

The Potosí Model: Extraction Perfected

The discovery of silver at Potosí in 1545 established the template for imperial resource extraction that persists to this day. Within 55 years, Potosí had grown to a population of 160,000, larger than London, Paris, or Madrid at the time.

The results were simple capitalist models applied to colonial enterprises: extract and ship various resources back to home countries in relatively raw forms, where further experimentation and stratification could be done to diversify product options and widen markets. The capitalist flywheel was put into devastatingly high output by the addition of slave labor during the 1500s-1700s, marking human abuses repeating for dozens of generations.

The Spanish Crown took one-fifth of all precious metals from the Americas. The encomienda system of forced indigenous labor, later replaced by the mita system of low-pay extraction, killed an estimated 8 million workers in the Potosí mines alone according to some historical accounts. Over 100,000 African slaves were shipped to Mexico between 1521 and 1650 to replace the indigenous population that had been decimated by disease and brutal working conditions.

If They Tell You We're Thriving, They're Lying

The most likely truth to Trump's affordability claim applies to himself and his family, followed by the long list of billionaires who have paid to hold court with him.

The decline of the United States is not an academic or theoretical abstraction. It is viscerally here, happening in real time, and without intervention, will continue. The most telling evidence for it is the expansion of U.S. reach into resource-rich but inhabitant-poor Venezuela, a South American region that serves as an emblematic part of the arc through history described above.

The Domestic Extraction: $79 Trillion Transferred Upward

The mirror today derives from the national order in the United States. According to the RAND Corporation's 2025 analysis, $79 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% since 1975. This figure has grown from the $47-50 trillion documented in the original 2020 study.

Meanwhile, where no logical nor balanced explanation proves otherwise, families struggle to pay for health insurance, food, housing, transportation, and a long list of services which otherwise should be distributed equitably (even if just based on effort or direct contribution to the wealth generation process). The contrast is so stark, and the difference gap so wide, there is no need for advanced-study analysis by experts in any field to see the enormous disparity right before our eyes.

The Current Situation: Venezuela as the New Extraction Zone

We are either stupid or blind to tolerate the wealth distribution curve in front of us. There is no spread of superior intelligence, nor a Divine Right of Kings, nor a theological mandate that any reasonable person can cling to in order to justify the disparity.

South and Central America are now in the sights of Monroe-doctrine revivalists, being puppeted by Trump. Invasion of our neighboring continent makes sense because a growing dissent in North America makes the extractive pattern that has simultaneously functioned as a boot on the neck of South Americans while massively enriching its Imperial overlords for the past six centuries visible.

Venezuela's Oil: The Prize

Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves at approximately 303 billion barrels, representing 17-18% of global supply. This exceeds Saudi Arabia's 267 billion barrels by a significant margin.

Despite holding the largest reserves on Earth, Venezuela produces only about 1 million barrels per day, less than 1% of global output. At its peak in the 1970s, the country pumped 3.5 million barrels per day. This production decline, caused by decades of mismanagement, underinvestment, and international sanctions, represents precisely the kind of "broken" infrastructure that invites imperial intervention.

The pattern of abuse of the resource-rich Central-South American region cannot be overlooked or underplayed. Trump has stated that U.S. oil companies will spend "billions" to rebuild Venezuela's infrastructure. Francisco J. Monaldi, director of the Latin America energy program at Rice University, estimates it would take at least a decade and investments of more than $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela's oil infrastructure.

The Endgame: Currency, Control, and the Return to Land

Throughout history, until relatively recently, when countries run out of space, they seek to occupy and control, with hegemonic intent, the people in other countries. Those people serve as indigenous labor for primarily resource-extractive priorities. Sophistication is never achieved in this state, because the population becomes unmanageable and uncontrollable the more educated and equilateral it gets with its oppressing imperialist occupier.

We achieved the same outcome for the indigenous peoples of North America within two hundred years of British conquest of the eastern part of the continent.

We are now on track to have mass population disillusionment towards the inequitable transfer of wealth to the top 1% of Americans so severe that it directly threatens their very existence, and the stability of the currency which enables attribution and comparison of their wealth to the remainder of the population.

The Currency Question

Imagine if coordinated and severe disengagement by the American people from this wealth-extraction normalization were to take hold. That imaginary scenario is more than a passing thought to those in the top 1%.

Once that happens, how will wealth be measured? Once again, like it was by Europeans for dozens of centuries, it will be land ownership and utility. Extractive processes can still work in South America and the farther-North Canada and Greenland. Much remains to be harvested, pulled from the earth, stripped and sold for its relative value compared to the assets, economy, and markets of the rest of the world.

The irony will take hold as the devaluation of the currency used to demarcate the ultra wealthy will happen just in time to enable cryptocurrency to stabilize as the wealthy's coin of power among one another, representing their locus of control once again: tethering to extractive means and forces controlling a much more easily conquered area rich in resources amenable to extraction.

Conclusion: The Cultural Endgame

The United States took a longer path than colonial Spain. It built constitutional structures, democratic institutions, and an innovation-focused economy that delayed the extractive endgame. But there is only so much wealth that is to be accumulated through innovative means before resources come into play again.

The comparison of South America's current fate to where North America has deliberately taken a longer, more innovation-focused, more democratic approach reveals the same ultimate destination: When domestic extraction reaches its political limits, imperial powers look outward.

But there is another comparison worth making, and it concerns what happens to populations after centuries of extraction.

South America today is characterized by rampant subversion, cultural avoidance of government, and deep distrust of institutions. This is not a character flaw of Latin peoples. This is the predictable cultural outcome of 500 years of being extracted. When every institution, from colonial administration to national government to international finance, has functioned primarily to extract wealth from working populations, those populations learn to distrust every institution. They develop elaborate informal economies. They treat official channels as traps. They assume that anything presented as beneficial is actually designed to exploit them.

This is where the resignation and domination model leads. The American compliance machine, the marketing apparatus that has convinced working people to accept unacceptable conditions, is training a population for the same outcome. Each generation that accepts stagnant wages, impossible housing costs, crushing education debt, and granular consumer pleasures as substitutes for genuine prosperity moves closer to the South American cultural condition.

The question is whether Americans retain enough of their defiant, sneaky, norm-rejecting spirit to recognize debt as fake oppression, to see the compliance model for what it is, and to refuse participation in their own extraction.

If they do, the South American fate is avoidable. The institutional distrust, the parallel economies, the assumption that all official channels are designed to exploit, these are not inevitable. They are the cultural residue of extraction that has gone on too long without resistance.

If they do not, if the resignation and domination model succeeds in breaking the defiant spirit that the national mythology celebrates, then the trajectory is clear. Americans will join their southern neighbors in the post-extraction cultural condition: surviving rather than thriving, distrusting rather than participating, evading rather than engaging.

How reasonable is it that the wealthiest nation in human history, one that has seen $79 trillion flow from the hands of working people to a fraction of a percent of its population in just fifty years, would decide that the best use of its military power is to seize the oil reserves of a neighboring continent?

The answer is written in 500 years of hemispheric history. The question is whether Americans will read it before they become indistinguishable from the populations their government now seeks to control.

The defiant spirit is still there, buried under decades of compliance training. The sneaky, norm-rejecting, authority-questioning character that built the country has not been fully extinguished. But each year of resignation, each acceptance of domination dressed as necessity, each small pleasure substituted for genuine prosperity, erodes what remains.

South America shows us the destination. The path we are on leads there. The only variable is whether enough Americans recognize the extraction in time to refuse it.

Data sources: RAND Corporation (WR-A516-2, 2025), OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2025, U.S. Energy Information Administration, World History Encyclopedia, Library of Congress, Encyclopedia.com