You went off the deep end there a little I think. I’m supposed to be blaming the US because my agenda is to keep the system running? Look, of course you’re right that exploitation was not a US invention - my article did not claim it was. My account of the behavior of the Spanish should make that clear. Your straw-man caricature of my argument doesn’t really address the core thesis here. The US was a unique child of the colonial era and it embodied in its cultural development the expansionist ideology of its inception, infused with some unique elements (rejection of tradition and authority for example), the origins of which I outlined. I’ve no doubt you’re right that an element of cultural insecurity in relation to its upstart status is in the mix too. Its exploitative character was not its own invention but an amplification and continuation of its foundational principle. The fact that it was uniquely successful in exploiting the land and resource bonanza of the New World then made it into the empire whose ideology of unconstrained “free enterprise” would become uniquely influential in the 20th century. That ideology — not purely American but particularly and characteristically so — which perpetually seeks to expand and consume, now drives a kind of self consumption since there are no more resource bonanzas left to exploit. This is particularly evident in the US. The first paragraph should make it clear that blaming Americans is not the point however: everyone in the affluent countries of the world is part of this. It's about how we got here, and how the New World resource bonanza of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ultimately led to Credit Default Swaps, VC culture and other contemporary pathologies. I won’t dispute though that this very broad outline sketch overlooks much that deserves to be explored, including the broader context of the British imperialism. But that is way beyond the scope of a 2,600 word polemical article on medium.