Let me see if I can come up with some Achilles Heels for western "democracy"...

Okay...

1. All decisions are normally made on the basis of money rather than on the basis of achieving the overall common good (of people, the environment, animal species, etc.) THAT is the number 1 problem in the world right now. That is the greatest threat to all life as we know it.

2. the electoral sytem doesn't work properly anymore, because huge monied interests are controlling the political parties. This results in political parties that don't really represent the public anymore, and the public is helpless to do anything about it.

3. the main avenues of media information (TV, radio and print) are controlled by a few huge centralized monied interests as well, who have agreed pretty much on setting common objectives (profit and control). This effectively results in a public that is ill-informed and mainly hears a centralized pre-digested propaganda line rather than a genuinely open debate on important issues.

4. (a) the modern medical industry is geared more toward selling drugs and making money than toward finding cures and teaching people how to live a healthier lifestyle.

4. (b) the modern food industry is geared toward selling genetically engineered, processed, and chemically altered food that looks good and has a long shelf life! That same food has about 1/5 of the nutritional content per volume that food used to have only a few decades ago. So we are eating like pigs, but not getting proper nutrition from the food while we do it. This results in a North American population that is suffering record levels of overweight, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other deadly illnesses.

5. the drug laws are geared mainly toward punishing people and regulating supply rather than toward helping cure addiction, reducing poverty, and educating people so they will be less inclined to get addicted in the first place.

6. In communities...we plan our communities more as if we were trying to make CARS happy than people! This is unwise. ;-) Again, it has to do with profit. (and sheer laziness)

7. We value money more than real things. (Money is a made-up thing that everyone has agreed to pretend is real, and now everyone is enslaved by it.)

8. We have created a military-industrial system that needs to keep producing armaments in order to perpetuate itself and employ all the people who are in it. We cannot justify building all those armamaments unless we have continual conflict or threat of conflict in the world. This means we have to find new enemies every time an old one ceases to be viable. And that, in a nutshell, is where this ridiculous war with the Muslims came from. It had to be arranged to fill up the vacuum that was left when the Cold War ended!

Remember the "Peace Dividend" that we were all supposed to enjoy after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Ha! It never happened. You know why? It would have mostly put the military-industrial complex out of business....and that simply could not be allowed to happen, because those guys are NOT going to yield their control of this society. A new enemy will ALWAYS be found...or invented.