Comment by snickerbockers

>The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.

Reminds me the latter three dune novels. Frank Herbert had this idea he was exploring about how the inevitable end-state of society is this sort of stalemate between opposing bureaucratic factions which have become optimized towards preventing their own destruction to the point that they aren't capable of doing anything other than prolonging their own existence.

It reminds me of the Republicans and the democrats in America which have become utterly unresponsive towards their own voterbases because they have already rigged the political system to prevent any viable competitors from displacing them but in general it seems like the whole of western civilization has reached this point over the last 50 years or so, because just about any country which is referred to as 'western' has a set of very obvious problems on the horizon with very obvious solutions being stalled by a ruling class which is concerned with maintaining its own existence at all costs even if it has to bring down the entire nation with it.