State power leverages private wealth, which is the systemic source of soaring inequality: $5 million spent on lobbying and campaign contributions can generate $100 million in private gains. Since few have $5 million to invest in influencing the state to serve private interests, the super-wealthy become wealthier. The state has no mechanism for recognizing that the state itself and the super-wealthy elite are the root problems. The state is not a self-aware system; rather, it is a trial-and-error mechanism that preserves existing solutions as it processes competing claims for its attention and powers. The state has no way to recognize that its own concentration of power is now the source of systemic destabilization. This is the core structural flaw in the state.

Viewed through the geopolitical filter, states fail as a result of war, conquest or bolts from the blue such as pandemics or drought. But if we remove this filter, we find that the decay of the domestic economic, political and social orders is the decisive factor. States fail when the domestic economy no longer generates enough surplus to fund the state and the parasitic elites that have come to dominate the state.