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 It seems all governments / civilizations tend towards extreme corruption, no matter how lofty the original goals were. I think some type of revolution or collapse will be needed to roll things back at this point. 
 I agree. I've thought so for two decades now.  At first I thought it would be revolution, a civil war.  Now I think it will probably be rebuilt after WW3, but it remains to be seen by who and how corrupt they will be.  Probably every country was always corrupt, and my younger self was only naive.

I also have hope for a distributed and voluntary form of partial government, starting as a society (maybe a secret society) that evolves over time. But that seems so far off and intractable that the hope isn't very great. 
 Some kind of federation of small states seems like a good idea, which I thought was what the U.S. was supposed to be, literally. But I guess it's the centralized part that will always accumulate more and more power. 
 The number of people the government oversees is much too large. Even some of the states are too big; we need a completely fractionalized system that oversees, at a maximum, a city population. 
 Point to a place and time when government wasn't at least half comprised of the worst kind of corrupt individuals. Look at history in even relatively small republics, like the pre-revolutionary  American British colonies. Where was justice then? Perhaps a few good men were shining examples, but what about the remainder?