If you assume everything American is broken and sucks because it's supposed to suck and be broken, it makes perfect sense. Regret maximization.
So, basically, don't try to help an American. It won't work and they'll resent you. They want to fail, you're making more work for them; now they have to find an excuse to reject your help before they can comfortably fail. Simply secure yourself against their severe mental disturbance. Ten foot pole minimum.
Basically the game is to suck as much as possible without giving away the secret that the brokenness is intentional. E.g. if you are a Twitch streamer you can't load up Mario 1 and then die repeatedly to the first goomba. Too obvious. You have to pretend you're trying - you even have to jump over the first pit. Carefully succeed barely enough to keep folk watching, but otherwise fail at every opportunity.
Virtue signal: see how carefully I can ride this edge. Without, of course, looking so-called edgy. Very socially Sophisticated.
You're supposed to get as close to suicidal as possible without actually killing yourself. Can't feel remorse if you're dead. The complaints are all humblebragging - watch what they do, not what they say. The more they have to complain about, the more viciously they'll defend the status quo.
E.g. you can't derail an American train by putting little lips on the rails. Not because Americans don't want trains derailed, but because it has to look like an accident. Appearances must be maintained. The government won't pay you to just smash trains into each other. (Without government intervention you can't afford to run a train company America-style at all.)
Americans deliberately make their wives as shrewish as possible. If their kids are too well-behaved they needle and abuse them until they act up. If you don't raise your daughter to be an entitled whore you're doing it wrong, and Americans will get all up in your business about it. Especially if she's "dating" their son. If their boss accidentally treats them well, they throw tantrums until he's manipulated into retaliating. The schools are so bad and anti-educational only because they can't "accidentally" send the kid home covered in cigarette burns. Liberals know they're making themselves look retarded by telling obvious lies, but they're higher-status than conservatives because the con-jobs are only failing to tell lies because they can't quite bring themselves to mouth such blatant falsehoods; the flesh is capable but the spirit is weak.
Of course folk who are naturally terrible at games or life have an advantage. When they're unwatchably awful their Americanism performance looks a lot more authentic. If you hire folk who genuinely can't maintain a train, you better launder the intentional sabotage - the concrete damage genuinely is accidental.
That said Americans do seem to like to watch someone who should be winning and contributing to society suffer as much as possible and break as many things as they can reach. If you're highly competent, you can figure out new and improved ways to suck without actually dying, see?
The leaderboard is all about accepting as much failure and suffering as possible without accepting so much you quit, die, or reveal that you can actually succeed. E.g. someone accepts more pay only so they can alienate their wife and accept more stress without just whipping themselves like a flagellant.
Crime seems to a popular dump stat. While the ideal American accepts every hardship, they know it's not realistic. Getting into a neighbourhood with 'good schools' seems to be accepted as sacrificing few sacrifice-virtue-points in exchange for opening up a lot of capacity to sacrifice.
There are a few pockets of goodness in America, and they're dump stats. Folk want to suffer it but find it intolerable. I believe pedophilia will work out as such. Parents will desperately want to look the other way when a deviant rogers their 7-year-old's back door, but won't be able to bring themselves to actually do it. Not enough free suffering points.
That and the fact it would legitimize May-December e.g. a 14-year-old marrying a 41-year-old man. (Their SMV can decline in sync instead of doing a weird dance.)
Similarly there are pockets of psychopaths who fully reject American self-hating masochism. They contribute to America by adding to suffering but always have a reason for securing their own comfort and convenience. They also exploit ways you can pretend to suffer without getting caught being comfortable, analogous to being perceived to die in a videogame without actually dying. E.g. have a reverse-smurf League account which you only play while absolutely blitzed, to hide your real diamond account.
A lot of American 'decay' isn't decay. It's intentional innovation. They figure out a new way to make sabotage look like accidents, or they figure out a new way for accidents to occur without destroying the accident-generating system. Early, crude stuff like corporate welfare propping up consistently
unprofitable train companies is real old-fashioned at this point.
E.g. wokies know damn fine the darkies are incompetent. However, they first had to come up with sophisticated arguments showing that nobody could possibly know this particular darkie is incompetent, so they can hire them anyway without it looking like intentional self-sabtoage. I would say Progress is good! Can now derails dozens and dozens of trains without a lawsuit bankrupting the train company, because that's racist! They might have to hire a few white or east-asian men (under the table, as much as possible) to run the hazardous-materials trains, though. If it shows up in the news a second time they might be vulnerable to An Investigation. The idea is to be negligent without looking (officially) like negligence. Plus if the poisonous sludge end up in the countryside somewhere, how are you supposed to put it into e.g. fire retardants for worldwide distribution? Tsk tsk.
E.g. they realize they can 'accidentally' tell insecure biology labs to research better viruses. Oh, uh, ""oops."" How did that happen. No respectable person would admit out loud to seeing this coming, because that would mean admitting the labs are insecure. Innovation, see? Find vulnerability, exploit vulnerability. Don't have to worry about anyone shutting down the labs until we figure out what's going on - which would cause an absolute decline in failure and suffering. If gain of function gets banned, figure out how to do it without calling it gain of function. ("Is it a tank?")
De-"stigmatizing" pedophilia would allow allow virginal marriages, as above. Bzzzt. Bad innovation! No soup for you! It has to a strict increase in suffering, not merely a net increase. No wait, there's more: there are way more "pedophiles" who want horny virgin wives than there are, you know, pedophiles. Proportions all wrong.
It helps that American IQ is dropping precipitously - by biological standards - which is opening up previously unusable scams. If your audience is made of drooling morons then you don't have to carefully hide your sabotage, you can blatantly shoot yourself in the foot. If all your hires are AA hires then you don't have to perform elaborate ruses to hide your sabotage from HR (or vice-versa) you just let the AA employees hire as comes naturally to them. Competent sabotage cleverly executed is self-reinforcing.
The Jamestown colony was founded as pure, unadulterated Communism. However, they all nearly starved to death - you can't be Communist if you don't exist. All American history has been dreaming of returning to Jamestown but without the dying this time. Finally, scientists have come up with Wokism, which is almost indistinguishable. Approximately, have just enough slaves to keep the Communism running.
The American "renewable" energy business is a lot like a cruiseliner putting a hole in its hull so it can use the resulting flow of water to power a turbine. So clean! Input: water; output: water and power!
The point of building a cruiseliner in the first place was exactly so that it could be sunk.
In the meantime, there's an opportunity: Americans can fight to pump out the liner's bilges. Some like to be paid fabulously (far more than the power costs) so they can spend it on degenerative self-destruction. Others like to volunteer, doing it nearly for free. As long as nobody respectable can point out the connection between the perforated bulkhead and the fluid in the bilges, everything is fine. Lots of money to be made - which increases the suffering capacity, so you can take on more hardships. Hooray for everyone.
Still the American project is about putting as many holes in the hull as possible without actually sinking. You can't regret having died, you're already gone. All about new and improved bilge-pump techniques which allows the seals to more closely resemble swiss cheese. Of course they sometimes (defund the police) punch out one hole too many and have to hurriedly weld it shut again. Eventually they'll drop the welding iron and won't be able to snatch it back up before the water fries its circuits.
