In the spring of 2004, Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond delivered a lecture entitled “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?” in which he discusses the plight of the Easter Islanders. It seems that1 the when the Polynesian people settled the island, it was covered in forest that they relied upon for their way of life. Over the course of their limited time on the island, they slowly forested their way to societal collapse despite the inherent obviousness of what they were doing; a classic application of the frog-in-boiling-water allegory.2
In the US, our Polynesian lumberjacks are facilitating a slow slide into fascism4; death by a thousand axe cuts.