Before getting deeper into my rant, I must reiterate that we are living the most comfortable/indulgent lives that the world has ever allowed and while it is trivially easy to argue that the only way from here is down, I'm the last person to give up on the idea that we should be satisfied enough to stop looking for significant improvement. My only qualification paraphrases H L Mencken and admits that the many opportunities for improvement are increasingly entangled in complex webs of interdependence and hence are not amenable to simple solutions.

In the half century since Eisenhower's prescient warning about the rise of the Military Industrial Complex, many comparable Industrial Complexes have entrenched themselves in the fabric of our ever more borderless dominant culture. While all of them demand the vigilance of an informed citizenry, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the Legal Industrial Complex is the one with by far the greatest need to be brought to heel and the one with the correspondingly most potent ways of avoiding scrutiny and penalising dissent.

This is not the place for the full analysis of the problem, so I should only highlight a few of the most objectionable consequences of creating a society in which legal practitioners twist the political process so as to ensure their own enrichment:

• way too many of our most talented 18 year olds are sucked into its indoctrination program in unapologetic pursuit of financial reward;
• it has ensnared the Entertainment Industrial Complex into allowing a dominant role for drama which is so often little more than blatant promotion of the Legal worldview;
• unquestioning submission to the Rule of Law has taken on a sacred quality and become a pillar of resurgent authoritarianism; and
• the retribution it can wield unchecked is the guise of Contempt of Court makes religions' censures for blasphemy and sacrilege pale in comparison and ensures silence where there should be passionate debate.