A Time of Barracks Emperors

What you notice, when things are really starting to go south, and the rush to the bottom of the chaos-heap has begun, is, that major players start taking hits--sultans get unexpectedly strangled, well-regarded pedophile pimps are murdered in jail, by a seemingly universal conspiracy: It's as if nobody anymore has a retirement plan. You get to the top--and crash and burn. It seems to be an intrinsic and ineluctable flaw in the system which, at a certain point (in a devolution which is to be measured by the amount of the national budget allotted to secret and unaccountable military expenditure), necessarily results in the decimation (but, interestingly, not the annihilation) of its own top-level management personnel. It all seems,  in brief, at once maniacally and rock-stupidly game-like. Like somewhere there's a score being kept, and obese entities smoking expensive seegars are betting shares of stock against one another. Ugh. These are nightmares I have when I try to imagine the Deep State.