The country has collapsed several times, because of those things. The Civil War was the US collapsing over the rich landowners refusing to move away from slavery. The great depression was also a collapse of the old order, and ushered in the current MIC-based order.
The solution to the Civil War and slavery was Reconstruction, which was so successful that the rich rallied a counterrevolution to resuppress people. The solution to the great depression was the war economy and global looting that kicked off after WW2. Looting the planet with petrodollars has kept Americans complacent and happy enough til now but the rich have run out of places to loot other than home.
So now we’re back in crisis, perched on the edge of a new collapse. After several million or billion people are killed by disasters and genocide, things usually settle back into a prosperous mode for the survivors for a while until the stupid rich take over and collapse the system out of greed. Again.
It used to get recommended all over Stack Overflow, but I did really love reading Göedel Escher Bach. That book taught me to see math as a game or, equivalently, as purely exercises in shuffling symbols around, with intent.
That shift in outlook really unlocked the fun in math for me. I learned about category theory through Haskell shortly after, and got into number systems and the surreal numbers and quaternions after that. There’s so much neat math out there that the wall of calculus and linear alg really imposes right before all the good stuff.