Collapse of the American Empire

From CounterPunch:

All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.

In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse, also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire.

And after laying out four very persuasive arguments dealing with environmental degradation, economic meltdown, military overstretch, and domestic upheaval, the essay concludes with this depressing paragraph:

As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.

Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

Click here for the rest.

Sometimes I really do believe that ignorance is bliss. This essay is so disturbing to me because it does a good job of pulling together several strains of national belief that are all dangerous in and of themselves: together they spell disaster. I usually don't consider the synergistic effects of America's multiple psychoses because doing so is like crawling into a Sylvia Plath poem--it makes me flirt with a depression that would reduce the makers of Prozac to whimpering wussies in soiled diapers.

We really are in big fucking trouble, and the whole "everything's going to be okay" thing is starting to wear thin. America is headed toward a solid brick wall in a fiberglass body sports car at 120 miles per hour. Put on your seatbelts folks, because, apparently, nobody wants to stop the ride.

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