The American Empire is deteriorating. It’s been going downhill for
decades. The descent is likely to continue, alleviated irregularly by
policies that retard the decline or even reverse it for a time.
The general pattern set by declines of previous empires is occurring in
this country. There have been at least 215 empires in the last 5,000 years.
They have all declined and fallen, as will the American Empire.
The IDEA that there is an American Empire is not widely recognized by the
general public. It’s not taught in the public school’s history books.
Scholars still debate it. American leaders spread other myths like
exceptionalism that obscure the concept and prevent the public from realizing
it.
If the public doesn’t grasp that there is an American Empire, they cannot
understand the idea that this empire is declining and headed for greater and
greater failure.
The difficulty in understanding both empires and their decline is their
complexity and variation within type. Several factors are present operating
concurrently, and this obscures causation. No two cases are exactly the same.
An article by J.R. Fears suggests the theory of
Herodotus. It’s a starting point. He endorses the theory of Herodotus. The
pertinent passage is this:
“Herodotus believed that there were invariable laws to the rise and fall
of empires. Empires rose and fell—as they still do today—because of
individual decisions made by individual leaders.
“The greatest mistake made by those in power, like Darius, was the sin of
hybris. That Greek word means ‘outrageous arrogance.’ Hybris (and that is the
way it should be transliterated) is the outrageous arrogance that marks the
abuse of power. Only those invested with enormous power can commit the sin of
hybris. Hybris is the imposition of your will, at all costs. The Greeks
believed that hybris was preceded by ate or moral blindness that
makes you believe that you can do anything you want to and there will be no
consequences from either Gods or men. It was this hybris that led Darius to
undertake a preemptive war against Athens. It was his moral blindness that
believed he would never know defeat. He ignored all the warnings that the
Gods sent him because he felt so secure in his power.”
He then asserts that this factor has been operating in America since the
fall of the USSR in 1990.
This is a helpful theory. It focuses on the empire’s leadership and their
decisions. It examines why they make erroneous decisions that undermine the
empire: abuse of power, arrogance (hybris or hubris), attempts to impose
one’s will no matter what the costs are, and a moral blindness underlying the
desire to dominate and impose one’s system. The hybris and belief in one’s
own superiority and rightness lead the leaders to ignore all warnings and
evidence to the contrary.
There is a necessary condition for the empire to be vulnerable to decline,
which Fears pinpoints: “Only those invested with enormous power can commit
the sin of hybris.” The empire cannot decline and fall unless the political
system has already concentrated enormous power at its apex, in just a few men
or even one man. Misuse of power can’t occur without the power being present.
This is a fault of the American system of government. The checks and balances
have failed. The check provided by the American public and electorate has
failed. Power is concentrated at the top.
This concentration of power is a necessary condition for failure. Is it
sufficient? Does the very concentration of power induce the hybris? Does that
concentration of power attract the most arrogant candidates as prospective
leaders? There is an excellent chance that it does, in which case the system
selects the very men and women most likely to cause its downfall.
Why does the concentration of power occur? This is not hard to understand
(see here andhere).
It is inherent in the political dynamics of any government except
self-government that has continuous accountability.
Why does moral blindness occur? Why do men think themselves to be gods?
The seed of this failing is always present in human beings. Why does it take
root and grow? Does the concentration of power itself enhance the corruption
as Lord Acton thought? Perhaps so. But I suspect that there is more to it.
When the empire rises and its political power increases, there is an
accompanying alteration in how religion and philosophy are thought of. Power
and domination exercised by mortals come to be greatly respected, feared and
even venerated. Religion and philosophy are deformed or newly-invented to
suit the empire and its striving, and this feeds back to encourage and
support moral blindness in which men and the empire replace gods.
This process permeates society, which is being weakened in any event by
the undue exercises of power from the political center. Consequently, a
deterioration in morals sets in that is driven both by the perverse economic
incentives caused by the empire’s power being applied perversely and by
religious-philosophical concepts that in one way or another rationalize and
support the empire.
There is yet more to the story of an empire’s decline and fall.
The knowledge of truth and the desire for truth are casualties of the
processes of power growth, power concentration and power misuse. The
competition for power sees to that. This competition ignites corruption that
permeates the system. Rivalries come to the fore. Sectarian proponents
routinely lie, mislead, twist the truth and propagandize. Independent sources
of truth are bought off and become shills. Truth is suppressed and distorted.
Confusion rises.
Growth in power of the empire accompanies more legalities and more
attempts at controlling matters that are best left alone and uncontrolled.
Consequently, the enormous powers of the governing bodies of the empire can
no longer be managed rationally by the central leaders. Even the actual
administration of these powers by underlings and bureaus cannot be known or
managed by those at the top.
Given the complexity and the overly broad scope of government, leaders
necessarily are prone to make mistaken decisions. The distortion and/or
absence of truth has an independent negative effect on decision-making.
Leaders even come to believe their own fabrications.
Some leaders will appear to be and actually be rash as they attempt to cut
through the fog. Others will appear to be and actually be indecisive,
wavering, inconsistent and dithering. Some candidates for the leadership will
offer extreme remedies as solutions to control what are processes out of
control. Others will offer simple-minded remedies that betray their ignorance
of what’s actually going wrong and why it’s going wrong. Yet others will
counsel war and more war or else demand even greater powers.
America today is subject to these processes of decline. They are
irreversible. They are built into the system.
