Before the Collapse

Introduction
I hope everyone read Prof Jared Diamond's essay in last weekend's New York Times. In it, he listed 5 major reasons why nations and civilizations collapse. He also pointed out that collapse often happens quickly and without warning. Although most of the 5 symptoms are observable in the United States today, Prof Diamond thinks our fate is not a certainty. People have the intelligence to avoid an otherwise likely outcome, if they use it.

Introduction

I hope everyone read Prof Jared Diamond's essay in last weekend's New York Times. In it, he listed 5 major reasons why nations and civilizations collapse. He also pointed out that collapse often happens quickly and without warning. Although most of the 5 symptoms are observable in the United States today, Prof Diamond thinks our fate is not a certainty. People have the intelligence to avoid an otherwise likely outcome, if they use it.

Diamond summarizes 5 common conditions:

"When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case."

These can be restated in 3 major groups: environment, foreign relations and domestic governance. I have made climate change and environmental damage one larger category, the environment. Foreign wars and trade come under the general heading of relations with other national powers, or international relations. The remaining factor, the various forms of societal response, are encapsulated in governance. Except for naturally occuring environmental factors, most of the causes of collapse are human activities; i..e., we bring it on ourselves.

It was my view at least since the middle 1980s that the United States was becoming a Third World Country (or TWC). Now I believe the United States has earned that dubious status. It may not seem the U.S. is a TWC, since the U.S. possesses the most powerful military and the world's 1st or 2nd largest economy. But, China has an economy about the same size as that of the U.S., and we still consider it a TWC. Size and power alone do not define a TWC, or a First World Country (FWC). TWCs are characterized more by their domestic conditions, their governance, than by their foreign relations. The United States became a TWC in virtue of having the world's largest separation between the rich and poor together with the callous policies that made it so and keep it that way. With the election of a conservative government, that gap grows larger every day. Moreover, the conservative authorities under the Great White Bandit's leadership have a distinctly authoritarian tone. What makes a country Third World is a characteristic, colonial attitude its rulers have toward the ruled. Such places exist only for the benefit of the Masters; nothing else matters.

Imperialism exists at many levels and always involves committing the three deadly sins leading to collapse. This is the natural result of the stance taken by the rulers: empires exist to pleasure their masters. Such masters feel free to abuse the resources and people they rule. They are not concerned about the environment. In their arrogance, they assume foreign peoples are less than human, so ripe for exploitation. Nor do they feel any loyalty to their own kind, for the rulers almost always identify themselves as gods or descended from the gods. This unconcern for ordinary people is always the undoing of Empire.

It's the same with a greedy petite bourgeois who owns a small store. Such people belong to the National Federation of Independent Busisnesses (NFIB), an organization of the far right in today's America. This sort of owner feels entitled to huge profits and benefits, even if employees are wanting in many or most of the necessities of life. This sort of business is especially mean to its customers, as it thinks nothing of selling defective and dangerous goods at the highest possible prices. Half-truths and outright lies are stock in trade for such operations. Very often these businesses deal outside the law. Under Imperialism, the bottom layer of society is the same as the top; a corrupt society is corrupt at every scale.

When we see the United States engaged in Imperialism, this is not an aberration or a failure of sight. It is a reflection of the entire society, top to bottom. The Great White Bandit is the logical result of that society. The only to get rid of the problems is to cure the entire society. You cannot cure the patient suffering metastatic cancer by cutting out a piece of malignancy here or there.

Prof Diamond concludes his essay in the hope people will use their intelligence to change the conditions leading to drastic results. I agree that the results are avoidable, if we are willing to take the cure. Unfortunately, history shows that people seldom take the doctor's advice.