America in the
Dust Bin of History
Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: “ ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!’
Revelation 18:10
For a long time in history now, those who study the pathway of mankind have had a certain predilection for considering the process of the political in terms best left to the Buddhists and naturalists. From the ancient city of Babylon, which ruled with a mighty iron fist, but still fell to the higher sophistication of the Meado-Persians to Rome’s eventual development of the modern day United Kingdom, historians and the like have viewed history in “circle of life” terms. Mighty kingdoms and the men who ruled them have a bell curve existence: rising, cresting, falling. It matters little if the cause is economic, cultural or ecological, the end result is the same: it is a long and winding road to the end.
Today, there are many who see the same encroachment problems in the future of the United States. Challenges that face the nation are often viewed as a smoldering, yet containable fire. Competing world demographics would seem to have painted a bulls eye on the backs of the American way of life, thus not so much conquering the nation in an old fashioned invasion type scenario, but instead, whittling down the public finances of America and forcing an uptick in retirees versus the number of workforce persons. China, as an example, continues to flex unusually powerful muscles all over the world and will create a situation of economic superiority over America by the year 2027 if current trends continue.
As for climatic change, considering also the increase in powerful earthquakes all around the world in diverse places, a final pay day could be less than a century away. I loathe to even consider the fact that there are major fault lines in America just waiting to crack and cause a type of chaos that could go way beyond economic strife, as we have seen in Haiti and now also Chile. There is also a major undersea fault line shelf that runs parallel to the northern west coast, that if tampered with naturally or perhaps influenced in nefarious ways, could cause a tsunami that would cripple half of America. While we concentrate on the much shorter time lines of say, withdrawal of troops from Iraq, it is easy to loose sight of the long term storm that could be building in our own backyard.
But let’s consider that perhaps this is not the case. Let’s consider that perhaps the history of nations is actually more like a Toyota. Sudden acceleration into a blinding crash in the twinkling of an eye could actually be the truth of history. Someone somewhere (sic) once said they would come like a thief in the night, and it could well be that such a scenario is not at all that uncommon.
The inner workings of a great power are less like the business model of the tree that works from the top and spreads out toward the bottom and more like the workings of old style printed circuits, but with much less order. In fact, they operate in percentages of order, some greater than others, and get by day by day based on the competencies of the people who run them.
Such a system is in a constant state of flux, merely due to its human element. In the same way that a small business runs the rapids month to month of financial integrity, these organizations (major world powers included) teeter on the brink of going critical. There can also come a swift time when the power finds itself past the point of no return, being too big to fail can actually come back to haunt an entire nation overnight. All it takes is the wrong card at the bottom of the stack to suddenly weaken and die and the whole house comes down.
Unfortunately for historians, short stories are anathema. It lends much more credence to the position of an historian if they can give long term reasons and rules for the collapse of a nation than to simply state that the roots fell ill and killed the rest of the tree. This doesn’t make for good copy, or vilification of the historian’s position and therefore most of what is explained as history is somewhat revisionist in its attempts to explain and delineate cause and effect of most any major happening that is textbook worthy.
The truth of this however is that the majority of what is reported on by historians is not a gradual wearing away of a society’s economic or even moral fiber which leads to its eventual dissimulation and decline. The end for Ancient Rome came long before it was overrun by exterior communities of barbarians, that was merely Rome’s epilogue, and that was the protracted part of the story.
Nature’s complexity is very much a reality that lends itself to much understanding concerning the construction of nations composed of those who make up the multitude parts of that society. As in the case of a beach, there are millions of grains of sand that construct it, yet the beach carries the same characteristics at its base core as the finite grains of sand. In much the same way, honey bees begat honey bee hives that are a direct result in their construction and formulation. Following the analogy : A nation is known by the multitude of flawed humans who inhabit it and literally make up its “body”, if you will.
Complex systems at the core share certain verifiable tendencies. The human nervous system and the sub atomic makeup of water crystals may seem variant at the outset, yet when treated with the same kind of interruptive event, will both contend with the same predictable eventuality. Namely, when a system like these is interrupted from its normal course of functioning, it is impossible to predict the scale of the resulting chaotic condition.
It may seem on the surface that any large power is run by its “King”, which may or may not be a result of mere heredity, resultantly producing disaster with the variable nature of generational competency, or perhaps the ruling faction can simply have been the stronger faction of the society. There are many ways in which the powerful can rise to power. But the truth of the power is in the workings of the system below the King, the day to day workings of the society of those who make up the body of the kingdom and much rides on the proficiency of this body, as the decline of the educational system over the last 30 years has shown us here in America. As a result, it is quite possible that like the example of ancient Rome, America is already in its epilogue stage, suffering its killing blow some time in our past. In much the same way that natural systems as I have spoken of have a tendency to suddenly go critical, a nation too can reach this point and then live on in its death throws for countless years until it reaches a point where suddenly it is no longer relevant.
Let’s take the Soviet Union as another example. Historians now report the existence of all sorts of back room villainy that caused Russia’s collapse tracing back to the time of Brezhnev and beyond. Back in the 1970’s it has been surmised that only high prices of oil held back the end of the world and an escalation of the cold war between America and the USSR, but this was little more than a smokescreen of intel at the time as most nations from the third world were tilting in the northern direction toward communism due to the superior firepower of Russia over America.
When Mikhail Gorbachev took power, only five years past before Soviet power fell to ruin and then the total dissolution of the USSR followed in 1991. As you can see, the die was cast long before what seems to be a sudden crash, yet the “sudden crash” is what gets the press.
If great empires are the larger creations of the smaller parts of its citizenry and respond like all naturalistic systems, what does this mean for America? What can we say about the possible existence of the retro implications of a fly in the ointment of 30 years ago that will realize themselves, or perhaps already are paramount in the state of America today?
more on this next time
Today, there are many who see the same encroachment problems in the future of the United States. Challenges that face the nation are often viewed as a smoldering, yet containable fire. Competing world demographics would seem to have painted a bulls eye on the backs of the American way of life, thus not so much conquering the nation in an old fashioned invasion type scenario, but instead, whittling down the public finances of America and forcing an uptick in retirees versus the number of workforce persons. China, as an example, continues to flex unusually powerful muscles all over the world and will create a situation of economic superiority over America by the year 2027 if current trends continue.
As for climatic change, considering also the increase in powerful earthquakes all around the world in diverse places, a final pay day could be less than a century away. I loathe to even consider the fact that there are major fault lines in America just waiting to crack and cause a type of chaos that could go way beyond economic strife, as we have seen in Haiti and now also Chile. There is also a major undersea fault line shelf that runs parallel to the northern west coast, that if tampered with naturally or perhaps influenced in nefarious ways, could cause a tsunami that would cripple half of America. While we concentrate on the much shorter time lines of say, withdrawal of troops from Iraq, it is easy to loose sight of the long term storm that could be building in our own backyard.
But let’s consider that perhaps this is not the case. Let’s consider that perhaps the history of nations is actually more like a Toyota. Sudden acceleration into a blinding crash in the twinkling of an eye could actually be the truth of history. Someone somewhere (sic) once said they would come like a thief in the night, and it could well be that such a scenario is not at all that uncommon.
The inner workings of a great power are less like the business model of the tree that works from the top and spreads out toward the bottom and more like the workings of old style printed circuits, but with much less order. In fact, they operate in percentages of order, some greater than others, and get by day by day based on the competencies of the people who run them.
Such a system is in a constant state of flux, merely due to its human element. In the same way that a small business runs the rapids month to month of financial integrity, these organizations (major world powers included) teeter on the brink of going critical. There can also come a swift time when the power finds itself past the point of no return, being too big to fail can actually come back to haunt an entire nation overnight. All it takes is the wrong card at the bottom of the stack to suddenly weaken and die and the whole house comes down.
Unfortunately for historians, short stories are anathema. It lends much more credence to the position of an historian if they can give long term reasons and rules for the collapse of a nation than to simply state that the roots fell ill and killed the rest of the tree. This doesn’t make for good copy, or vilification of the historian’s position and therefore most of what is explained as history is somewhat revisionist in its attempts to explain and delineate cause and effect of most any major happening that is textbook worthy.
The truth of this however is that the majority of what is reported on by historians is not a gradual wearing away of a society’s economic or even moral fiber which leads to its eventual dissimulation and decline. The end for Ancient Rome came long before it was overrun by exterior communities of barbarians, that was merely Rome’s epilogue, and that was the protracted part of the story.
Nature’s complexity is very much a reality that lends itself to much understanding concerning the construction of nations composed of those who make up the multitude parts of that society. As in the case of a beach, there are millions of grains of sand that construct it, yet the beach carries the same characteristics at its base core as the finite grains of sand. In much the same way, honey bees begat honey bee hives that are a direct result in their construction and formulation. Following the analogy : A nation is known by the multitude of flawed humans who inhabit it and literally make up its “body”, if you will.
Complex systems at the core share certain verifiable tendencies. The human nervous system and the sub atomic makeup of water crystals may seem variant at the outset, yet when treated with the same kind of interruptive event, will both contend with the same predictable eventuality. Namely, when a system like these is interrupted from its normal course of functioning, it is impossible to predict the scale of the resulting chaotic condition.
It may seem on the surface that any large power is run by its “King”, which may or may not be a result of mere heredity, resultantly producing disaster with the variable nature of generational competency, or perhaps the ruling faction can simply have been the stronger faction of the society. There are many ways in which the powerful can rise to power. But the truth of the power is in the workings of the system below the King, the day to day workings of the society of those who make up the body of the kingdom and much rides on the proficiency of this body, as the decline of the educational system over the last 30 years has shown us here in America. As a result, it is quite possible that like the example of ancient Rome, America is already in its epilogue stage, suffering its killing blow some time in our past. In much the same way that natural systems as I have spoken of have a tendency to suddenly go critical, a nation too can reach this point and then live on in its death throws for countless years until it reaches a point where suddenly it is no longer relevant.
Let’s take the Soviet Union as another example. Historians now report the existence of all sorts of back room villainy that caused Russia’s collapse tracing back to the time of Brezhnev and beyond. Back in the 1970’s it has been surmised that only high prices of oil held back the end of the world and an escalation of the cold war between America and the USSR, but this was little more than a smokescreen of intel at the time as most nations from the third world were tilting in the northern direction toward communism due to the superior firepower of Russia over America.
When Mikhail Gorbachev took power, only five years past before Soviet power fell to ruin and then the total dissolution of the USSR followed in 1991. As you can see, the die was cast long before what seems to be a sudden crash, yet the “sudden crash” is what gets the press.
If great empires are the larger creations of the smaller parts of its citizenry and respond like all naturalistic systems, what does this mean for America? What can we say about the possible existence of the retro implications of a fly in the ointment of 30 years ago that will realize themselves, or perhaps already are paramount in the state of America today?
more on this next time
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