“We’re at the end of the empire. But it’s entertaining. No one ever told you how much fun it was going to be. I think that’s what historians always miss. ‘How do these great nations fall apart?’ It’s fun, that’s how. If you had a time machine and you could get some guy who was alive at the fall of Rome and talk to him, and some historian asked, ‘What happened? How did you lose the empire?’ He would say, ‘Dude, I just saw a lion fight a man. I don’t know what to tell you. It was $8 and it came with a beer. I was having a great time.’”
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. We live at the end of the American empire. The signs are everywhere, but as the ill-fated time traveler in Dave Smith’s joke, we fail to see them.
There always seems to be a world empire. It was Rome, it was the Mongols, it was Britain, and Spain had a moment in the sun, just to name a few. For now, the honor belongs to us, but for how much longer? Because we somehow forget the lessons of those before us in other times and places. We think we’re different. We think we’re immune from it. We tour the ruins of fallen empires, and look with pity and without any fear that it could happen to us.
Knowledge Is Power
We are entertained everywhere we go. We have magical rectangles in our pockets that keep us occupied every time the material world becomes drab or disappointing. I’m one of the few who don’t disparage that remarkable technology, nor do I think it’s bad to be informed about every cramped or tidy crevice of this fine blue and green rock, as others do. Some readily say, “We know too much.” I don’t think so. I think rather that despite our great collective knowledge, we still lack collective wisdom, and having the lessons of history at our convenient touch could be our only hope to remedy it. But far be it from me to belabor such a trite point.
Government is an abstract concept with real consequences in the world, but if we all question that abstraction, the physical structures fall apart. Those noises in the woods at night are surely a monster so long as you believe it is, and it will scare you like one, but as soon as you see that it’s only a raccoon, you don’t fear it in the same way. If enough people asked, “Who gave you the authority?” it could be as powerful as a bloody revolution, but without the bloodshed.
Corrupt Rulers
Degradation of religion and economy, military overreach, and blatant and shameless political corruption all point to the historical reality of empires that rise and fall in predictable cycles, but we’re like fish unaware of the water. We’re so deep that it’s hard to see the forest in lieu of the trees—and those trees are full of those ferocious raccoons I mentioned earlier. We have, in the COVID and post-COVID era, witnessed a revelation of government for what it really is: elite, yet unremarkable rulers who claim to serve their subjects, but actually abhor them. Examples abound, but the unashamed elitism by rulers such as Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi during the lockdowns will always be apt classics, as well as President Biden declaring half of the voting citizenry as a “threat to this country” in a speech last September. Biden also called it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The Hitlerian parallels will go unmentioned to avoid the beating of dead horses. Not to mention Biden’s recent joke about not talking to the press. Joe Biden, a war criminal with dementia, serves as a perfect symbol for a falling empire. As that reality shines through the translucent mask more and more, we get closer to the day that ends every empire when it finally comes: when people lose faith. The fact that the stock market can crash because of the possibility of a pandemic illustrates a faith-based economy. That economy is the product of a faith-based government which only holds the monopoly on violence because we arbitrarily appoint certain people to that privilege. Once faith is tested, it fails, just like the economy. We live in the midst of delicious fictions of constitutions that control our rulers, objective laws that are followed and not interpreted, and a military that occupies over seventy countries to keep us safe, and in no way acts as a provocation to those nations and puts us all in danger. These are sweet, beautiful lies, but they are just that: lies. I wish, maybe more than anyone, that these things were true, because the simplicity would make our lives and destinies palatable and explainable, but regretfully, that’s not the world we live in. These things are hard to explain, and they’re hard to accept. It’s hard to accept our best young men and women dead in the desert for a lie, when the liars masqueraded as our guardian angels. Angels with blood on their feathers, perhaps, but corrupt bureaucrats remains the more likely explanation.
For context, and not exhaustive detail, I will give the briefest and most elementary explanation of why this matters, because there are professionals more qualified than I to explain it. Since 1971, when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods Agreement, and severed the U.S. dollar from the gold standard, the main thing upholding the dollar’s value was a deal we had with Saudi Arabia to trade oil exclusively in our currency (which came to be known as the petrodollar). This, ever since, has acted as a pseudo-gold standard; a valuable commodity to back our paper money. It’s one of the main reasons our currency hasn’t collapsed. Any good economist will tell you that the mere existence of our currency a century into the practice of central banking defies economic logic. Artificially low interest rates, valueless bonds, “printing” money out of “thin air,” and other wily methods of unelected bankers are the only things that have kept the dollar alive up to this point. But those things could only delay the inevitable, and make the inevitable far worse. Another thing that has upheld the dollar’s supremacy is our military presence in other countries enforcing its use. This is also overdue for a change as we see things like the BRICS countries coming together to wean themselves off of the dollar and American influence in general.
China, of all countries, has been the impetus for peace deals between Saudi Arabia and Iran, who (with the exception of Israel) have been at the heart of most middle eastern wars for the last hundred years. The wars in Yemen and Syria, with which the U.S. has been involved for twelve years and eight years respectively, are slowing and cooling down, if not coming to an end altogether. It turns out you can’t bomb and drone-strike your way into peace, submission, or whatever their goals in those conflicts were. Arming ISIS to fight Asad didn’t work very well either, a hard lesson the Obama Administration had to learn. Not for nothing, but Xi Jinping has expressed a desire to achieve similar peace between Israel and Palestine, and Russia and Ukraine, as well. Allowing the world to see another country—especially China—mediate peace between bitter enemies, proves that we don’t have to bomb, gas, drone-strike, sanction, rape, and destabilize in the vain hope of westernization. That is a dangerous revelation for the regime. This is what leads to a loss of faith. To see the futility of war is to withdraw support for it. It doesn’t seem like lack of support from the general public would affect the military industrial complex, but it could. Plummeting military enlistments and the elections of Donald Trump and Barrack Obama—who both deceived voters into thinking they would end the wars—prove that.
Herbert Stein, an economist, coined what he called “Stein’s Law,” which goes like this: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Simple, but effective. There are many brick walls approaching our windshield at faster and faster rates, and we are going to hit one eventually.
What Next?
But wouldn’t the end of the American empire mean the end of the world? No. Only the world as we know it, and what do you know about it that’s so great? If America put its fist back at its side and stopped thrusting it into every beehive it found, it would not mean your life would end, it would only mean fewer stings. It wouldn’t necessitate any negative impacts for innocent people. It could lead to some, just as surely as America’s provocation of a nuclear-armed country like Russia could, but it in no way necessitates it. To live in a country that isn’t systematically starving children abroad, murdering innocent civilians, and stretching itself far beyond what it is economically capable of, would bring a national peace of mind and pride that people my age have never known in our lifetimes.
Imagine life in an America that minded its own business and didn’t control the world. Imagine a world where we could trade with Iran, visit the historical sites of Afghanistan, and spend a weekend in Moscow, all without the stress of knowing our rulers fisted all those beehives, and we could get stung for it.
If you shatter the illusion, the government becomes nothing more than a carefully constructed story, and the more people who undergo such shattering, the closer we get to that day when everyone stops believing. The proverbial raccoons have no real power without the illusions of monsters.
The empire will fall, and the world may be better off for it.
