TED talk. Michael Vlahos, PhD, professor at both the US Naval War College and Johns Hopkins, consultant for both the Dept of State and the CIA, national security commentator, etc. His predictions for US Empire seem about right. It will fall apart. Some excerpts from the embedded John Batchelor interview: “The empire will be replaced – in the meantime, there is savagery. Americans need to embrace their identity and new things. New things can be remarkable, yet not to be found in the currency of elite conversations of today – not in political correctness, not in the empty ideological coinage and currency of today. As the elites collapse – it will open up new space in which the people can approach the world differently. There is no ultimate hope that the current system in the United States can continue. Things like $500 billion deficits are just metaphors for the impoverishment of the system itself. It is the spiritual core that will come down. The system is absolutely hollowed out – incapable of offering anything to the world or to its own American people. No possibility of revival through the current system exists. It will eat itself out in the civil war that is coming. Nothing of it will remain. Without the elites being sensitive to the needs of the larger society, this has to happen.”
Vlahos describes well the historic cycles of control by elites, increasingly imposed order to serve themselves at the expense of the rest, increased stratification and rigidity, increased militarization to maintain the imposed order, decreased social mobility among the rest of society leading to increasing levels of general poverty while the rich get richer, increasing controls justified in order to “protect civilization” by which the elites mean “their order which benefits them,” people stop believing in the leadership and system as external triggers foment a destructive event (climate change, wars, migration, famine, epidemic disease,…), a void is left after the system falls in which humanity is able to grow/advance and meet previously unmet needs/desires, people find meaning in themselves and their communities,…. Then, the cycle repeats. At the end of the TED talk, he says to the select Johns Hopkins university audience: you are the elite, and the revolution is coming for you.
I advocate freeing people to live how they want, to work how they want, to keep what they earn, to move freely, to stop protecting and bailing out and legislating in favor of elites and politicians and corporations that use societal controls and levers to benefit themselves at the expense of others, to stop militarizing for domestic controls, to stop intervening internationally in affairs that do not serve the interest of individuals and which lead to massive costs and blow back, to stop putting people in prison and ruining their lives over things that they put in their own bodies, to legalize competition in everything: schools, medicine, employment, transportation, currency,…, to stop the facade of “protecting society” from threats that really only threaten an imposed order which requires great external pressure and cost to maintain – be those exaggerated threats domestic or foreign. By reducing the external pressures of the artificial system now, by reducing controls and permitting mobility, perhaps the adjustment to a level of more natural homeostasis will be less violent, deadly, destructive, destabilizing. The correction may not have to be severe if it is proactively defused and permitted to evolve in voluntary and mutually beneficial fashion.
Of course, no elites throughout history have voluntarily given up their ill-gotten power and wealth. As history shows, they will resist and control till your last breath – which has not been uncommonly caused by those that “just follow orders.” Censorship, police presence, surveillance, conscription into their wars, social isolation, political prisons, labor camps, expulsion, employment controls, intimidation, property and wealth confiscation, currency manipulation,… – so many tools at their disposal. Fortunately, the energy and cost required to maintain such systems and controls are high and eventually self-limiting, as typically is the tolerance of the controlled. But as Dr. Vlahos points out, these cycles tend to run in temporal terms of centuries. So, buckle up, ‘Murka. It’s sure to be a bumpy ride.