Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on May 8, 2013
All Empires Crash Soon After They Reach Their Peak
Thomas Edison said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” And because I love my country, I frequently criticize America’s shortcomings in the hopes of making her better.
But the truth is that the United States is not unusual … it is just like all other empires which have hit their peak and then quickly crashed.
We noted in 2008:
Political insider and veteran reporter Kevin Phillips has documented that every major empire over the past several hundred years has undergone a predictable cycle of collapse, usually within 10 to 20 years of its peak power.
The indications are always the same:
– The financialization of the economy, moving from manufacturing to speculation;
– Very high levels of debt;
– Extreme economic inequality;
– And costly military overreaching.
We wrote in 2009:
In 2000, America was described as the sole remaining superpower – or even the world’s “hyperpower”. Now we’re in real trouble (at the very least, you have to admit that we’re losing power and wealth in comparison with China).
How did it happen so fast?
***
How Empires Fall
Paul Farrel provides a bigger-picture analysis, quoting Jared Diamond and Marc Faber.
Diamond’s book’s, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, studies the collapse of civilizations throughout history, and finds:
Civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power…
One of the choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions
And PhD economist Faber states:
How [am I] so sure about this final collapse?
Of all the questions I have about the future, this is the easiest one to answer. Once a society becomes successful it becomes arrogant, righteous, overconfident, corrupt, and decadent … overspends … costly wars … wealth inequity and social tensions increase; and society enters a secular decline.
[Quoting 18th century Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler:] The average life span of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years progressing from “bondage to spiritual faith … to great courage … to liberty … to abundance … to selfishness … to complacency … to apathy … to dependence and … back into bondage”
[Where is America in the cycle?] It is most unlikely that Western societies, and especially the U.S., will be an exception to this typical “society cycle.” … The U.S. is somewhere between the phase where it moves “from complacency to apathy” and “from apathy to dependence.”
In other words, America’s rapid fall is not really that novel after all.
How Consumers, Politicians and Wall Street All Contributed to the Fall
On the individual level, people became “fat and happy”, the abundance led to selfishness (“greed is good”), and then complacency, and then apathy.
Indeed, if you think back about tv and radio ads over the last couple of decades, you can trace the tone of voice of the characters from Gordon Gecko-like, to complacent, to apathetic and know-nothing.
On the political level, there was no courage in the White House or Congress “to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions”. Of course, the bucket-loads of donations from Wall Street didn’t hurt, but there was also a religion of deregulation promoted by Greenspan, Rubin, Gensler and others which preached that the economy was self-stabilizing and self-sustaining. This type of false ideology only can spread during times of abundance and complacency, when an empire is at its peak and people can fool themselves into thinking “the empire has always been prosperous, we’ve solved all of the problems, and we will always prosper” (incidentally, this type of false thinking was also common in the 1920′s, when government and financial leaders said that the “modern banking system” – overseen by the Federal Reserve – had destroyed instability once and for all).
And as for Wall Street, the best possible time to pillage is when your victim is at the peak of wealth. With America in a huge bubble phase of wealth and power, the Wall Street looters sucked out vast sums through fraudulent subprime loans, derivatives and securitization schemes, Ponzi schemes and high frequency trading and dark pools and all of the rest.
Like the mugger who waits until his victim has made a withdrawal from the ATM, the white collar criminals pounced when America’s economy was booming (at least on paper).
Given that the people were in a contented stupor of consumption, and the politicians were flush with cash and feel-good platitudes, the job of the criminals became easier.
A study of the crash of the Roman – or almost any other – empire would show something very similar.
We pointed out in 2010 that more empires have fallen due to reckless finance than invasion. (Whichever side of the stimulus-austerity debate you agree with, spending walls of money on things which neither help people or stimulate the economy is idiotic.)
Inequality was – indeed – one of the main reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire … and inequality in America is much worse than in Ancient Rome. In fact, inequality in America today is twice as bad as in ancient Rome , worse than it was in in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America.
Finacialization? Yup, we’ve got that in spades … Economist Steve Keen has also shown that “a sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP”, and that higher bank profits leads to a ponzi economy and a depression). But government policy has been encouraging the growth of the financial sector for decades:
Corruption? Check … the government and big banks are all wallowing in a pig sty of criminal fraud. The economy has been hollowed out due to looting and fraud. And our institutions are so corrupt that people have lost faith in the economy. They are so corrupt and oppressive that people are more afraid of the government than of terrorists.
The bigger the bubble, the bigger crash … and we’ve just come out of the biggest bubble in history.
Costly military overreaching? Definitely…
The war in Iraq – which will end up costing between $5 and $6 trillion dollars – was launched based upon false justifications. Indeed, the government apparently planned both the Afghanistan war (see this and this) and the Iraq war before 9/11.
It is ironic that our military is what made us a superpower, but our huge military is bankrupting us … thus destroying our status as an empire.
Empires which fight “one too many wars” always collapse:
“Just one more surge!” — The Indus
“Just one more surge!” — The Kushan
“Just one more surge!” — The Scythians
“Just one more surge!” — The Parthians
“Just one more surge!” — The Saffarid
“Just one more surge!” — The Ghaznavid
“Just one more surge!” — The Ghorid
“Just one more surge!” — The Timurid
“Just one more surge!” — The Hotaki
“Just one more surge!” — The Durrani
“Just one more surge!” — The Aryan
“Just one more surge!” — The Persians
“Just one more surge!” — The Sassanids
“Just one more surge!” — The Hephthalites
“Just one more surge!” — The Huns
“Just one more surge!” — The Mughals
“Just one more surge!” — The Arabs
“Just one more surge!” — The Turkic
“Just one more surge!” — The Hazaras
“Just one more surge!” — The Khwarezmids
“Just one more surge!” — The Mongols
“Just one more surge!” — The British
“Just one more surge!” — The British (again)
“Just one more surge!” — The British (Yet again)
“Just one more surge!” — The USSR
“Just one more surge!” — The United States
10 Comments on "All Empires Crash Soon After They Reach Their Peak"
J-Gav on Wed, 8th May 2013 5:37 pm
Some valid points and some strange reading of history here …
True – the U.S. empire will collapse, and sooner than most expect. The causes mentioned (inequality, financial disarray, military overreach, arrogance, complacency …) are also on target.
False – empires collapse between 10-20 years after their peak. Rome took centuries after its peak to actually collapse and many of them probably didn’t even notice it was on the way out during all that time (arrogance).
Empires are incapable of seeing themselves objectively, always convinced they’ve got the situation under control even when a quick ‘stop and think’ would make it clear that the opposite is true.
KingM on Wed, 8th May 2013 5:46 pm
The premise is flawed. Most empires take generations to collapse unless the collapse is caused by an invasion from a superior foe.
CAM on Wed, 8th May 2013 6:24 pm
Actually the speed with which events occur has as much to do with the speed of communications and transactions. The instantaneous follow-on of events in today’s world should be an ominous harbinger of things to come. We have seen the repercussions of political and financial events echo around the world in seconds. When collapse comes it will hit with mind numbing suddenness on an unsuspecting world. It will be something to behold!
Pezza on Wed, 8th May 2013 8:21 pm
Maybe I am a bad student of history, but I am having trouble thinking of empires that collapsed due to lack of faith, arrogance, righteousness, inequality etc. I am thinking that the societies that collapsed, collapsed due to logistical pressures. They could not finance their continued growth and therefore (due to positive feedback systems – human nature etc) collapsed. Sure, some of the traits mentioned would have influenced the growth rate – military over-reach etc, but it was primarily logistic/financial causes that saw them collapse.
Arthur on Wed, 8th May 2013 9:12 pm
– The British empire, the largest in recorded history (25% of the planets surface), was taken apart within a decade or so, not by an invader, but on insistence of it’s ‘friend’/ally, the US, where the Nazis before 1939 had offered to send troops to defend the British empire. The British until today still think they won WW2.lol
– The USSR-empire was taken apart in a matter of days. Moscow could have fought, but it (wisely) chose not to.
– You could argue that the US is occupied by invaders, although with consent of the rulers of the US. That does not mean that these invaders could not contribute greatly to the final demise of the US, because the original European colonizers do ‘not entirely feel at home’ anymore in Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, etc. There are several potential points of initiation that could lead to the breakup of the US. First of all, a financial collapse, followed by a wave of secessions. Second: 9/11 truth coming out and the US army intervening. Picture the complete AIPAC, ADL, SPLC staff getting arrested, kicking and screaming. Can’t wait to see that happening. Third: one flash mob too many or another Zimmerman incident. In Britain the shooting of one ‘ethnic thugg’ was enough to set the entire country in flames in an uprising that lasted several days. Remember Rodney King. Fourth: US government attempt to disarm the (white) US population, but gun owners resist on a large scale, pointing at their constitutional rights.
My guess is that all four will happen, initiated by a financial collapse. And once that avalange is set in motion, there is no way back. It is enough to point at the difference between Japan and the US. After the Fukushima disaster there was no looting whatsoever. But a flooding in New Orleans immidiately led to big ethnic tensions and lootings by members of the (rather big) ‘minorities’. Possibly hundreds of looters were killed. Scenes in the Dome are ‘legendary’. Just like Yugoslavia, Iraq and Syria, diversity is your demise, regardless of what the folks from the ADL tell you. I think that Buchanan is too optimistic with his predictions of 2025 max.
Ed on Wed, 8th May 2013 9:48 pm
I like ‘One of the choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions’
How much of the renewable energy build out could have been done with the $5 to $6 trillion that was spent on the Iraq war?
Hugh Culliton on Thu, 9th May 2013 12:42 am
KingM: I would suggest that the speed of collapse is related to the speed of assent. For example, Rome took several hundred years to ascent, but as you correctly point out, took a couple of generations to collapse. Yet compared to her rise, that was darn quick. The US took only a couple hundred years to ascend but, if collapsing at the same scaled rate as Rome, will do so in only a couple decades. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see who’s right. I hope it’s not the author or me.
Hugh Culliton on Thu, 9th May 2013 12:58 am
“The British until today still think they won WW2.lol” Arthur: This is totally off topic and I hate to go jingo on you, but the British Empire, including her senior Dominion, Canada, were fighting the Nazis for 3 years before the US had ‘boots on the ground”. I’m not saying that US participation wasn’t vital – it was. But I have too many relatives planted in Europe and at the bottom of the North Atlantic who died before Pearl Harbour to let you get away with taking all the credit! If the British Empire hadn’t stood firm through the dark years when she stood alone against the Nazis, the war would have been lost before the US had a chance to get involved. Besides, on Dec 7/41, a North Carolina AA battery shot at my grandpa when he was ferrying Canadian Anti-sub flying boats to the west coast. :-0
Arthur on Thu, 9th May 2013 10:01 am
“This is totally off topic and I hate to go jingo on you”
You are welcome but you picked a fight with the wrong one as I have spend more than one year full time of my own time, paid by myself to thoroughly study the subject.
“If the British Empire hadn’t stood firm through the dark years when she stood alone against the Nazis, the war would have been lost before the US had a chance to get involved. ”
Yeah, yeah, that is the old story of the Anglos marketing themselves as liberators against ‘evil Nazis’, where in reality they were nothing but water carriers for jewish interests. Like they are today. Chamberlain was a decent chap who understood that the 19th century, essentially the British century, was over, that America and the USSR were rising and that it no longer made sense but to accept the reality of a large German state in continental Europe and that Britain could no longer afford it’s five century old Balance of Power politics, fighting the strongest state in Europe. Hitler never wanted anything but being good friends with Britain, heck the desperate flight by Hess to Britain one month before the WW2 really began at the eastern front and the USSR was in full mobilization mode to prepare for the final assault against Europe, proves that. But the real villains of WW2 were Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. They were the only ones who really wanted world war and they were in close but secret cooperation in the years leading up to WW2. Roosevelt had Churchill on the phone every day, long before he became prime minister. On 29th of July, 1936 the chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, sir Robert Waley Cohen, set up a fund called The Focus to support Churchill and save him from bankruptcy. From then on Churchill was a tool of international jewry. All the famous speeches in the House of Commons were written by Cohen, not Churchill and the tone was: fight Germany. Also Churchill kept a line of communication open with Stalin, via the Soviet ambassador Maisky, all behind Chamberlain’s back. The crucial point of getting WW2 kicked off was the British/French war garantee for Poland, where Chamberlain was pushed into by pressure from Churchill and media. And Poland was secretly encourage to not give in to entire reasonable German demands about the German city of Danzig and was falsely promissed support and protection by the US, Britain and France against Germany. This encouraged the Poles to make a start with the job they completed in 1945: the ethnic cleansing of Germans living in Versailles Poland. THAT and nothing else was the reason for the German invasion, protection of their own people, not acquisition of Lebensraum baloney. But the US jews and Stalin got their war and together they could carve up Europe, which had been the purpose all along.
And now comes the last world war, number 3. And again it is the jews who are busy trying to get it kicked off, via Syria and Iran, as they want the entire world. And the Anglos are going to give it to them, or so they think. But the rest of the world, with a grin, knows what happened in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and think: let them come. Just like the jews knew it takes 3,000 American deaths to bring the US into a war (and pulled off 9/11), the world knows that it takes 40,000 American deaths to take them out again (Vietnam). The next ‘world war’, which likely is going to be a proxy war + limited clashes, as neither the US, Russia or China can hope to occupy the adversary and all can finish off the rest with nukes (one nuke on NYC and Washington means the end of the territorial integrity of the US), will lead to the dumping of the dollar, which will lead to zero US buying power on international markets, which will lead to great social unrest within the US and it’s final demise and balkanization.
Arthur on Thu, 9th May 2013 11:38 pm
“I’m not saying that US participation wasn’t vital – it was. But I have too many relatives planted in Europe and at the bottom of the North Atlantic who died before Pearl Harbour to let you get away with taking all the credit! If the British Empire hadn’t stood firm through the dark years when she stood alone against the Nazis, the war would have been lost before the US had a chance to get involved. Besides, on Dec 7/41, a North Carolina AA battery shot at my grandpa when he was ferrying Canadian Anti-sub flying boats to the west coast. :-0”
You seem to think I am US-American, I am not. When you add up the contribution to the war effort in terms of loss of lives and material and destruction of homeland, the estimation could be: USSR 80%, USA 15%, UK 5%. For every American battle field death, 50 Russians died. The contribution to the buildup of the Red Army by the Americans during the thirties was gigantic. Core figure was Armand Hammer, who build numerous armament factories in the USSR.
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Carpet-Joseph-Finder/dp/0030604842