7 Pillars of Folly: How to blow an Empire in 7 easy steps

The great gift and great curse of the student of History is the utter lack of surprise about current events. When one knows the Past, one can predict the Future, as Mankind has a propensity for repetition of behavior. There are no limits to human folly, and we are rather lucky, as there are rescuers who emerge from obscurity and swoop in and help us overcome ridiculous odds, during our darkest hours. The US has had more than its fair share of such souls: Washington and the Founding Gang, Lincoln, FDR, possibly Obama. It is our stupidity, greed and fear that leads us into dark corners, and so far, we have been graced with amazing human beings to lead us out into the Light again. Other cultures are not so fortunate.

The American Century may be coming to a close before we hit the 100 year mark. We are in the process of blowing an Empire, just as our proud Pappy, the United Kingdom, did around the turn of the last century. Is this a bad thing? Should there be Empires anymore? My only complaint is that I may be proven right about the American Sunset, which in many ways, will be a loss to the world. Our track record as a World Leader over the past 40 years has been rather dismal, and it is understandable why many in the World are losing faith in us.

Globalization isn't a new thing. Empires have been carving up maps and claiming large chunks of land as their own for eons. The Romans did it, the Spanish, the Chinese, anyone with a map and crayons and the egoistic belief that they had the right to draw the lines, has carved up the World, Old World, Middle Kingdom, and the New World to suit their own purposes again and again. World Trade has existed for as long as the map carving, probably even before the maps. The Slave Trade, The Spice Road, the Silk Road, the Tobacco Road, The Cotton Trade, Sugar Trade, and the Tourist Trade have entailed multiple nations and oceans, so Global Trade has been around for nearly as long as people. The Tourist Trade is the most fascinating to me as it spawned Crusades and countless Holy Wars. Armies and nations were formed just because a bunch of Pilgrims wanted to get some postcards and shot glasses from Bethlehem.

Most of us focus on the rise of Empires, but the decline and fall is packed with lessons and examples to make current events seem creepily familiar. As we shudder under our current state of peril, we can look back at our ancestor, Great Britain, and learn from her downfall. But how does an Empire, upon which the sun never set, crumble into a nation filled with Oxfam shops? It wasn't easy; it took years of poor management and loads of bad decisions, but we can break it down into seven easy steps, and feel slightly queasy when we consider that we have followed in the dinosaur's footsteps.

The British Empire was a splendorous conglomeration of slave states and outsourced manufacturing. She had a Navy no one could beat and the British Pound was second only to gold as currency. Sound familiar? Let's take a closer look at the Decline and Fall.

Poor Leadership at a Critical Time:

The UK: Have a boorish, nearly insane, King (hmm, his name was George), through bad manners, alienate your biggest cash cow – The Colonies – into a state of rebellion. The Colonies was the greatest money-making scheme ever created. This start-up had a no-cost labor model which consisted of conscripted, indentured, penal, slave, and ambitious-non-fist-born-sons. It turned Great Britain into an economic powerhouse that France, Spain and Russia were hard-pressed to compete against. And George lost it.

The US: Have a boorish, inept President (hmm, his name was George) start a “preemptive” war with a country in the Middle East with the supposition that our invading army would be greeted with flowers and song. The whole picnic would be paid for by Iraqi oil, which would flow, effortlessly from the fields as we grandly flicked the ON switch. Oh yeah, 50 years of good will towards to the US evaporates in a few weeks. And yeah, we alienate our friends and allies and delight our enemies. Oh yeah, we pay for the conflict with debt.

Open Conflict with your Prime Trading Partner:

The UK: Not only did George lose his primary supplier and leading consumer of goods, he earned a persistent, canny, eager-to-snipe enemy. He chose to go to war with the Colonies just as Napoleon was looking at the Royal Rear-End for the tastiest place to chomp. And Napoleon was a master of topography.

George chose to fight a war with very long supply lines and hostile natives. Warring with your prime trade partner and supplier of raw materials is just plain dumb.

In hindsight, I have no understanding for why he didn't make the smallest concessions for Parliamentary representation of the Colonies. It would have saved the Empire!

The US: Not only did George start an unsuccessful, expensive war with a certain Middle Eastern country, his poor fiscal policies resulted in the massive deflation of US currency. We happened to owe a lot of our currency to the Chinese Government. By deflating our currency, we basically thought we could underhandedly “reduce” the trade gap with China. The Chinese aren't pleased with us. In fact, they have proposed the creation of a new currency in favor of the dollar.

Manufacturing Mishaps, Outsourcing Yourself out of Existence:

The UK: Once the Cotton Trade was restored, Britain outsourced a lot of manufacturing to India, only to be nearly crushed by the Civil War which engulfed the Dis-United States. Crippling cotton prices and reduced supply put the squeeze on the British Economy. They got lucky and the Industrial Revolution, the Cotton Gin, global demand for steel, and the Railway saved their bacon.

The whole thing could have been avoided had the Crown agreed to dissolve Slavery, when Colonists, nervous of being replaced by no-cost labor, petitioned to ban Slavery in the Colonies, the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was the earliest noted in Wikipedia.

The US: As part of globalization, in the spirit of “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em”, in an effort to compete with slave labor ,we exported our manufacturing base to Asia and with it, most Middle Class jobs, thus making most Americans downwardly mobile and reducing the tax base. Even worse – guess who is now making most of the products that we buy with our devalued currency? The very same country that wants to start a new currency.... The only upside was that Kathy Lee Gifford was given some grief for her clothing line being manufactured by slaves.

Social and Economic Policies that Concentrate most Wealth into a Tiny Percentage of the Population

The UK: until WWI, this was standard practice, and it didn't appear to hamper the Empire building, but once the cracks were there, the Empire crumbled so quickly because there wasn't a middle class to absorb the blow.

The US: At the turn of the this century and last century, there was a large gap between the classes. At the turn of the last century, we had a tiny, struggling middle class. We also had multiple panics, social unrest, and a stagnant standard of living. Our Golden Age was 1950 – 2000, when we had an expanding, strong middle class. During these 50 years, we enjoyed greater economic and social stability compared with the last century, and an impressive rise in the standard of living. Granted this was partly due to our being the only country on Earth not bombed to bits from the aftermath of WWII.

I am still a strong proponent of the Middle Class. Their conservative investments and hopes for a better future for their children truly builds Empires like nothing else.

The Wealthy Few Fail to Manage their Assets

If you concentrate the wealth in the hands of the few and they blow it, then the country goes broke rather fast and hard.

The UK: During the Industrial Revolution, the Merchants and Industrialists made big bucks, but the Landed Gentry, those who held most of the wealth of the land, couldn't recognize that wealth transitioned from land-ownership to less concrete investments, like stocks and ownership of businesses. By the 1880s, the landed gentry was hurting and marrying the wealthy offspring of American capitalists to support their estates. While Winston Churchill was the result of one of these unions, most Brits wish they could have saved themselves from Yankee wedlock.

The US: Our wealthy few got addicted to unrealistic yields on investments made via globalization. They figured out a way to set up businesses that could take advantage of the perks of the Modern Economies of US and others, eluding taxation while reaping the huge profits in slave labor, which is plentiful, but not within Industrialized Nations. They literally had the best of both worlds for almost 20 years. They became addicted to enormous profits, and when the Third World started to perk up, and workers started getting a decent wage, that cut into the huge, unrealistic profit margins. Investors got antsy and so purveyors of “investment instruments”, felt compelled to invent some really crazy, leveraged-risk schemes like credit default swaps and all kinds of other risky “investments” that were thinly disguised shell games. This greed started in the US, and unfortunately, it has infected the world economy.

But the US will fall very hard in this because the Middle Class has lost its earning base with all the outsourced manufacturing, and hasn't been able to save for about 15 years, and isn't in a position to cushion the blow as most folks in the Middle Class are living on credit.

Corruption and/or Bankruptcy of the Middle Class

The UK: Here is where my thesis wavers. I can find how this happened in Rome, but not the UK. Perhaps since the Middle Class is still kind of a shadow thing in the UK, they haven't ever gotten large enough to become corrupt.

So let's go to Rome instead: Lead poisoning? Orgies? What was it that caused Roman society to fall apart? But Fall it did; it could have been from poor governance, but the only way democracy rots into this kind of failure is when constituencies stop making demands from their leaders.

The US: Ben Franklin, when asked what kind of government he and his posse was going to give the Ex-Colonies, said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” (Bartleby.com) Ben was convinced that the Republic would eventually fall when the average citizen became corrupt. Jefferson thought this was a ridiculous idea; the Republic would never fall in a land of independent farmers. They would be perpetually busy in the vital business of growing food for the populace. No chance of sloth here, Bennie boy! But then, Jefferson thought there might be living dinosaurs out West and was disappointed when Louis and Clark didn't bring any home. Genius has its limits. The authors of this link try very hard to guild the lily concerning Jefferson's erroneous beliefs. http://www.nps.gov/archive/jeff/lewisclark2/TheJourney/Fossils.htm

Well, here we are. The Average Joe doesn't live within his means, is hoping to become a rock star or millionaire. Most women worship graven images of celebrities. We live on credit. Our communities are non-existent, and we are generally an ungrateful bunch. I think our addiction to television, crappy food and questionable heros are all symptoms of some sort of corruption.

An Un-winnable War in the Graveyard of Empires: Afghanistan

Don't let the cute costume fool you, those tribal leaders are tough, resilient, independent-minded, and government-averse. Oh yeah, and they are bred to fight. But don't take my word for it, check out all the Empires that have wheezed out their last in Afghanistan. If you don't feel like reading all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, just read the bit about Afghanistan. It is a logistical nightmare for an invading or occupying army. It's infrastructure sucks, it has almost zero arable land (save for the poppies), and its terrain is mountainous – perfect for hiding people, arms and ambushes.

It reminds one of some mythic mirror which shows the tragic flaw of all Empires that have blundered into it.

The Romans – Pax Romana, met their end when they tried to conquer it to “preserve the Peace.”

The British – Why on earth did they bother? Probably to reduce border violence in the Pakistan/India 'hood, but they learned the hard way that no one wanders into the A-hood without serious losses.

The Russians – The Russians are extremely paranoid and haven't gotten over the many bloody invasions they have suffered over the millenia. They specialize in preventative military invasions. We lured them into Afghanistan in a effort to speed the decline of the USSR. It worked! We even armed the Taliban to better harass Russian soldiers. We taught Bin Laden a lot about Guerilla Warfare. Read Charlie Wilson's War for all the gory details.

The US – This just in: we are going to swing more soldiers and money into Afghanistan. I believe that Obama has all the right intentions and understands the difficulty of this endeavor, but history has proven this area to be impossible to control through organized force. It must be done tribe-by-tribe, and even then, their loyalty to outsiders, and to each other, is fleeting and volatile. Our best chance is to help them get those poppies to be legal. Once they are part of a legitimate economy, standardized, tested and taxed, a real economy could emerge from Afghanistan. And where are the oil and gas deposits? What is our real motive for this?

Conclusion:
There we have it folks, the 7 easy steps to dissolution of an Empire. Personally, I like the John Lennon vision from his song, Imagine. Imagine all the people, living life in peace, without attachment to the material. This might be possible if we all believed in an abundant universe, and merciful god, and above all, if each of us believed in all the rest of us, and in ourselves.

This vision of the world is a rare one, but I know I'm not the only one. I hope one day you can join us, and the world will live as one.