Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.

I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.

As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”

This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.

And it never will.

If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.

But of what importance is this to us today?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rome Was Eternal, Until It Wasn’t: Imperial Analogs of Decay

January 1, 2024

Rome Was Eternal, Until It Wasn’t: Imperial Analogs of Decay

The tricky part is distinguishing the critical dependencies–those resources the empire literally cannot do without–from longer-term sources of decay and decline.

In response to my recent post What If There Are No Analogs for 2024?, an astute reader nominated the Roman Empire as a fitting analog. Longtime readers know I’ve often discussed the complex history of Western Rome’s decay and collapse, for example, Why Rome Collapsed: Lessons For the Present (August 11, 2023).

Dozens of other posts on the topic stretch back to 2009: Complacency and The Will To Radical Reform (February 12, 2009)

What conclusions can we draw from recent research and the voluminous work done by previous generations of historians? Our first conclusion is simply to state the obvious: it’s complicated. There was no one cause of Western Rome’s decay and collapse. A multitude of factors generated feedback loops and responses over hundreds of years, some more successful than others.

Indeed, we cannot help but be struck by how many times impending collapse was staved off by brilliant leadership and policy adjustments.

Our second conclusion is to distinguish between the erosive forces of decay and critical vulnerabilities that can trigger collapse. Many authors have pointed to moral decay and fiscal over-reach as sources of Rome’s eventual fall, but there were far more pressing dependencies that created potentially fatal vulnerabilities.

In the case of Western Rome, these included:

1. The depletion of the silver mines in Spain (and the eventual loss of Spain to the Visigoths). Once you run out of hard currency, your free-spending days are over. This dependence on large quantities of hard currency to fund your armed forces is a trigger for collapse.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The World’s Top Industrial Countries Are in Treacherous Waters

October 12, 2023

The World’s Top Industrial Countries Are in Treacherous Waters

Sometimes, after reading a slew of news articles from around the world, I feel confused and weary. But occasionally patterns seem to emerge. I say “seem” because the human brain is all too eager to see patterns where there are none (hence humanity’s fascination with false conspiracy theories). Nevertheless, these days I can hardly escape the sense that current events are accelerating toward . . . something troubling.

Of course, we all bring preconceptions to bear on new information, and those preconceptions tend to shape the patterns we see. My own preconceptions have emerged from a few decades of studying humanity’s systemic problems—climate change, resource depletion, pollution, economic inequality and fragility, authoritarianism, war, and so on—and how these evolved through many centuries up to the present in response to new energy sources and technological innovation. The cornerstone of my preconceptions is a limits-to-growth perspective that sees the last few decades of fossil-fueled rapid expansion of population and per-capita consumption as profoundly unsustainable, and the decades of the 2020s and 2030s as the likely turning point in humanity’s overall trajectory from rapid growth to just-as-rapid contraction.

So, I guess you could say I’m a short-term, big-picture pessimist. You can judge for yourself whether focusing that particular lens on the Rorschach inkblot of current events is helpful.

The world is a complex place, and some countries are always doing better or worse than others. But occasionally, as was the case with the Great Depression and World War II, the whole world seems to falter or erupt at once. If the pattern I think I see is really there, we may be approaching a similarly pivotal moment.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Last Gasps of a Dying Empire

October 11, 2023

The Last Gasps of a Dying Empire

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818 – (image by Dezgo.com)

All empires in history follow the same trajectory of glory, stasis, and decay. They start their existence around agricultural or mineral resources that they use to create a powerful military force. Then, they grow by conquering their neighbors. The structure of an empire is not different from that of other human enterprises: companies, states, or other groups of people who happen to collaborate with each other in formal or informal ways. It is just that empires are nearly pure military organizations. They live by war, and they die by war.

Necessarily, the resources that created the glorious empire are destined to run out, typically overexploited by the greedy imperial elites. At the same time, the empire itself creates structures that tend to destroy it: bureaucracy, desertification, pollution, and more. In time, depletion and pollution collaborate to bring down the mighty imperial structure and to bring it down fast. It is the essence of the “Seneca Effect,” according to the words of the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who noted that “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” At some point, the King of Kings, Ozymandias, will find that his time has come, and nothing will be left of him except carvings on stones in the desert that proclaim his eternal glory.

But between the phases of growth and the collapse, there is a gray zone, a short-lived age in which the empire is still powerful enough to attempt new conquests but too weak to succeed…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What do the Rich Have in Mind? First, Their own Survival

October 10, 2023

What do the Rich Have in Mind? First, Their own Survival

We know very little about what the rich actually think, surely nothing like what transpires from their public declarations. I’ve always been thinking that the rich and the powerful are not smarter than the average commoner, such as you and I. But just the fact that they are average means that the smart ones among them must understand what’s going on. And what are they going to do about the chaos to come? They have much more power than us, and whatever they decide to do will affect us all.

Douglas Rushkoff gives us several interesting hints of what the rich have in mind in his book “Survival of the Richest” (2022)

The portrait of the average rich person from the book is not flattening. We are told of a bunch of ruthless people, unable to care for others (that is, lacking empathy), and convinced that the way to solve problems is to accumulate money and keep growing as if there are no limits. But Rushkoff tells us that at least some of them understand that we are going to crash against some kind of wall in the near future. And they are preparing for that.

Even without Rushkoff’s book, it seems clear to me that plenty of planning and scheming is going on behind closed doors. Large sections of our society are by now completely opaque to inquiry, and commoners have no possibility to affect what’s being decided. We know less of what’s going on in Washington’s inner circles than the Danish peasants knew of what was going on inside the Castle of Elsinore.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Leave Home

August 7, 2023

Leave Home

As an increasing number of people realize that their home country is becoming a liability to them, the most common question I hear from them is, “What do I have to do to remain where I am and still be assured that I’ll be able to retain both my wealth and my freedom?”

The simple (and tragic) answer to this question is that there is no such solution. The two objectives are mutually exclusive.

Throughout the ages, whenever an empire has begun its inevitable collapse, no country has ever woken up and reversed the process. In every case, the government rides the decline to the bottom. And, along the way, a series of policies is invariably undertaken to save those in government in the downward rush. These policies are always at the expense of the populace.

Invariably, as the decline worsens, governments drag out the same policies that all other failing empires have implemented before them: Devaluation of currency, default on debt, increased warfare, creation of a police state and, finally, the looting of all those citizens who have even a modicum of wealth.

The question is not whether we like our home country as it presently is, but whether we’re prepared to accept what it’s about to become.

As people become more aware that their government is not only not their friend, but has become their greatest threat, it’s human nature to hope that “it won’t get any worse.”

And, of course, it then gets worse.

The great majority of people don’t actually try to escape until they find that they’re now trapped and cannot escape. (Curbing the outward flow is surprisingly easy for any government to achieve – by implying that those emigrating are enemies of the state. This time around, those attempting to exit will be called domestic terrorists.)

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Dusk of a Global Empire

January 18, 2023

Dusk of a Global Empire

The slow passing of a global hegemon, the Empire of all empires, made me ponder how it will pass to the pages of history books. Apparently, its ruling elite has chosen a strategy called spite: knowingly (or unknowingly) hurting their own self interest, hoping that their enemies will be hurt more. Sanctions come to mind here as a prime example, but spending more than half of one’s discretionary budget on militarism could be seen as an even more spectacular way of running down services, infrastructure, security and resilience at home, while overcommitting oneself abroad — all at the same time. One way or the other, absent of a decisive victory rewarded with a renewed flow of cheap resources, both of these strategies will lead to increasing isolation and deprivation in the coming decades, then… well, something comparable to the fall of Rome. But let’s just not get ahead of ourselves yet.

First let’s define what is an empire. According to Britannica, it is “a group of countries or regions that are controlled by one ruler or one government”. Simple as that. In order to control a territory or state however, obviously you would need to apply some sort of force, be it economic, financial or military in nature, to ‘convince’ your ‘allies and partners’ that it is in their best interest to comply with your will. (Why, how else would you ask a sovereign country to commit economic suicide for your sole benefit…?) According to the late Anthony Stafford Beer, a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School:

“The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

How Empires Die

February 10, 2022

How Empires Die

When the state / empire loses the ability to recognize and solve core problems of security and fairness, it will be replaced by another arrangement that is more adaptable and adept at solving problems.

From a systems perspective, nation-states and empires arise when they are superior solutions to security compared to whatever arrangement they replace: feudalism, warlords, tribal confederations, etc.

States and empires fail when they are no longer the solution, they are the problem. As the book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization explains, when the dissolution of the state / empire becomes the pain-reducing solution, the inhabitants withdraw their support and the empire loses its grip and expires.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, states and markets are problem-solving structures. These structures solve problems by optimizing adaptability and beneficial synergies that reinforce one another as evolutionary advances.

The rise of the middle class is an example of beneficial synergies: as this new class gains access to credit, expertise, trade, enterprise and pricing power for their labor, they have the means to transform their labor into capital by saving earnings and investing the capital in assets, new enterprises, etc. which then generate income from capital which fuels synergistic increases in credit, expertise, assets and income from investments.

States / empires fail and expire when they elevate the fatal synergies created by self-serving elites. Rather than encourage the dynamics of adaptation–competition, transparency, accountability, experimentation and dissent– the elites suppresses these forces as threats to their monopolies, cartels and wealth.

Stripped of adaptability and beneficial synergies, the state / empire is no longer able to solve problems. It becomes the problem which cannot be resolved.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Propaganda: the Doom of the Western Empire

December 7, 2021

Propaganda: the Doom of the Western Empire

This painting by Konstantin Vasiliev (1942-1976) celebrates the great patriotic war of 1941-1945 (Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́). It is a good example of Soviet propaganda at its best. But, on average, propaganda in the Soviet Union was primitive and heavily based on censorship, eventually turning out to be unable to keep together the Union in a moment of crisis. In the West, propaganda was much more sophisticated and, for a while, it managed to convince Western citizens that they were told the truth by their governments. That phase is now over and the Western propaganda system has reverted to a fully “Soviet-style” censorship system. With this development, the Western Empire may well have sealed its doom: no government can survive for long if the people it rules don’t believe in it.

“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.” Charles Baudelaire

I distinctly remember when I was a child and my father saw me reading a small book illustrated with images showing red flags, sickles, and hammers. Worried, he took it from my hands, looked at it, and gave it back to me. “It is all right,” he said. “It is our propaganda.”What I had in my hands was an anti-communist pamphlet of the 1960s, issued by the Christian Democratic party. I remember it well, it was full of images of evil Soviet Communists slaughtering their own dissidents, part of the general anti-communist propaganda in Italy of the post-war period.

At that time, it was still fine to state openly that something was propaganda. And it was normal in a bi-polar world to be expected to believe in the propaganda issued by one’s political side while despising the symmetrical propaganda issued by the other side.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the Troubled U.S. Empire Could Quickly Fall Apart

November 1, 2021

Why the Troubled U.S. Empire Could Quickly Fall Apart

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die from overreach and sacrificing broadly social goals for the narrow interests of political and economic minorities.

The United States has 4.25 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths from COVID-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic. It now wrestles with a huge segment of its population that seems so alienated from major economic and political institutions that it risks self-destruction and demands the “right” to infect others. Refusing to accept lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates in the name of “freedom” mixes a frightening stew of ideological confusion, social division, and bitterly rising hostility within the population. The January 6 events in Washington, D.C., showed merely the tip of that iceberg.

Levels of debt—government, corporate, and household—are all at or near historical records and rising. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve with its years of quantitative easing. Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the U.S. Treasury to enable more U.S. government spending. The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Is How It Ends: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

September 11, 2020

This Is How It Ends: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

While the Federal Reserve and the Billionaire Class push the stock market to new highs to promote a false facade of prosperity, everyday life will fall apart.

How will the status quo collapse? An open conflict–a civil war, an insurrection, a coup–appeals to our affection for drama, but the more likely reality is a decidedly undramatic dissolution in which all the elements of our way of life we reckoned were solid and permanent simply melt into air, to borrow Marx’s trenchant phrase.

In other words, Rome won’t be sacked by Barbarians, or ignite in an insurrectionary conflagration–everything will simply stop working as those burdened with the impossible task of keeping a failed system glued together simply walk away.

If we examine the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Western Roman Empire, we can trace the eventual collapse to the sudden psychological shift from an assumption of permanence that found expression in denial (Rome can’t fall, it’s eternal…) or in the universal belief that life was unchanging and so everything was forever.

This psychological state was replaced by a shocked awareness that what was unimaginable, “impossible”–systemic collapse–was not only entirely possible, it was happening in real time. This change in consciousness arose in individuals in differing ways and velocities, but eventually everyone accepted that some adaptation was now necessary.

Correspondent R.J. and I have been discussing the consequences of the sharp decline in the value of labor which is painfully obvious in the chart below and the many other charts depicting the declining purchasing power of wages and the skimming of the majority of the economic gains by the top 0.1%.

In effect, it no longer pays to work beyond the bare minimum needed to survive as all the value generated by labor above this minimum is either skimmed by the Bezos, Buffetts, Gates, Zuckerbergs et al. or it’s paid in higher taxes to the government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The lure of imperial dreams: What are our leaders going to do to us?

September 10, 2020

The lure of imperial dreams: What are our leaders going to do to us?

Donald Trump is often represented wearing some kind of imperial garb. Actually, his presidency may have been less imperial than that of his predecessors. Yet, his style as president is very much “imperial” and his winning slogan in the 2016 elections, “MAGA,” (make America great again) has a deep imperial ring to it. Earlier on, Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian government between the two world wars, was destroyed (and with him Italy and not just Italy) by his Imperial ambitions.

When things get tough, people seem to think that they need tough leaders and this is a clear trend in the world, nowadays. It is a deadly mechanism that tends to bring dangerous psychotic personalities to the top government positions. I already noted in a previous post how imperial ambitions coupled with incompetence (both common conditions in high-level leaders) can destroy entire countries.

Here, let me examine an interesting feature of how Benito Mussolini (1883 -1945) ruled Italy. Despite his warlike rhetoric, during the first phase of his government he pursued a moderate foreign policy, avoiding wars. Then, the second phase of his rule was characterized by a series of disastrous wars that led to the destruction of Italy (and not just of Italy) and to the downfall of Mussolini himself. Whether this story can tell us something about a possible second term for Donald Trump as president, is left to the readers to decide.

Benito Mussolini and the Italian Empire: How Leaders’ Absurd Decisions Lead to Collapse.

Benito Mussolini ruled Italy for 21 years after the “March on Rome” of 1922. Many things happened during those years but, on the whole, you could think of the Fascist rule as having two phases: one before and the other after the turning point that was the invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why America Won’t Be ‘Great’ Again

July 11, 2020

Why America Won’t Be ‘Great’ Again

They called him the ‘Little Emperor’. Romulus Augustus — better known as Romulus ‘Augustulus’ (‘Little Augustus’) — was the last Western Roman Emperor. He assumed the throne at the age of 16 during a period of unprecedented strife. There had been 8 emperors in the previous 20 years. Like his predecessors, the Little Emperor’s reign was short. It lasted less than a year. In 476 CE, Augustus was deposed and the Western Roman Empire came to an end.¹

One wonders what Augustus said to his followers during his reign. As little more than a proxy for his military-general father, Augustus left no monuments and made no decisions. But what might he have said in private? Perhaps he promised to ‘make Rome great again’. …

✹ ✹ ✹

We are perennially fascinated with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Why? Likely because its collapse cast such a long shadow on Western Europe. Once the center of civilization, the Roman collapse sent Western Europe into a dark age. It would take a millennia to recover.

Interestingly, the Roman elite seemed to be the last to recognize the empire’s decline. True, during Augustus’ reign the elite probably knew that the empire was a shadow of its former self. But elites were too busy squabbling over power to care much for the long arc of history. In their eyes, a return to Roman ‘greatness’ was probably forever on the horizon.

Perhaps the best characterization of this elite attitude comes not from history, but from science fiction. In his Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov imagines a galactic empire that sits on the verge of collapse. Scientist Harry Seldon sees the writing on the wall. But the leaders of the galactic empire do not. They’re too busy squabbling amongst themselves.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Revolutions And Wars”: What According To Ray Dalio Comes After “Printing Money”

May 21, 2020

“Revolutions And Wars”: What According To Ray Dalio Comes After “Printing Money”

Having seemingly conquered the world of finance, Ray Dalio and Howard Marks have been competing who can be a more productive writer in recent weeks, and just two weeks after writing a lengthy thesis on the rise and fall of fiat currencies (which had no less than 43 mentions of gold for obvious reasons), Dalio is back to discussing one of his favorite topics, namely the rise and fall of empires, among which the US and China, over the last 500 years.

The third chapter of his “Changing World Order” series (preceded by Chapter 1 “The Big Picture in a Tiny Nutshell”, and Chapter 2, “The Big Cycle of Money, Credit, Debt, and Economic Activity” and its appendix “The Changing Value of Money“), takes a closer look at the rise and fall of the Dutch, British, and American empires and their reserve currencies and, in what will spark howls of outrage from both sides of the discussion, touches on the rise of the Chinese empire, which Dalio views as the next ascendent superpower “to bring us up to the present.”Ray Dalio✔@RayDalio

In this latest release of my series The Changing World Order, I will review the rises and declines of the Dutch, British, and American empires and their reserve currencies and will touch on the rise of the Chinese empire to bring us up to the present…

https://bit.ly/TCWOch3 The Big Cycles Over The Last 500 YearsNote: To make this an easier and shorter article to read, I tried to convey the most important points in simple language and bolded them, so you can get the gist of the whole thing in just a few…linkedin.com

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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