Empires rise and fall based on their resource base, and how much they can extract from their dependent nations.  When an empire’s capital maintenance costs exceed its income, then that is when catabolic collapse sets in.  Capital maintenance costs always get exceed income eventually.  When the landowning class becomes small, when the landowner has lots of employees/slaves, and does not oversee it himself, when the farmland is measured as an profitable investment instead of a relationship where the land owns you and tells you what it needs, then you’ll inevitably get a lack of long-term investment in the soil health, which will lead to a reduction in yield, and eventual abandonment.  Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but on the whole, that is what is happening with vast amounts of wealth inequality.

In essence, empires must be violent.  They must expand or die.  When there is no place left to expand, because either the return on investment of invasion is negative, or because a competing empire is rising along the periphery, then they also die.  That much concentration of wealth and people must have a steady income stream of replacement parts, of food and water, of soldiers who have not led a couch-jockey lifestyle, or the maintenance costs will overwhelm them, and they will fade away.  How quickly they fall, without their daily bread and circuses!

Under POSIWID, the purpose of an empire is to loot, pillage, and steal the wealth and resources of the many, and concentrate it into the hands of the few.  Oh, I know, they always have the usual propaganda.  Look, you’re better off now!  You have freedom, and free trade, and democracy, and women’s rights!  Look at how much better your education system is now!  Is it, though?  Are things actually better?  Is there not still xenophobia, oppression, theft, fraud, mass murder, despair and suicide?  If things are so much better, why is the antidepressant use so high?

Have we not woken up homeless in the very land our forefathers died in battle for?  Have we not become hungry for the truth instead of the fake news and the entertainment surrounding us on all sides?  Have we not started to grieve for the destruction of the productivity of so very much of the farmland which used to feed us from its bounty?  If not, you probably live in a major city, and your paycheck depends upon you supporting empire.  When people understand how narcodollar recycling works, yet depend on dollars to eat, to have a roof over their head, to have water pumped through their pipes and into their houses, they don’t want it to stop.  Even while empire drones to death children, bombs hospitals, cuts off water supplies to people who, 100 years ago lived peacefully as neighbors with the people who were turned against them.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Many empires have risen and fallen over the last 5000 years of written history, and much longer still.  The sun never sets on the American Empire.  The dark joke that goes with that, is that God doesn’t trust Americans not to kill and rape each other to death in the dark.  This is not a white skinned thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-white empires, of which there have been many.  This is not a Christian thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-Abrahamic empires, of which there have been many.  Who goes and steals cultural artifacts of the places they invade?  Empires do.  Not just Germany.  Not just the United States.  Not just the Vatican library.

This is the other side of the coin from the realization of self-determination.  I have the authority to decide what my actions are, to not mindlessly obey leaders.  Yet, some things in the world are inexorable, inevitable, and unchangeable by even the most potent hypersigil.  A great many things are not part of my story, yet are.  That the American Empire will fall is not something I can change.  How it falls may be.  Yet even there, the options are quite limited.  I don’t want nuclear war.  I don’t want sea level rise to melt down the understaffed ocean shoreline based nuclear reactors, when the jellyfish and plastic bags in the cooling intake valves aren’t enough.  I don’t want genome targeted virii to wipe out gobs of the population.  What I do want, I’ll have to wait to write more about, some other time.