SOCIETY AND POWER - 11/09/2022In the year 1566, the Ottoman Empire was the World’s dominant superpower under the legendary Suleiman the Magnificent. Ottoman territory extended across three continents over nearly 2.3 million square kilometers. Its military was powerful… and feared. The economy was strong and the treasury plentiful. But in time that changed. Subsequent Ottoman rulers became complacent. The government became bureaucratic. The military became softer. Society became decadent. As a whole, they lost the elements that made them strong and powerful to begin with, and the empire began to dwindle.
Over time, France ascended as the dominant superpower; Paris became the global center of politics, commerce, and arts. And no other European power could come close to France’s wealth or military capabilities. But the French, too, lost their way, and were eventually displaced by the British Empire as the world’s leading superpower.
To this day the British Empire is still the largest ever in the history of the world, totaling more than a quarter of the world’s land mass. They dominated global trade and oversaw a period of geopolitical power now called the Pax Britannica.
The British Empire was ultimately displaced by the United States, which has now been the world’s leading superpower for decades. Today the United States is also in decline. From a rational academic perspective, it is easy to recognize obvious and familiar signs of an empire in decay.
If we explain the fundamental forces of decline in 4 different groups, we may group them in forces of Resources, Society, Economy and History.
Forces of Resources, that´s mainly energy and minerals, have created rising energy and steel costs that are now first visible as an energy crisis. As the cheapest and nearest energy sources already are explored, for every day who pass, more and more energy is required to extract and produce energy than before. In other words, oil producers must burn more oil to fuel their equipment, for every barrel of oil that they pump from a well which is more far to reach, or the crude oil is more impure and must be better processed than before. This is a critical trend to watch; the past few centuries have proven a very clear link between energy and prosperity, and more expensive energy is a nasty, long-term barrier to economic growth.
The second major category of forces causing decline in the World Economy are the Forces of Society. We can see this every day in the social and political divisiveness, censorship, media manipulation, the appalling decline in trust, rising crime rates, extreme politics, wokeness, etc.
The third category are Forces of Economy. Here we can see evidence in the absurd level of FIAT money printing, inflation, the national debt, rising taxes, multi-trillion dollar/euro spending packages that “cost nothing”, etc.
And the fourth category are the Forces of History. This is the inevitable course of empire-- rise, peak, and decline, and it includes all the geopolitical events we’ve witnessed, from the debacle of Western invasion troops in Afghanistan to the conflict in Ukraine.
Each of these groups of forces are contributing to an obvious Western decline.
It is by no means a one-way street. And there are many elements that could be improved. The widespread adoption of nuclear power, for example, could result in an economic bonanza, which would keep the party going for quite some time. But for now, the trajectory of the West appears to be heading down. Again, that shouldn’t be a critical issue if we look at the situation rationally and dispassionately, and not through the lenses of emotions, blind faith or fear.
Who will be the dominant superpower after the US and European decline? Is China the answer… simply because it is the only viable power large and rich enough to displace the increasing void? But China has a lot of its own problems too. Some are fixable, like its giant debt bubble. Others (like its demographic crisis) are not.
So maybe the myth of an inevitable Orwellian Global Superpower will be broken and replaced by the emergence of several smaller empires which counterbalance and disturb the creation of a fake Democracy which threw the mask to become a totalitarian Global Superpower. As in Europe, after the fall of the West Roman Empire, no single power dominated the rest. Then, the diversity, the environment and the humans would still have a chance to survive.
If you download a language map, it not only shows the clusters of languages with similar roots. Embedded in a language come more important glues which ties brothers and sisters together, like culture, religion and traditions. A language map shows cultural ties, possibilities for real and natural alliances. A split global world, yes, from which failure a spectrum of strong nations and true alliances is born. Today, we can identify at least 8 stronger empires, but no one should be strong enough to gain global power. For example, these, with their possible headquarters in parentheses.
TURKISH (Istambul)
SLAVES (Moskva)
GERMAN-JUDAIC (New York/Tel Aviv/Bryssel/Amsterdam/Berlin)
ARAB (Saudi)
CHINESE (Somewhere in China)
ROMAN (Paris)
HINDU (Somewhere in India)
PERSIAN (Teheran)
Plausible empires are under development, like INDONESIA and EAST AFRICA. And some of the mentioned empires can split up in two or more smaller ones, like the Eastern Europe Slave states, who once had enough of Soviet terror, or Arab and Indian regions and states who likely can split up in several smaller communities as their culture are rich and very diversified, as well as they have rich local history of earlier empires. Peripheric states like Australia and Japan joins the German-Judaic community, as well as Cuba and some African states may join the Russian Union, by political and economic pressure.
Language World Map
