Pentagon study declares American Empire is 'collapsing'
medium.comand the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling.
Good.
potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future
Even better. Trusting government is a fool's errand.
But, the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a “wakeup call”. If nothing is done to adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases.”
IOW, it's not the Department of Defense at all. It's more like the Department of World Domination.
And what is your proposed replacement? I've seen a lot of libertarian/ancap complaining about governments, but never any suggestions where the cure isn't worse than the disease.
FFS, look at history. When governments collapse, what springs up is never a wonderful, harmonious, anarchist collective. What actually happens is this: a short period of chaos, followed by the public willfully putting a strongman authoritarian into power when they're sufficiently sick of the instability and just want peace and quiet back. This is a constant pattern throughout history and it is ridiculous to think "this time will be different".
You really can't think of any middle-ground between what we have now and anarchy/libertarianism?
How about just this as starters: 1. Legalize marijuana 2. End civil asset forfeiture 3. Stronger anti-trust on the internet and wireless spectrum 4. Improve the legal system to prevent civil cases from stifling free speech (perhaps by offering pro-bono lawyers to individuals sued by corporations for acts of speech only) 5. Work to end corporate influence over government.
It's not an all-or-nothing thing, we just need to decide what we care about, talk about it, and it will happen (but slowly).
I am in favor of all four (EDIT: five, my bad). But none of those are related to the GP's comment.
But none of those are related to the GP's comment.
Actually they kinda are. When I say "don't trust government" you can take that as "grant government ZERO authority which can be abused" (the anarchist position, and, by happenstance, pretty much my actual position), but you can also read it as "trust the government with less authority which can be abused."
And even as an anarchist, I'd take any developments in regards to the latter half of that as progress in a generally positive direction. I mean, I'm an anarchist, but I'm also a pragmatist. We won't get an ancap society in my lifetime, but if we could scale back the size and scope of government just a bit, I would be happy(er).
Okay, so people should not trust their government. Ways they can not trust their government are by
1. Separation of powers
2. Accountability via body-cams
3. Freedom of speech to protect political progress that threatens incumbents
4. Making voting systems that have auditibility
etc. These are all good practical ways to reduce trust in government with no downside. Why ask for "trust" instead of offering proof?
It is our role in a democracy not to trust our government, but to guide it (by selecting the correct representatives) to represent us on the things we agree on.
That's a great point. And to the extent that we do allow "government" and grant it some authority, transparency is - to my mind - absolutely essential. That is, if we're going to give a subset of people some privileged degree of power over others, then it is extremely incumbent upon us to ensure that that position isn't abused. And personally I feel like our current (US) government is far, far away from being properly transparent, or accountable to the people.
So anything that moves towards less secrecy, and more transparency, is compatible with my "don't trust government" position. Of course one can argue about just how far to take it, but I think most of us agree that we've gone too far in the secrecy and obfuscation direction as of late.
There's a first time for everything. And things do change. I'd say we, collectively, have a better understanding of how self-government can work now, than we did in the past. Are we "there yet"? I don't know. But I know that what we're doing now isn't working so great.
potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future
Even better. Trusting government is a fool's errand.
wow, great... what do you suggest -- remove governments and go back to clan wars? or perhaps we should be asking the question of how did we end up with governments that cannot be trusted...
Then who do you trust no one? computers? corporations? religious leaders? scientists?
How do you run society without trust?
Wait, what?? Where did I say anything remotely like "trust no one"?
Trusting governments has worked out so well historically though. That got us many wars, untold numbers of people killed, incarcerated and/or experimented on. It got us untold numbers of people inhibited from creating wealth and a better future for themselves, so the existing elite power base could preserve itself. It got us civil asset forfeiture, the "War on Drugs" (aka, war on civil liberties), horrible nutritional advice promulgated by the USDA and their ilk, which has ruined people's health (hey, eat lots of carbs, fat is evil!). It's got us entrenched systems which promote the morality of one religious group (Christians, in the US) regardless of one's personal beliefs. It's got us MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, Room 641a, etc., etc.
Are you suggesting any alternate ideas here, or just ranting about "muh gubment"?
All they're suggesting is that trusting the government is a silly idea, and then provided examples of it. I don't think they're suggesting necessarily that we need a brand new kind of government - just that we should for good reason be wary of the one we currently have.
"Government" is governance of humans by humans. It has never been "good" because the past is so dismal and because humans collectively have not come to make it good.
The challenge for those who critize government generically is that they design a good governance ... whether we call some part of it government or not.
> Trusting governments has worked out so well historically though.
The absence of government, on the other hand, was even better. We have such incredible highlights as the dark ages, the Mongol conquest, islam's spread, ... each of which killed far more people than 40-45 including Japan and the Holocaust, when the total human population was a fraction of what it was during WWII. Collapses of government which are more recent, but on a smaller scale are currently used as laughingstocks for anarchists and ... sorry to say ... rightly so. Among such examples are Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan as recent examples.
Without the government, can you really vouch for all 7 billion humans alive, even for basic things, such as that no group of them would commit mass murder, just because it would provide a better meal tomorrow evening ? How about all 300 million Americans ? I don't think so. How about 10 million New Yorkers ? I wouldn't take that bet.
The bet that they wouldn't band together and steal whatever they can is so ridiculous it's barely worth thinking about.
>Trusting governments has worked out so well historically though.
On balance, though, for most people, it actually has. Which creates a bit of a messaging problem for anarchy in the general case.
I for one don't trust anyone in that list (maybe computers?). But, I think I can trust my neighbor. Maybe that's where it starts.
>how do you run a society without trust?
You distribute trust and power among actors in a way that is secure and relatively equitable (compared to current power structures). Enter bitcoin and other more versatile cryptocurrencies like Etherium.
Cryptos may form the foundations of a healthier globalism and a new era for the human race, in that we will be less bound to and reliant on government as a separate, opaque power structure. However, there is a long way to go regarding development and adoption, and, let's be real, the overwhelming majority of private citizens may never understand the function or power of cryptos, while government entities will see it as the power threat that it is and may legislate it away while the populace remains ignorant.
I especially enjoy the fact they seem to be deeming their own citizens as enemies.
Great job guys!
To governments, their own citizens are the enemy. We are a potential uprising just waiting to happen.
Good. Here's how things should go:
1. First America stops being world police.
2. America plays ball with rest of world (adopts metric system, becomes a leader in climate, shares control of internet, turns concern toward to real issues like asteroids, population growth, health issues, cyber security)
3. Citizens acknowledge that war is a tool for siphoning tax money into the coffers of people with connections/government-contracts, and move towards a post-war-era.
4. Citizens start to move to a post-nation era, where we acknowledge have more in common with each other than our own politicians who drive us apart for financial gain.
5. We move toward universalizing language, so we hit a point that declaring war with Iraq seems as absurd as declaring war with Canada.
6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
[Link to Pentagon's study: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/download.cfm?q=1358]
As nice as your list is, I have a few issues with it:
1 - "World police" tends to stick around, or soon comes back. (depending on how encumbering you define the "world"): US, British Empire, Rome, Ancient Persia, Chinese Dynasties. All have sought and won control of major parts of the world because it was beneficial to them and their trading partners.
2 - Sharing control of the internet with whom? China? Russia? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Cuba? The internet is fragmenting and soon each country will have their own local control. No need to share. (unfortunately)
3 - War is about power. As long as one person wants power, there will be war of some kind.
4 - Politics is also about power. As long as politicians have that power, they will seek to keep it (see also #3). See Venezuela for a current example of how sad this can get.
6 - Status, attention, and ego are just a few things that cannot be automated away. If your point were even remotely true, then the difference between a typical underpaid school teacher and Elon Musk (or Larry Ellison, or Donald Trump, etc.) would be trivial after the 100+ years of automation we've experienced.
Finally, collapse of empires tends to be followed by periods of lower economic output and higher violence; not to mention significant loss of knowledge. I'm not happy that we have one, but seeing it disappear could easily be worse.
1. Historical fallacy (just because things were a way in the past does not mean they will always be that way)
2. What if, like blockchain, we build a DNS model that is server agnostic? People are already working on this, if you think it's not possible you should learn more.
3. That's not valid logic.
4. That's not valid logic.
6. [There seems to be no 5?] Historical fallacy.
This is a laundry list of stuff that will never happen in any current country in any of our life times.
I've heard people say that before, but I don't see why I should believe it. 230 years ago America didn't exist. 150 years ago black people were property. 100 years ago women could not vote. 50 years ago nobody owned a computer. Until recently, weed was illegal.
The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
Countries rise and fall. There is still slavery in America, and (separately) black people and women are often still disadvantaged compared to other races and to men. Weed is still illegal in the majority of states and under federal law. These are things that change and shift over time.
1+2. One way or another, America will "stop playing world police". It might do things like adopt the metric system (depending on how long the "rugged independence" streak runs). U.S. climate policy is about as important to the world as Californian climate policy is to the rest of the country (near zero). The internet is already splintering into interlinked regional networks, and will continue to do so naturally.
3. War isn't inherently a way to enrich private entities, although it's clearly true that that's one effect of it, in this country right now (and arguably, currently the primary reason). War has been a constant reality, at least since the time humans began agriculture. Maybe it'll go away in the future, but I see no evidence of it.
4. One over-arching nation, with some division of regional governments. Conflict will just move down the tree.
5. A single, universal language isn't an inherently good thing. It sounds like a great way to kill off cultural diversity.
6. We'll have to change the nature of the human animal. We're naturally prone to categorizing, ranking, organizing, and using those structures to assess threat levels. Denying that is fighting nature; you won't win that war.
> The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?
True, true. Things will change. They'll follow the path of least resistance, on the macro and micro levels. Your 6 steps are fighting entropy the whole way. They're radical claims. Radical claims require radical evidence...do you have any?
War won't go away until people stop wanting other people's stuff.
All those changes you mentioned are trivial compared to completely reworking how human society has functioned for thousands of years.
No, they're not.
I'm sure people argued the American economy would collapse without slave labor.
And America not being world police isn't a revolutionary change, we only started being world police in the last 70 years or so, and it's done more harm than good realistically.
I'm unclear what your defeatist motivation is, but it doesn't seem like you've actually sincerely thought this through.
Pretty wild oversimplification there. War is complex and doesn't happen for one reason. For instance Russia's involvement in Syria and Crimea is more about expanding territory and sphere of influence than funneling tax payer's money, Putin and the Russian oligarchs do that well enough already.
> 6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.
We already have excess of some things such as calories and clean clothing. The cost of 2k calories per day is a pretty small fraction of minimum wage. We are also witnessing a rise in food classism that is targeted at the foods that are hard to bring the price down on. It has become a status symbol to "know where your food comes from" or to eat at a "farm to table" restaurant. These are associated with ways to get your calories that have high logistical & labor costs.
I agree that we will see eras of excess in more and more goods and services, but the idea that humans won't find a way to show superiority or class by consuming higher cost goods/services seems kind of out of touch.
> For instance Russia's involvement in Syria and Crimea is more about expanding territory and sphere of influence
For the record, these places were Russian sphere of influence before the conflicts started. Though not strictly Russian territory, indeed.
That's a good way of becoming weak. Your enemies will be very glad to watch you try this.
"The Americans have brought their armed forces back home, adopted sensible foreign and domestic policies, and are starting to see eye-to-eye with people whom they once found too foreign to relate to. Now is the perfect time to strike!"
Our global hegemony ensures stability of trade for the entire world, and that stability is the reason that other countries eagerly trade and generally deal business with the US. Unfortunately, if we back away from our role as world police, the resulting power vacuum will see some other country take up the role at best, and at worst we could see another large scale conflict as emerging powers compete for dominance.
Our current foreign policy is far from ideal, but there is a delicate global balance which would be dangerously upset if we ceased global operations and "world policing." The GP is niave to think that such rosy, utopian intentions would not be taken advantage of by other global players. Look, for instance, at the current posturing by China in the Pacific. Imagine the scaling of their operations if there was no one in our position to apply pressure against them.
Someday, sure. But, globally, humans are still viciously tribal, and some form of enforcement keeps everything running smoothly for everyone. And while Americans foot much of the bill, there is no denying that our benefit is of larger proportion as well.
I feel like a lot of people have a lot of trouble appreciating the wars that _didn't_ happen under American hegemony. I don't believe we're perfect in anyway, but under our influence the world has been more peaceful and interconnected than at any other time in world history.
Similar to the violence that was quelled under Saddam. It's difficult to appreciate and measure that which is absent.
Rephrase that last sentence a few different ways and you'll see the problem:
"Now is the perfect time to close the Suez Canal" "Now is the perfect time to invade South Korea" "Now is the perfect time to plunder any ship with cargo" "Now is the perfect time to take Qatar"
The reality is, America's military presence abroad is a stabilising force. Take that away and other powers will move in to fill the vacuum.
Please elaborate how exactly this leads to weakness? And how do you define it in the first place?
power and political vacuums tend to want to be filled
You do realize that a bunch of our present political instability is because quite a lot of people viscerally hate and fear 4 and 5, and are voting for politicians who promise to block them, yes?
The people who viscerally hate (4) and (5) have little stakes in the economy, and will have less and less, to the point that their vote will be essentially meaningless.
If that were true, then neither Trump nor Brexit would have happened. You could always claim that it is not true now but will be "in the future", but that claim is unfalsifiable.
>1. First America stops being world police.
Yes, how do we do this? I'd like to see us declare victory, and remove our troops from South Korea, Japan, Germany, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and everywhere else. The UK did essentially this over the course of the 20th century. Is there any way to accelerate the process without world wars?
Does anyone have examples of groups working "together" that share one common interest, and are opposed on many other fronts?
War has been a part of society for as long as society has existed. What has changed in your mind to make post-war era possible?
Also does post war mean war never again happens? Or just happens less frequently?
I truly believe a post war era (war not happening for millions of years) will not be possible without genetic mutation of the human genome.
That may work if nothing else changes, but things would change and likely drastically, and many many peoples lives would be turned upside-down. The upside-down is coming regardless, but I'm hoping delayed past our lifetimes. Modern day humans are great at delaying rather than fixing!
You forgot an important one (probably a prerequisite): fix the political system.
are asteroids a real issue?
From what we can tell, they've caused mass extinctions before, no reason to believe they won't again.
i believe that i just don't think the timeline is short enough for it to matter. afaik there is no impending asteroid disaster within the next 1000 years, although there could be hundreds of factors in my ignorance on this matter.
There's not enough data to support this claim. At present the budgets spent on policing space for foreign objects is puny, and currently less than 5% of the night sky is being policed or analyzed. Asteroids can come from a bazillion different trajectories up down left right.. all in 3d space... it's not like looking left/right and left again crossing the street.
It's very possibly an asteroid could strike us and we wouldn't even be aware of it till after the fact, or at the very least till a week or two before it strikes... if it's in one of our blind spots (i.e. the other 95% of the sky)
It is not yet possible to know when the next one is going to show up. We are only currently aware of a bunch of rocks that most likely wont hit us.
Mass extinction due to meteor strike is just one hypothesis.
That's 100% of the point.
If other planets/moons/whatever haven't been colonized by the time humanity gets empirical data for that hypothesis, a lot of people are going to wish they'd put that a little higher on the list.
> We move toward universalizing language
Perhaps Chinese would be a good choice.
I think picking any one existing language would be too emotional for people.
I don't have the implementation details. But just to illustrate how doable it'd be, I'd suggest we take something neutral (like Esperanto) and every language start adding 20 Esperanto words to their language per year, with a plan to coalesce after 200 years.
40,000 shared words isn't a full language, but it's enough to make conversations and debates possible.
This was a top post in r/geopolitics a couple of days back. I can't find the link anymore, probably because it was removed. A lot of them commented that this sounded like DoD propaganda to get increased funding, especially when you consider that this study was funded by DoD.
Anyway, it is truly scary if they think they need to massively expand the already unparalleled American military dominance.
One thing I find particularly funny about the whole Trump-Russia connection and the possibility of Putin & Co. meddling with American Elections, is the disconnect of those that are so blindly outraged about it all.
Trump of course should resign if the intervention is proven as deliberate and facilitated by his side, but shall we make a list of all the foreign elections the US have been meddling with in the last 50 years?
The real solution? American friends, as much as I love you (and I do, mostly), you should just stop being so way up your own ass all the time. About everything. There's a world out there, across the borders and the two ponds.
The techniques used in the 2016 US election were developed by western governments to interfere in 3rd world countries' elections. Heck the same subcontractors were used. Classic example of a weapon being turned on the maker.
Maybe they should consider exactly how badly they used their post-Cold War dominance. Things like the Iraq war leeched their dominance, by showing them as unprepared, by showing them as an occupying power and by splitting them with most of Europe.
It wasn't the only decision that had this effect, either. The report might as well say "We used to be rich, but we spent it all on fast cars and drink."
I wonder if this is what the Soviets proposed right before their collapse. I guess when you're a hammer (Pentagon) you only know how to hit things (war). We may or may not be about to collapse as an empire, but I'm certain that if we follow the plan outlined here, we will collapse as a society. We've already been heading there for quite awhile now. Let's spend more on military while our citizens are jobless, homeless, and dying of sickness, then use propaganda to tell them they're living the high life. There are, unfortunately, enough stupid people in this country to keep such a charade going. The current leadership, both political and military, is just a reflection of that.
Theres a easy cure that will be the norm in 100 or 200 years, whenever we get sick of capitalism. You're right capitalism is not currently recognized as a form of government, but in reality it is the dominant form of government in the west.
The cure is, get this, transparency. It'll take some effort to get to a true transparent government and im calling this new form Transparentism.
Edit: "...has collapsed."