It will be not the direct or even immediate outcome of an economy entering a fetal phase of assured free-fall and which, by all evidential markings and data analysis available, seems poised to soon crash into its looming meltdown. But nor will it be the direct or immediate outcome of the accumulating failures of ill-conceived geopolitical strategies whose most conspicuous achievements so far have been, on the one hand, to build into powerful enemies countries it could have had as friends, and on the other, to do the utmost to act as if to purposely unite them against itself. Those facts notwithstanding, and although they are not unconnected with the domestic front, the most decisive events cobbling themselves together to bring the US of A into the-not-yet clearly discernible but nonetheless surely approaching economic, political, and social unraveling, are all homespun and homegrown factors.
As a matter of readily available data, it is the kind of society which the US of A has become over time; the kind of politicians this society produces; the kind of leadership and policies it forces into place on all fronts; the kind of culturally worthless “values” it celebrates; the kind of minority- oriented ideology that now substitutes for its original Anglo-Saxon pragmatism—all that and more of the same is what ultimately accounts for the train of errors, mistakes, and misdirection now derailing the US of A toward its downfall. But that is to say that the most salient of the homespun and homegrown factors that lead to that harken all the way back to the early years of the nation and the incipience of the American society, as it transitioned from being humbling colonies into what it is today.
Which leads to the two fundamental questions:
Firstly: What has the US of A become in our days? The answer to that is: the US of A is the place from where the other nations of the West are being led to their comprehensive downfall. And Secondly: How can we tell that is indeed the case, without necessarily immersing ourselves in oceans of economic, financial, and military data, and without being geopolitics experts? Answer: When a nation is on its way down, a constellation of signs, in the form of events, happenings, happenstances, situations, scenarios or whatever else one chooses to call them, are on display everywhere. And such display, observed in a certain way, is in essence a constellation of signages, not of what is to come, but of that which is already on its way. From such signage, read off against the pertinent moments of a national history and the current political and cultural discourses, a composite picture emerges that show through the fog what is soon to be plastered to our face.
I have gathered in this piece manifold telltales from the most outstanding of samplings of what things looked and felt like in their everyday for the peoples of ancient Greece, Rome, and after them, from Spain, France, England, and Britain who lived through the, at first, slow unraveling and unspooling of their societies, as their own lives were increasingly being wrapped up the corruption and decay around them, as their nations precipitated toward their collapse and final eclipse. These samplings are not by any means exhaustive, but are nonetheless adequate to facilitate an insightful look into the historical past as we in the US of A head off toward the inevitable.
Alas! It’s not a question of History “repeating itself.” For, History is a continuum and need not a repetition. But, stories—they are the “eternal recurrence of the same.” Because they have been taken from various bibliographical sources and proceed from different countries and ages, these signs and symptoms of the already-on-its-way collapsing US of A are not arranged in any particular order.
· Observed in the way suggested above, the first thing that makes itself noticeable is the vague but “oceanic” sensation, registered by almost everyone wherever they are within the society, “that something big is about to end”; that “things do not look, feel, or behave as they have always had”; or that “everything is changing fast around us”; or simultaneously, that “we are living at the end of something” we cannot immediately put our finger on. We are coming to the “end of things,” and this looming end gets recognized by the intellect as a failure to understand: the immediate reality cannot be comprehended by the mind. Well observed, that’s the emotional and psychological stuff the ongoing American zeitgeist is made of.
· A state comes to prevail of generalized, multifaceted confusion about practically every area of public and private life that inflicts itself equally on all classes, races, genders, sexualities, and in all but the few. The “few” is here understood as a cultural or intellectually loose plurality of individuals, as well as a handful of small organizations or circles voluntarily or otherwise operating at the margins of the “goings-on” in a given nation. with no recognizable links between them, mostly spread out across society.
· In that state, practically nothing seems exactly what it is because practically nothing presents or shows itself as it is; and thus, nothing seems what it is while nothing is what it seems. In such state of affairs, practically everything is misleading even if that is not necessarily intentional, which it often is not. But that only serves to underlie the scope of the reigning confusion. In such state, society stands starkly divided as larger segments of the population have persuaded themselves that the claims they stake, or which are made by others on their behalf, accord with reality, and this simply because those claims reflect their own assumptions about themselves, the immediate consequence being the emergence of countless “communities,” which signals the splintering and fragmentation of the erstwhile society. If it goes on existing at some levels, it increasingly becomes dysfunctional at many levels, or the other way around; and the erstwhile citizens, to all effects and consequences, become “community subjects.” Everybody seems then to belong to a “community,” to which they have informally sworn allegiance often with their own flags or symbology, and their own lingoes. Such “communities” (in truth a euphemism for tribes, sects, and fractions), tend to be formed by members proceeding from a diversity of classes, genders, and races, and from the ever-splitting recombination of ever-multiplying sexualities and para-sexualities. This is a phenomenon known since ancient Greece history, and it is typical of civilizations approaching their end. Also typically, in such sectarian or cultist “communities,” individualism is outstanding, since they possess nothing that is truly communal. For, in a generalized state of confusion, it is everyone for themselves.
· In that state, to the extent that the concept still does justice to it, “society” turns into a more-or-less loose collection of particularisms: the old systems of belief that functioned as the bonds between the in many ways different strata of society, and among its institutions, also break down following what is going on in the everyday language.
· That state of affairs expresses itself with especial force in the language, with all its capability to dim the mind. Thus, an utter state of generalized confusion can first of all be detected in the fact that, with the fragmentation of society into countless “communities,” words themselves stop meaning what they had always meant, which is why, as it was said above, practically nothing can be known for what it is, nor can it be addressed in the direct way it had traditionally been done. An internal breakage in the language seems to take place, which can be localized at the semantic level, that makes virtually impossible even commonplace speech understanding outside the “community” one belongs to. In the larger realms of the public space everybody speaks “in tongues” as it were, or in different variations of the same language; semantical reception of even the same words of old is no longer universally viable. So utter is the generalized state of confusion that the tendency prevails in commonplace language itself to cease to generate meanings that can be readily grasped. Language now functions on paradigms that organically reflect the idiosyncrasy of the class, gender, sexuality, race or “identity” the speaker belongs to. Even the erstwhile shared protocols to produce meaning in language; even the basic awareness that words acquire their meanings from the sentence as the basic structure that brings together and organizes all the parts through which cogency in language attains, the sentence approaches near collapse. A tendency prevails in language to reflect the shortcuts and shorthand of thoughts.
· By force of necessity, when a nation or society reaches such state of utter confusion, a strong disregard of, and indifference toward truths take hold of it, and except for scattered small marginal groups from the fringes, this gets demonstrated every time from practically all sides, as the whole advances toward implosion and disintegration. Such development is of course intrinsically related to what is happening to language as sketched above. A society; a nation; an époque that started by questioning whether the truth exists and whether language can reflex or express objective realities, and which in another of its phases moved to overtly deny its existence—now reaches a point at which in myriad ways it declares that, whether it exists or not, the truth simply does not matter. Then, the means are engineered to make it not to count. Lies abound. Lying, by the authorities and every center of power, becomes the norm, while those who demand truths are blackballed and blacklisted, interdicted, and prosecuted. At that point, other derivatives of deeply entrenched forms of corruption take over the whole. For instance, given the fragile relation to the truth of a society that is disintegrating into “communities,” the tendency there predominates for appearance to take the place of the real, at times deemed more desirable than the actual. People, institutions, organizations of all persuasions largely operate under collective delusions.
· Reality in every realm of life is apprehended not as something one adapts to or seeks to transform, but as something that must be escaped. And so, the means proliferate through which such escape is attempted. Narcotics in their many varieties are at everybody's reach. Among the old and the young, everybody but the very few consumes alcohol, nicotine, or both; the consumption of hard drugs shoots up as a population constantly searches for the right substance to stupefy themselves. That often happens with the explicit or implicit encouragement of the authorities. For stimulants make controlling the populace far easier, while taking public attention away from questions that may arise from the few, concerning the generalized state of confusion in a given nation.
· Likewise, the traditional, long-honored criteria concerning culture, education, arts, love, sexuality, friendship, business, religion and the like get progressively discarded and the self-regarding and self-interested idiosyncrasies of a host of elitist groups are substituted thereof at institutional levels and in the public discourses which now becomes ever more fragmentary as some of the natural capabilities of language get curtailed.
· In all areas of life, excluding none, and concerning whatever you will the standards of taste in public and private conduct and self-comportment break down. The “old ways” are largely ignored and overtly mucked, derided, and dismissed. That corresponds to the cultural general break that takes place in the general population. So that, the differences tend to disappear between morality and immorality, as whole institutes succumb to the swell of confusion going around, brought up by the “new ways”; and that means no entities are left with the moral wherewithal to serve as guide or shed light on both the social and the personal the realms.
· Giving up old scruples (scruples having become “old”) in their private and public life, private citizens as much as public ones like politicians and celebrities exhibit no ethical “holding-back,” and in everything they do they bar no holds. In such state, norms and traditions are ignored with alacrity, and vulgarity and coarseness appear everywhere in expressions and presentations. The more vulgar and coarse everything turns the more unaware people tend to become of the presence of vulgarity and coarseness in their personal life. Then, misuse and abuse of the laws by the authorities is never to be discounted; violence, both from the authorities on society and among the denizens against one another eventually becomes something to be expected, as the population becoming desensitized to it.
· A feature attendant to a society or nation prey to generalized confusion—and which maybe is the surest sign and symptom of it being in the process of discomposing and disintegrating—is that the more indications thereof become more defined, the less the majority of those most affected demonstrate any serious interest in getting enlightened about the state of things, either around them or in the larger realm. People take to heart that “ignorance is bliss,” thus precipitating their own decay. Lethargy, indifference, and apathy are the characteristic moods because of their ubiquitousness, and every act, action, or deed rises from these moods, and feeds these moods. An especial kind of boredom spreads.
· And indeed, in a state of generalized utter confusion, to the that extent to which collective understanding is still possible, it is limited within the space of given circles or coteries. That sets the boundaries between individuals (the former societal subjects). Such way of limited “understanding” prescribes the sense of belonging or not to a “community” or another, outside of which language is just a noise nobody wants to hear. Consequently, direct, free, and spontaneous communication and conversation inter pares is possible or even desirable only up to a minimum. Tribalism provides the ethos to live by. As language falters and breaks down, it ceases to be efficient enough to convey a generalized state of affairs throughout society: to the extent that they still do, people communicate “atomically” and fragmentarily and in pre-approved and sanctioned terminology. Chattering increases to the same degree that the capacity to generate meanings gets fixed in all but the few. In such atmosphere, some words get ideologically misconstrued in their meanings, and consequently banned; other words get assigned shibboleth status. Speakers who insist on using certain words get badmouthed, denounced, and excluded.
· Consequently, in such a state of generalized confusion, euphemisms and round-about manners of speech are very much needed. At a psychological level, the tendency prevails to self-censure and self-withdrawal. That jibes with, and is indeed a picture of what is going on in the collective mind of the population of a nation moving toward disintegration. A salient feature of the kind of confusion in question is, everything—business, sex, education, friendship, the law, etc. etc.—is seen through an ideological prism. Which leads to a situation in which, in any kind of relations, relationships, or transactions, the ideological presuppositions of the most vocal and influential sectors within a nation must first be satisfied, for that is the precondition for anybody attempting to attain anything else. Whether political, educational, artistic, sexual, or what have you, ideology becomes either a reinforceable form of an unofficial religion, or a sort of “super-value” placed above all other values. Therefore, social groups, and social coteries and circles are formed around it, and are also sustained through their ideological identity with each other. Thus, business and trade have more of a chance of succeeding and prospering only when the ideological requirements of the parties involved align with each other. That suggests that business transactions, customer service, and business relations like most other activities, adopt political protocols. Business owners as much as business corporations seek to service those customers and clients that think like themselves.
· The reverse is intimately connected to this phenomenon: one of the consequences of that scenario is a shrinking economy, in which large number of independent businesses goes into bankruptcy. For it is harder or maybe impossible for smaller businesses to impose or function around any ideology.
· On the other hand, because in a state of collective mental disarray things function on ideological identification, a nation or society that has fallen into it experiences the most diverse, most variegated, indiscriminating and even promiscuous mixing of the races, ethnicities, skin colors, sexualities, social classes, social standings, and intellectual levels. Everything is mixed up, and everyone is mixed up with everybody else as myriad elements; for example, the very rich and the very poor hang together, as do elements from the white and the black race; from Blacks to the “peoples-of-color”; from the highly educated to the barely so; from the very beautiful to the repulsively ugly; the God-fearing to the atheists; the well-brought up to the vulgar, etc., etc.
· All these variegated sorts become reciprocally attracted to one another, mediated by shared political ideology. The tendency is to indiscriminate “socializing”; to fraternizing with one another, and so they promiscuously sleep and procreate together, support each other's political interests. All that corresponds to times in which standards are lax and clear criteria about practically everything are lacking. No one recognizes themselves for what they are unto themselves but only as functions of whatever the “cause” they are married to. Which means no one knows how to think with their own head. Political recycling, social bundling: these are the “grand style” of a societal plurality.
· Yet, the epitome of falling into a generalized state of confusion can here be recognized in that, on the one hand, the social classes, the races, the sexualities, and the political parties and activist organizations, in the other, as well as religion affiliations and denominations—all grow ever more alienated, with some among these categories becoming ever stranger to the others. Yet, through promiscuous and indiscriminate mixing up in their “communities,” they at the same time tend to adopt each other's idiosyncrasies, ethos, stereotypical attitudes, tastes, preferences, and even their respective vocabulary and speech patterns. White people, for instance, begin to sound ever more like blacks and to think like them; heterosexuals become hardly indistinguishable from homosexuals; the very poor attempt to imitate the habits and preferences of the very rich or the well-off; “people of color” become emulators of black people; religious organizations turn ever more secular and less divinely inclined; women more and more appropriate for themselves the practices and activities that had traditionally been the turf of men; the beautiful trash themselves to look more like ugly sort; animals acquire a more relevant importance than ever in human lives and in some circles and places are deified above humans; in short, the social segments that are the least educated, less sophisticated, less cultured, and more ill-read posit themselves or are posited as the model for everybody else. Snobbery and pretentiousness are the esprit of the epoque.
· Furthermore, ideologies are also swapped among the categories above. And they do so even when an ideological form might be counterproductive to their material conditions of life and respective lifestyle. Consequently, “right” and “left” become indistinguishable from one another not only in party politics but in the most general, encompassing meaning of the term. As the main political parties seem to trade off their ideologies creating a situation in which what used to be believed and pushed by the traditional Right is now believed and pushed by the Left, and vice versa, the large population often rallies behind causes and people that are essentially contrary to their interests and wellbeing, and shun and reject the people and the causes that could bring them the better goods.
· The very few are the exception. These marginal, loose and independent individuals are the only ones who can often comprehend the directions things are going, and are keenly aware of the shape things have taken. The rest is a blackout. That makes it quite easy for the most influential and powerful groups to exert the most control over the state of things, which usually guarantees them to prevail on the larger stages—at least for some time.
· Despite the visibly defining differences from one category to another, what brings and binds them together; what allows for this miasmatic situation of indiscriminating mixing of the races, classes, and sexualities, and of the educated with the culturally illiterate, and the beautiful with the physically repulsive are items of belief that go by the name of “equality,” “equity,” “freedom,” and “rights.” These are all subterfuges; they are all veils and disguises over respective strategic interests and self-serving politics. The way to know this is to notice that in every instance a claim gets made under any one of those items, the disposition, willfulness, and the push of the claimants lean heavily toward one extreme or another of the right-left scope. That is, moderation and equanimity have no part in their formulations, which are substitutes for irascibility and irrationality. Unapologetic radicalization and extremism on all sides and about everything, even if not strictly political, are perhaps the most telling signs and symptoms of doom.
· It is life lived in extremis, in the literal Latin meaning of the expression. In part owing to that, and while reflecting the whole of the society, institutions of all kinds and sizes get weakened as they get degraded and downgraded, and ultimately miscarried and corrupted. Everybody who shares a given ideology with anybody else wants them “on-board” and close at hand, and so, from private businesses and corporations to the erstwhile most selective and choice organizations and institutions make themselves ready to accommodate the co-religionists of their ideology, and the doors are thrown open ostensibly to anybody on a purely ideological basis.
· Professionalism, intellectual fitness, proficiency, and capability—the qualifications on which merit used to be decided—are in practice declared unnecessary and null, just as the requirements and standards are rendered into window-dressing in some areas, while in others they get watered down or often openly denounced as “too demanding” or unnecessary. As it happens, it is in the workplace and inside institutions that the most wide-spread indiscriminate ill-matched mixing of social, racial, sexual, and cultural quantities takes place. That goes by the name of “openness,” “inclusiveness” and “diversity.” Thus, society at large is forced to exist in a vicious circle in which, the more “diversity” it produces the more “inclusiveness” is demanded of it; and through the same motion, the more the demand for inclusiveness is satisfied, the more “diversity” gets created, or more than created, fabricated, to keep it “open.”
· Awareness is perversely lacking that “diversity” is the cause of “inclusiveness,” and at the same time, that is the former product of the later, and both the result of unqualified “openness.” Owing to that too, together with the sense for equanimity and moderation, in a nation or society on the verge of collapse nothing stands in a proportioned relation to anything else. Appreciation for symmetry and orderliness disappears from where it used to predominate in public and private affairs, and everything clashes with everything else. Hence, high culture and fine art reach their demise, while popular and low culture and arts become ever more impoverished. A large majority gives up on reading, even among the young or especially among the youth. Among the people in general interest in self-cultivation and education suffers a sensitive defeat; ugliness and slovenliness are ever more tolerated, and letting oneself go becomes fashionable. In general, life becomes chaotic; here and there, superficiality and ignorance dressed up as “social cause” or “social justice” is the diet of the populace and the majority.
· As remarked above, “rights” of one type or another, together with “freedom,” “equality,” “equity” and the like are the names a nation or society gives to virtually everything that has takers; it does so to divert and to hide from its consciousness the process of its general melting-down and decomposition. As noted above: that practically nothing presents itself for what it is; that the names given to things, to entities, or to processes do not as a matter of course correspond any longer to their essence as revealed by their functions or their effects; that therefore almost everything misleads and leads astray—are the first signs and symptoms with which a generalized state of confusion announces itself. In a nation and/or society in the grips of such a generalized state of intellectual and mental disarray, nothing in its political, cultural, and artistic life, nor in its literary or religious life and in other social practices, has enduring meaning or significance.
· Or rather, the meaning and significance of the goings-on and happenings there are either hard to fathom once and for all, or, for the most part, the meanings and significance thereof remain hidden even for those involved. Until one of those historic moments arrives where things come to a head. But then, it is always too late. In the meantime, practically everything in the public and the private realms (public discourses and performances in whatever their forms, whether by the government or by private agencies), are perforated by nonsensicality, absurdity, self-contradictions, and cynic self-obliviousness, or by any combination of the above. There, a willful resolution to ignorance, which makes people to act and speak contrary to evidence, is pervasive.
· Particularly worth noticing is what tends to go on concerning sex and sexuality, and the relation between the sexes, at some point in time, but usually at the initial phase of social and political unrevealing. It would seem from the historical experience of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from the historical data available from Spain, France, and Germany, that the emotional and/or psychological makeup of individuals of a certain constitution, and from related social and cultural milieus, get most sensibly shaken up. Whatever the cause or causes of this phenomenon could ultimately be established to be, homosexuality, and sexual practices to a virtually endless variety of denominations is rampant among the intellectuals and artists circles and their hangers-on from the middle-classes and the financial and political elites. Pedophilia, pederasty, and bestiality are the order of the day among elements of those circles; and the exchange of the traditional sex roles that Nature would have determined for the genders are freely challenged and traded on. When a society or nation is on the verge of getting superseded, the maximization of all its potentialities, sex and sexuality being the most “traditional” of all practices and activities, are more radically challenged, and become the areas where the upheavals of a failing political order are more directly and individually felt. Thus, sexual disinterest, sexual dysfunctions, and sexual apathy in the general population are ways in which a falling order registers in society. In the same way that in ancient Greece the philosophers we have come into much familiarity through the Foucauldian sponsorship were the vanguard in the sexual decomposition of “traditional” sexuality, in our own time in all the societies of the West it is a certain type of academic and scholar who have taken on that function. And, if in Rome some of the emperors themselves carried the torch among their inner circles, in today’s US of A and the European Union the overcoming of “traditional” sexualities—heterosexuality, for example—is an aspect of the cultural identity of the political and the financial classes—often one and the same.
As indicated above, the bullets of this signage of the coming collapse of the US of A, as can be observed everywhere in American life, are not exhaustive, nor do they seek or need to be. However, as gleaned from the historical accounts of virtually every nation of the West in ancient and “modern” times that grew to be global empire, and in due time lost it, the sources of their respective debacle could all be localized in their respective domestic front: in the kind of society each one of them developed into—or that in point of fact, were allowed or led to develop into, by the leading elites.