Slowly Sapping Our Strength

Death by a thousand cuts… the slow, slice-by-slice ancient Chinese torture-to-death inflicted on enemies of the emperor… is bad enough when it is imposed by a tyrant from the outside. But how bad can it be when the victim imposes that slow destruction onto himself? Self-destruction emanates from societies grappling with change that seems torrential and unmanageable. Human sacrifices to the gods, bizarre ancient rituals, reliance on shamans and soothsayers have been the fallback for ancient civilizations on the brink for all of recorded history. All societies that practice such desperate measures have actually gone over that brink. ALL. Whether they disband, wither way, migrate, are conquered in their weakened state, fractured or just disappear… they all wind up on the dung-heap of history.

It can happen as a society matures, refuses to deal with the constant need to reinvigorate and get its own citizens will to work to reconstruct the fallen aspects of their world (think Rome or the Southern Soong Dynasty that fell to vicious conquerors), overextends themselves in military expenditures (Sparta, and more than one Chinese dynasty, the Soviet Union) or as natural resources as destroyed or dissipated beyond replenishment (Easter Island, too many ancient native American civilizations, etc.). What was it like living though such change? What ran through the minds of the average citizens? Their leadership? What could they have done to save themselves that they didn’t choose to do? Were such falls even stoppable?

Most of us are aware, consciously or subconsciously, that Western civilization is slowly fading, replaced, inch-by-inch, by the super-tigers of growth in Asia or by the modern Visigoths of extremist and barbaric tribal religious extremists, under-educated, over-“inspired” by religious zeal as the justified incredible destructive efforts. In the Islamic world, the most flagrant example of such violent religiosity, there are rather significant pockets of such extremists, where most of their attacks are on their own people with occasional blossoming out “into the evil western world.”

There are real new differences in the twenty-first century. Thermonuclear war can decimate the entire planet, and we have fears that there are “martyrs” out there hoping to share that devastation globally. Virtually all of the world’s life-sustainable land is already occupied… there’re no great expanses of verdant potential that are not already occupied. No place to escape to. And the king of destruction – global climate change – is completely reconfiguring where food can grow, where disease-carrying insects must migrate to in order to survive, what lands are going to remain habitable and those that will simply dry up and blow away (or sink into a watery abyss) and, most importantly, where potable and irrigation-necessary water will be in sufficient quantities to sustain a Malthusian-over-populated planet.

There is a linkage between the above variables. Too much of that religious extremism is born of utter hopelessness as once productive farmland has ceded its potential to an expanding desertification, unleashing massive poverty and desperation, where unscrupulous leaders have offered false and violent religiosity as a plausible and “necessary” path of salvation. Lebensraum – expanding your country by conquest to capture resources, access to the sea, and land for your over-growing population – is back. World War II showed us all how devastating this philosophy can be in the modern era, but as Russia fights to pull in Ukraine or Saddam Hussein attempted to glom on to Kuwaiti oil, the concept just refuses to die.

Here in the United States, there is a massive backlash against scientific fact, often resulting in an utter rejection of obvious and required pragmatic solutions, replaced instead by false prophets, ineffective slogan-driven solutions, and the rich and powerful circling their wagons against the rest of society as they purchase what they believe (wrongfully if history is a teacher) are political and economic policies that can insulate them from economic and political chaos as all those around them watch their standards of living deteriorate.

We’d rather build prisons than schools. As budgets are slashed for uplifting educational programs, the United States continues to expand its prison infrastructure to sustain the fact that while we are only 5% of the world’s population, we have a quarter of the planet’s incarcerated prisoners. We can expect one in three African-American males to have spent time in the prison system, as the Ferguson-like-cities and towns (and there a whole lot of them) continue to be designed to ignore education and focus on finding and convicting black (and Latino) citizens. To what end? Does that really help build for a prosperous future or insure that the racially-driven criminal justice system will never change?

We’d rather keep taxes and regulations low for the rich – incorrectly believing they will pay us back by creating good jobs (we’re still waiting!) – rather than use money from this segment for investment in ourselves in my mantra of the three growth drivers that government should be fomenting: education, infrastructure and research. We’d rather fund a massive military, costing well-beyond our ability to afford such expenditures, which has, by swatting at wasp-nests all over the world, exacerbated, funded and empowered radical factions that have destabilized the world. Oh, and slammed our deficit to the wall. Our wars have sapped our will, our economy, but now we face what we have wrought.

We’ve spent hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars finding new fossil fuels or introducing environmentally toxic fracking practices to extract more from once too-difficult-to-access pockets of such raw materials… but still resist the investment necessary to migrate into alternative energy systems. As our addiction to burning for energy continues unabated, global warming has richly rewarded us with agriculturally-devastating droughts and raging forest fires, short-term mega-freezes as the Gulf Stream has uncharacteristically slanted south bringing Arctic cold, floods in northern plains, hurricanes and storm surges that suck away at our coastlines… well the list is long. Nature really doesn’t seem to care what we do, really, since we are effective ridding the planet of man… through our massive self-inflicted death of a thousand cuts. Isn’t it time for a groundswell fostering massive pragmatic solutions to it all?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I still wonder if it is still possible to effect a meaningful wake-up call to begin to create a world we really can live and thrive in?