https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/why-its-okay-that-america-has-died-740c1b4f5aa4
Why It’s Okay That America Has Died
Andrew Tanner

All complex systems evolve through an eternal cycle of death and rebirth, and 330 million people spread across a continent is the very definition of complexity.
The Adaptive Cycle screenshot from Nature

Truth be told, America as we think of it today isn’t very old. Any country or nation is an abstract concept made real by the actions of the people living in it, and the way we think about those actions defined by — in a perpetual loop — other people’s reactions to our own actions, which are expressions of our beliefs.

We are, all of us, fundamentally constrained by our biology. We can’t possibly interact in a meaningful way with more than a tiny fraction of the seven to eight billion other people living in the world. Language, culture, ideals, and morals are all products of localized environmental factors — including what our parents and peers tell us is true.

This is a function of the fact that nearly all humans are social, that is, we live in groups defined by some set of commonly held truths. Just surviving requires that a group of people interact in routine ways that make communication easier and less time consuming, so it often isn’t that important if these truths are true so long as they hold the group together.

Some people learn in their life that being able to control what truths are held so is a source of immense power. Power is the ability to coerce, to make someone do what they would not choose to, and the more a person has the more secure their position is in life. This dynamic what generates the hierarchical tendencies in many human cultures, especially the more complex ones — that is, the ones with access to large amounts of energy-dense resources.

The more resources there are to throw around, the higher the potential gains any individual can hope to reap if able to effectively exploit the situation. Inequality emerges from wealth and then self-amplifies over time because it is always easier to get more resources when you have a lot to start with. Wealth is a form of power, which is transformed into other forms like social prestige and political authority.

When I say that America isn’t very old, what I mean is the dominant story about the place told in mass media as well as in school is relatively new. America is just a name attached to a part of the planet that has existed in roughly its present geographic form for tens of thousands of years.

The United States of America has only been around for two and a half centuries, and where I live on the West Coast its presence here is even newer. My spouse and I settled close to the end of the Oregon Trail, presently living on lands the Kalapuya peoples occupied long before white people showed up.

Our families reached the West Coast just two generations before, after the end of the Second World War. It was in exactly this period lasting from about 1945 to 1955 that the narrative foundations of contemporary America, what I call Fourth America, were laid down.

This was a unique time in world history. The European world system had collapsed, and a new one was rising to take its place. For centuries even tiny European countries like Belgium had colonies abroad, participating in an extended global raid.

But then they blew it all up in a series of epic wars that left America the last major power standing, virtually all others devastated by decades of industrialized conflict that killed tens of millions of people. Safe on the other side of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans America was able to take advantage of its natural resources seized from the indigenous through a genocide that inspired Hitler to help defeat him.

Yet America has been, since the Civil War that never truly ended, riven by political factionalism. And as it has grown and the center of population has shifted westward and southward over the years new forms of regional division were starting to emerge as different parts of America further developed their own identities.

There is a very good reason that monuments to the Civil War went up like crazy in the 1950s, at the exact moment Black Americans were finally coming close to achieving full legal equality and not right after the war itself. As America recovered from the Great Depression and Second World War, a systems collapse of epic and global magnitude, a new social system rose from the ashes of the old.

Fourth America was the result, the America that raised the Boomers and taught them to embrace a particular set of myths about the country. Most of what is taught in schools as history is the end result of wrangling over truths fought between politicized groups of parents and teachers. This is why it has traditionally avoided difficult topics like race and geography and why students are taught their curriculum is comprehensive, that whose with diplomas and degrees are educated.

Naturally, the Boomers weren’t all taught exactly the same myth, but their family’s political affiliation and the natural tribalism of people meant that they didn’t agree on which version was true. Decades later their mutual belief that only one version can be true in any dimension is actively driving America’s collapse, because conflicts are now existential, with no room for compromise.

What is happening to America right now is that the set of critical narratives about American history students were taught to accept as truth are falling apart under the weight of reality. The silly backlash against so-called “woke” culture among older white people is driven by the fact it is hard for someone to accept truths they’ve believed in their entire life.

Fourth America has been living on borrowed time for decades, at least since the Cold War ended and raised the important question of why the federal government remains so huge despite not being particularly popular with the American people. Now that America isn’t the unchallenged world leader, the country can’t outsource all its problems with as much ease as was once the case, and the contradictions in the American system are all piling up at once.

Complex systems pass through phases akin to the seasons, with social, human systems driven not by inexorable, uncontrollable forces but by people’s own behaviors in response to stressful times. History sometimes looks like humans are at the mercy of great events and powerful people, but this is an illusion.

The most powerful force in human life is what people think is true. And contrary to what your college professors might have taught you, there exists no truly objective way to decide what is true.

Science is not the search for truth — it is about finding reliable explanations for why things happen. And because humans speak different languages, experience different things, there can never be absolute, universal truths every single person will agree on.

Pluralism is a basic necessity of society, with diversity representing its primary reserve of adaptive capacity under times of stress. But inequality tends to militate against diversity, creating hard boundaries between groups that people defend because their group membership is what secures their survival.

In the end, it is inequality that drives the eternal cycle of collapse and rebirth in human systems. Because truths don’t match up, people distrust those who express ones they disagree with. When times become tough as the environment shifts as it sometimes will, those unwilling to adopt certain truths are effectively cut off from the group.

Because people always tend to want and need to be part of a group, this creates social churn — new groups form, and they might behave very differently than before. Difficult times breed fear which erodes trust, driving people apart in a classic feedback loop, a self-accelerating process.

Any of this sounding remotely familiar? It really should — Americans are experiencing the collapse phase of the adaptive cycle at this very instant.

The eternal cycle of death and rebirth I wrote about at the beginning has been modeled in many systems as a four-stage process evolving over time. In any given landscape filled with freely-acting agents who share space and resources where availability shifts with the seasons, you can see the same patterns emerge among the actors.

Systems tend to collapse when resources are tapped and most of the landscape is filled with whatever is transforming them. In nature this occurs in autumn when solar energy starts to decline, affecting plants’ ability to sustain themselves. In human groups this happens whenever people expect conditions to get worse in the near future.

Funny thing about any science involving humans, even otherwise calculus and statistics reliant macroeconomics, is that their expectations about the future drive their behavior. People act rationally according to their social norms that tell them what to value and economic factors that tell them how valuable things are. We all make bets about the future using limited information and shift bets when we think our original data no longer fits the evolving situation.

Recessions are actually caused by a loss of confidence in the economic system as it stands. People shift their investments when they think it will grow less, which amplifies the very reasons they used to justify the initial change. As one investor looks to another and sees their peers’ behavior changing, they tend to do so as well.

If you look at America right now, it should be clear that the country is in the midst of a deep political recession. It just doesn’t work anymore, and so people are starting to despair — or demand immediate, even violent solutions.

I’ve seen some writing that they feel like everything is on rails, the country heading to some pre-determined destination. This makes perfect sense — it’s absolutely characteristic of the collapse phase because stuff that wasn’t working is going to keep falling apart under stress.

How long does the collapse take to finish? Depends on how hard the power players fight to maintain the old regime. Some will try to deny the truth, becoming angry with anyone who points out that all things must some day die.

Others will see the collapse as an opportunity to settle scores and seize control of marginal territories. During the collapse phase, survival depends like any other on maintaining access to vital resources, which more coherent groups tend to do a better job of accomplishing. The dominant strategy is that of the decomposer who finds something rotting and extracts all it can while it can — this is most large American companies to a tee.

But one decomposer will often fight another, their struggle consuming even more resources and often leading to their own internal collapse when there are no more carcasses to consume. Worse, the fight can take on a life of its own to the point it destroys everything — the prophecy of Ragnarok.

Eventually, the collapse phase will end —but reorganization phase that follows can be a long, difficult slog as everyone takes a breath and salvages what they need to survive the long winter. Everyone is exhausted, trust remains low, and no one is quite sure what the future will bring. The dominant strategy here is that of the hibernator who wakes only when the temperature is right to find some additional food.

This is a dangerous time in human affairs because inevitably fortunes turn again and a new spring will dawn, but it tends to be those who were able to secure the most resources through the downturn that are able to dominate the new world that rises from the ashes of the old. Collapse driven by inequality need not produce a re-balance — a system covering a wide area can fragment, the parts evolving in different directions.

Still, in the harsh days of collapse and disorder there is hope worth holding onto: human nature dictates that a new order will emerge at some scale and in due time.

It is this new spring that often proves — though this is usually realized only in retrospect — to be one of the most exciting and momentous moments in history.

People tend to change their thinking and habits only during certain limited windows, usually when forced to by their environment. When the whole world seems to have collapsed, that’s a pretty strong incitement to reconsider life.

Not everyone will accept the need for change, of course, but more will. That emotional and intellectual churn is what generates the need for new solutions to problems. Old ideas previously discarded or disregarded are reconsidered in a new light.

What often comes next is a period of rapid change that can substantially transform the way the system functions. All the new ideas start to compete, people try new things and uncover opportunities no one knew existed. These begin to interact and compound on each other, drawing people’s attention to new possibilities.

Just like spring buds blooming into May flowers a changed system emerges from the collapse of the old. Not much changed, maybe, but at least fixing many of the most egregious flaws of the old.

Some might read this as describing the long-awaited global revolution that will bring us utopia under some ideological paradigm, but this is a religious narrative with no grounding in science. The system that rises from the one that died still contains most of the same elements, they are simply rearranged and better balanced — at least if the new regime is fated to last long without plunging right into the same inequality driven cycle.

Eventually, this system too will decay, growth going from exponential to linear in a summer of varying but always finite length. This is actually a very good thing, a blessing of the gods if there ever was one, because it is why we don’t typically see dystopias in the real world — one person’s utopia is someone else’s dystopia, after all.

Still, collapse and reorganization offer a unique opportunity to change a failing system for the better. In its post-colonization history, America has gone through this cycle four times by my count.

The War of Independence ended the colonial system, First America. About eighty years later the Civil War ended Second America, Founders America. Just about eight years after that came the Great Depression and Second World War that saw the dramatic expansion of America’s global military presence and the power of the federal government in Fourth America, now failing today.

Fifth America, if anyone uses the term America in the future, will be born in the next decade or two. This is bad news for some, better for others, though all are and will continue to suffer in one way or another.

There is no escaping the collapse now — shocks like the Covid Pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations the failure of the peaceful transfer of Presidential power cannot be reversed. Pretending everything can ever go back to normal is in fact a bet on Fifth America, a demand for it to be reconstituted the way Fourth America was.

That is the path to protracted civil war, as is doubling down on politics as usual in the decrepit two party system. If one of the two is no longer committed to democracy then the democratic system has failed — and if one of the two perceives the other as no longer committed to it the same is true.

One way or another, the only way out is through. The good news is that there are better days ahead, even if America ceases to exist as an idea or legal reality.

Climate change, nuclear war, civil collapse — humans can and will survive pretty much everything. The world is a huge place, and even if climate change wreaks havoc on ecosystems some species will thrive.

Nothing truly dies. Everything is forever changing form.

But the lived experiences of all humans depend on the quality of the society they are part of. And that quality is defined by the actions of the people in it.

Which is another bit of good news for this otherwise bleak, Omicron-blighted winter where another two to four hundred thousand Americans will likely die.

The one thing you can choose is who to spend your limited time with. Make that a good choice, and in time, all follows from there. Together a coherent group can always find a way to survive, even thrive — then have an outsized impact on the future evolution of the system.

In other words, it’s the season of the raider. Pick a worthy target (ideally a rich person) and find a way to get hold of a chunk of their income stream.

Legally, if possible. But if you choose other options — hey, who am I to judge?

It’s the age we’re in.