Collapse of the American Empire
by John Omaha
Copyright, 2007 by John Omaha

America is failing, and its collapse will be ugly and violent. America will disappear into the abyss of history like the Babylonian, Roman, Mongol, British, and Ottoman empires that preceded it. The collapse of the American Empire will be accompanied by devastation exceeding anything that has gone before and may well, if the collapse goes nuclear, destroy humanity, relegating human beings to the ranks of extinct species.

If we are to avoid our extinction, we humans, as a species, must collectively achieve a higher order consciousness about the processes that have shaped human societies for the last 10,000 years. The seeds of this higher order consciousness can be found in the work of Ernest Becker and in particular his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Denial of Death," published in 1973 by Free Press.

The collapse of the American Empire has been accelerated by the current administration that has seized control of the United States. I feel certain that the architects of the hostile takeover of America have read Becker's book, although they failed to understand its arguments. Karl Rove must have, but he saw only a means to gain power and failed to grasp that seizing power entailed the destruction of the nation.

Simplifying an elegant argument, Becker suggested that history is the record of our various defenses against the knowledge of our mortality. Other writers have called these "world-view defenses" and have codified Becker's approach as Terror Management Theory.

Becker's most important concepts have been empirically tested, and the data support the theory. One experiment investigated the length of sentences given by judges. The judges were divided into two cohorts and were given a hypothetical case of a prostitute seeking bond. One cohort was place in what the authors called the "mortality salience" condition. They were asked to respond to two items: 1. Describe the emotions that your own death elicits in you; 2. Describe what will happen physically as you die and when you're dead. Judges who were not reminded of their own mortality set bond at $50. Judges in the mortality salience condition set bond at $455.

Another experiment showed that Christian students who were not reminded of their own mortality showed no preference for a Jewish or a Christian student in an assessment, while Christians reminded of their own mortality were much more favorable to a Christian student and especially negative toward a Jew. Additional studies demonstrate that mortality salience enhances negative reaction to criticism of America.

Mortality salience studies have been replicated in Germany, Israel, Holland, Canada, and Italy. Mortality salience has also been shown to "lead to distancing from and aggression against those who are different."

The pattern is obvious. Rove, Bush, and Cheney have demonstrated that heightening Americans' mortality salience allowed them to take over the U.S. government. Enhancing Americans' mortality salience (9/11, color-coded threat levels, "mushroom cloud" and "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" talk, etc.) has placed American citizens firmly in the mortality salience condition. As a result America shows "intensified positive reactions to those who validate [their] cherished beliefs and intensified negative reactions to those who threaten such beliefs." This is the world-view defense. It is a human response that can be observed not only in Americans, but also in Iraqis, Albanians, Turks, etc.

Becker observed that "primitives" do not appear bothered by their mortality. He also observed that children who had a "favorable" upbringing seem less bothered by the fear of death. Becker was committed to a psychoanalytic (Freudian) approach, and thus he missed an opportunity for a much deeper understanding of the development of fear of death and the reasons why some people deal with it better than others. Being a committed psychoanalytically oriented theorist, he asserted that a "favorable" upbringing provided the child with better repressive tools. I disagree. The "primitive" does not fear death, because in Margaret Mahler's psychodynamic language, he lives in a state of symbiosis with his own mother, a symbiosis that he has not developed out of. As a species, we did not begin to develop out of that symbiotic state until about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapiens began to eradicate them systematically. I believe that beginning about 10,000 years ago, language had developed to the point where tenses developed. As soon as the idea of the future developed, man, the symbol-carrier, could reason that in the future he would not exist. Existential mortality anxiety emerged, and with it the "human insanity" that is destroying the planet. The first case study of the human insanity can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

If we have enough time before we annihilate ourselves, we can survive. The answer appears to me to provide the quality of maternal care that produces children of so-called favorable upbringing. As a psychologist, theoretician, and author, I believe the answer lies in improving our children's early experience and specifically transmitting to them the skills of emotion regulation. You can find the skills and the theory in my professional book "Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Emotion Regulation." I will soon publish a trade book, "The Power to Feel," that teaches these skills to lay people.