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.

The Holy Business Empire

Business Enterprise has become the new religion, spanning the globe. Our civilization has conflated religion and economics. As a civilization, our purchase against Death has become "the economy." People measure their worthiness by the size of their paycheck, not by their pious acts. The transgressions of the pedophile priests has been dealt with exactly as the society dealt with the transgressions of Enron's economic rapists: trials were held and penalties were levied. These were business transactions. Nowhere that I am aware of was the subject of the consequences for the priests' souls or the victims' discussed.

The only difference between Republicans and Democrats concerns where to set the "burdensome bar." Both worship Business, but like the early Christian sects they disagree as to the details of the contract between the Deity and the People. No one dares question the "holiness" of Business Enterprise or the "godliness" of The Economy. Money, The Economy, and Business Enterprise are respectively, the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost of the new religion. All discussions of whatever kind are carried out in the context of the new religion. Brazilian officials complain that efforts to stop burning the Amazon Rain Forest will slow the nation's economic growth. Bush says expanding health care for children would be bad for business.

The prayers of people, usually men, who utterly devote their wills and their lives to worshipping the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost of Business Enterprise sometimes are heard and rewarded. These people are called hedge fund managers, CEOs, arbitragers, and bankers. The reward, in the form of stock options, cash, and arcane monetary manipulations understandable only by the high priests of Business Enterprise, provides both a medical and a psychological defense against death. The wealthy can afford the best health care, which is the medical defense. Securing the favor of Business Enterprise can delay physical death by a score of years over the national statistics. The psychological defense against death consists of endowing an academic chair in one's name or financing a university building or a museum in one's own honor. The illusion of life after death is supplied by having the title "CEO and Founder" after one's name in the history of the corporation that gained the favor of Business Enterprise. The illusion is perpetuated in the engraved marble or the wrought bronze letters proclaiming the Louise M. Davies Hall, or the Rockerfeller Medical Center.

The Corporatocracy comprises the high priests of the Holy Business Empire and the vast interlocking religio-economic structure that has seized control of the planet. Fanning out from the Bildenburg Group and Trilateral Commission to the World Bank and the neuronal network of banks, corporations, governments, NGOs, and bureaucracies in every nation of the world, the Corporatocracy has ruthlessly enforced global control. Europe, China, the U.S. & U.K., and South America are far less independent, competing regional power centers than they are business bishoprics controlled by satraps who owe their primary allegiance to Business Enterprise. The Corporatocracy can be understood by the metaphor of the Catholic Church. The Bilderburg Group is analagous to the College of Cardinals. The various "business bishops" from around the globe compete for the highest position, which is analagous to election as Pope, the President of the Bilderburg Group.