« The Motus that Got Away | Sacred Cow Dung Home | So Just How Much is a MOTU worth to a VC? -- VC Fantasy Life Part II »
June 26, 2005
What if the US were nolonger the World's Superpower?
What if the US were nolonger the World's Super-power?
Over the last few years, I have not been particularly bullish about the future of the US — both politically and economically — relative to the rest of the world. I’d like to think my pessimism stems more from a cold hard look at the increasing number of negative indicators, rather than just my status as a member of the Blue States of America.
But then I recently realized I have been asking the wrong question. It is not really about whether or not we are losing our status as the number one country in the world. It is about our society’s ability to acknowledge changing conditions and to take corrective action.
The real question we should be asking is a very non-partisan and hypothetical but extremely important one — perhaps the most important one —
If the US were losing it’s pre-eminence in the world, when would we, as a society, acknowledge that fact and would it be in time for us to rally the support required to take corrective actions to lessen the impact or reverse that decline?
I realize that’s a compound question so let’s break it down into it’s two parts —
Part I – If the US were losing it’s pre-eminence in the world, when would we, as a society, acknowledge that fact?
We know as individuals that ego dies hard. The ability of individuals to sustain extreme hardship has been a survival skill bred into the evolutionary survival of humans as a species. This survival skill is largely based on a single important human trait —
Our ability to deny overwhelming evidence which conflicts with our conceptual frameworks.
Denial is usually seen as a weakness in individuals, families, and societies. But it is paradoxically the key to individual and social change. “Denial of the Status Quo” is always threatening to existing social order, but it is also the source from which springs diversity of thought, innovation, and change required for the species, as well as individuals, to adapt to changing circumstances in order to survive and to thrive.
Without the human psychological trait of denial, we as a species, if we were lucky, would still be living in caves or, most likely, wouldn’t have survived at all.
So denial is always strong within us as individuals and in the extensions of ourselves — our families, our communities, our societies, and the nations of the world.
Therefore, in my view, there is a strong tendency for the US as a society to be in strong denial of any evidence that is contrary to our status as number one in the world. This is not a question of ideology, red or blue, but about human nature.
If our position begins to erode, it is likely that the trends will be very far along before we acknowledge them as a real threat to our current view of our selves in the world order.
Part II – Would it be in time for us to rally the support required to take corrective actions to lessen the impact or reverse that decline?
This is surely the crux of the matter. It’s one thing to wait to take action. It’s quite another to wait so long that any action taken becomes irrelevant.
If history is any indicator, the answer to this part of the question is clearly no. The contributing factors in the rise and fall of nation-states are quite easy to discern in the “retrospect-i-scope” of history. Past trends can be viewed “safely” from our secure psychological perch in the future and looked at in terms of what actually happened. What happened is nolonger a point of contention, so we are free to focus on why it happened.
The problem with discussions concerning the future is that there are really two discussions going on. First, What will happen. Second, Why it will happen.
In a Democratic society, this is really an evolutionary political process in it’s purest sense.
First, there must be a growing cognitive dissonance in individual members of society that their world views are increasingly in conflict with, or at least no longer adequately explain, an increasing number of events they are experiencing.
Second, there must be a growing consensus that the range of futures is narrowed down to a smaller and more manageable group of “most likely” scenarios.
Thirdly, in a democratic society, these scenarios must be “digested” by the masses through a process that moves the debate from narrow or academic communities into mainstream media outlets. The impact of these scenarios must begin to be “realized”. That means fully fleshed-out from theory to “what it means to me and my family” in the minds of the electorate. In other words, “Bringing it Home.” As we used to say in the sixties, the process of “consciousness raising” is an absolutely necessary step before any change can occur.
It’s only after these steps occur that politicians can begin their long and arduous process of aligning various factions to produce a list of action-able policies which can be adopted at a national level and to bring about a consensus view of “what to do next.”.
In summary: Acknowledging changing conditions and adapting to them has been the key to survival of individuals, families, communities, companies, and nation-states. It is how we, as a species, freed ourselves from, and learned to conquer, Darwinian evolutionary forces.
I don’t know about you, but if there are downward political and/or economic trends for the US, I would think that action taken now to correct these trends would be much more efficacious than waiting for all the steps of the above process to occur. It’s one thing to wait to take action. It’s quite another to wait so long that any action taken becomes irrelevant.
While decisionmakers in the rest of the world are hedging their bets, very few people in the US are even intimating the possibility that the US might one day lose it global hegemony. So I am not too optimistic that there is an affirmative answer to the question I’ve posed.
Posted by cmayaud at 03:14 PM | Permalink| Comments (2)
Del.icio.us Tagging |
Digg This
| Posted to Business Strategy | Political Economy | TRENDS
Comments
You don't have any specifics in this whole thing. For example, WHY do you think there are an "increasing number of negative indicators" and what are they? As you well know, in both politics and economics the exact same data can produce different conclusions. But by throwing out the the "denial" thing, you are setting up a "you're in denial!" response to anyone who disagrees with you.
I think politically there are no indications of slippage. The rest of the world is unwilling and unable to become a superpower - except China. That is a whole issue in itself - and any analysis can't leave out the response of Japan, the issue of Taiwan, and the whole Korean thing, but let's say that it is a long term issue of how/when China will rise, not the U.S. fall.
Economically...yeah, there are some issues. The trade balance is the biggest one. As we send billions overseas what happens to it? Right now it is being invested back in the U.S. so it can keep buying those things. So what happens if that changes?
The budget defict doesn't bother me as long as GDP keeps rising faster than the rest of the world, but the problem lurking in the shadows in Social Security and Medicare. The democrats want to cover their ears and shout outloud when people point out there is a problem, and until both political parties take a hard look at the severe budget problems that entitlement spending is going to produce, there could be a severe train wreck in the future.
Posted by: Director Mitch at June 26, 2005 08:13 PM
Mitch, I mostly agreed with you until "democrats want to cover their ears and shout outloud when people point out there is a problem."
I agree that the Dems are sometimes obstrcutionist. But you yourself mentioned the Medicare problem, which has become much, much *worse* under Bush and becomes a problem *sooner* than Social Security does. Why don't the Repoublicans want to do anything about it? Maybe they're covering their ears?
Posted by: Derek Scruggs at June 29, 2005 07:56 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
