Is the U.S. About to Collapse? Could It Be a Good Thing?

Every day, it seems, there is disturbing news about the stability of the country. The housing crisis has lead to concerns about the future of the entire economic system. As the gulf coast is battered by one storm after another, we are reminded of the predictions of scientists who warned about global climate instability. Now a new book by Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, suggests that the U.S. is vulnerable to the same forces that brought down the Soviet Union.

Orlov was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States at the age of 12. During the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he went to see for himself the various stages of the disintegration of a superpower. What he saw was shocking and often surprising, as an empire ceased to exist and a society was forced to reorganize from the top to the bottom.

The collapse of the United States may seem as unlikely right now as the demise of the Soviet Union appeared to be in 1988, but the warning signs are there for those willing to open their eyes. Like all people, Americans have a tendency to see our own system as superior to that of others. It’s easy for us to accept the collapse of the Soviet System because they are a “Godless, totalitarian country.” It’s equally difficult to see the possibility that we could be next, since the Soviet collapse “proves” that our system is superior and built to last.

But Orlov, who has first hand knowledge of both countries that most of us lack, sees the following parallels:

1. The Soviet Union (SU) and the United States (US) are each either the winner or the runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race and the bankruptcy race.
2. They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning.
3. Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing, funneling arms and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology and thwart the other (it’s easy to see our interventions as purely defensive responses to their aggressive actions).
4. We both spent large sums trying to control people. Both countries set records incarcerating their own population. Only South Africa was a contender. Now the U.S. is way out in front of the world with a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex.
5. Both countries became huge debtor nations. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The US is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world’s largest debtor nation, and many experts do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt.
6. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agri-business addicted to fossil fuels. As fossil fuels become more and more expensive and we pass the peak, more and more people are vulnerable to food shortages.

The good news may not be that Orlov is wrong, but rather that he is right. There are those who believe that all empires are unsustainable, whether they are Roman Empires, British Empires, Soviet Empires, or American Empires. David C. Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, sees the U.S. empire collapsing and an opportunity for a different way of being on the planet emerging. “The human species is entering a period of dramatic and potentially devastating change as the result of forces of our own creation that are now largely beyond our control,” Korten says. “It is within our means, however, to shape a positive outcome if we choose to embrace the resulting crisis as an opportunity to life ourselves to a new level of species maturity and potential.”

It seems clear to me that we cannot continue our addictive consumption of the Earth’s resources. We cannot continue to convert earth-mass into human mass (while creating ever increasing byproducts that cause global warming.) What do you think? Are we facing collapse? Could a collapse of our addictive system lead to a more sustainable Earth Community?

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