In our world, ignorance is not bliss. It is a delusion.
There is no longer such a thing as happy ignorance. The ignorant spend their days stepping on rakes, staggering from one accident to the next.
Just ask the ignorant in America. They are hurt, angry, and looking for someone to blame. There was a time when people were taught to take responsibility for their ignorance and failures, but the rate of failure and the extent of ignorance outpaced the supply of responsibility in America.
There are many reasons for the loss of public responsibility, including educational failure, the adoption of radical capitalism based on greed and racism, and the acceptance of advertising as ethical. These factors have resulted in people applying advertising principles to personal philosophy by never admitting errors and denying all responsibility.
This transformation was aided by a political system based on whatever you could get away with. Politicians then began addressing the people's unhappiness with being exploited by suggesting who to blame in exchange for a small donation.
Denial of responsibility merged with endless greed, emulating the political ideals of America. Progress became paying politicians to deliver on the exploitation of identified minorities and the further destruction of education for everyone.
Unfortunately, by the 21st century, everyone has become a minority for some politicians to blame and exploit. While the logic was shaky, the opportunities were limitless, just as capitalism must produce endless growth from limited planetary resources.
They have taken over their own political party staffed by losers who show pride in ignorance and stupidity. This is how you do it. Whine and lie until everyone is so disgusted they don’t care anymore.
The fact of their ignorance and resultant rake-stepping is loudly denounced as a conspiracy. They have selected a whinny loser with decades of bankruptcy and, now, multiple felony convictions as their leader to show the way.
That brings us to the point of this article. It is essential to choose an easy, fast way to collapse your empire that keeps everyone as happy as possible. Things have not been going well, and people know it.
They, deep down, suspect that the whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket but have no idea how total this collapse will be.
Collapsing the largest empire in human history is difficult because people don't know it is collapsing as they are constantly told that everything is beautiful and your check is in the mail.
The reasons for that collapse are planetary laws of physics. We are already in an accelerating decline as the 1% percent at the top have to squeeze the 99% harder to keep up the illusion of growth.
To allow the backers of a whiny loser political party to place a stunningly stupid loser as an absolute ruler to ensure those backers maintain their monopolization of a drying teat will quickly explode.
As many people tell me, that may be a good thing. Our media now takes stupidity as one of the options for leadership, so why not just get it over with and let them blow the whole thing up?
That is a bit short-sighted and not like tipping the headsman for a quick, clean cut when placing your head on the chopping block as the English monarchs politely did. You still end up dead, but at least you keep some pretense of style, and all the mess is kept in one place.
Giving in to ignorance and stupidity is the traditional, brutal way to collapse your empire.
Even with our short-term climate disaster future, allowing an ignorant whiner to take over makes everything worse for the time we have left. But it seems that since Donald Trump managed a unanimous conviction on all felony counts in his first of many trials, people are realizing that he is too much of a loser, even for the losers.
The national media will not tolerate Trump losing. The race must be life or death, even though there is no real choice except for more of the same or more of the same with three pumps of corruption and extra stupidity.
But fear not; we have the gentler Biden option for the collapse of America and its erstwhile empire.
The Biden option does not require the sudden and brutal change to a truly dark age managed by complete idiots determined to get their pound of flesh but the maintenance of the familiar capitalist illusion. The gentler option does require us to keep ignoring billionaire asset theft, continuing and starting permanent wars, and our client states (looking at you, Israel) indulging in genocide, but that is just more of the same.
This gentler option requires no significant change at all. It involves avoiding international media, which is not a problem for most Americans (What media?). There will be rough spots as the climate disaster grows, but people are numb already. Who cares if a million people die of heat stroke in India?
For those fully programmed by American media, the official problems will remain the same but increasingly disconnected from reality. We see this already as a shift away from the American Empire to the multipolar BRICS planetary alliance is carefully ignored in the Empire's official mass media.
The confusion over proxy wars will continue to grow. Who’s fighting who and for what? We only hear about Ukraine and Gaza, but Gaza is just an Israeli police action with 2,000-pound bombs. The US Navy has lost the Red Sea, but that is just a rumor, so no need to worry.
Atrocities are something that bad people do, but there is so much video that it is hard to ignore our guys killing all the children. But those kids are not kids, right?
Biden works hard at explaining why atrocities are only bad when the wrong people commit them. The American Empire is never guilty. That is another case for controlling access to foreign media because the rest of the planet has a very different view of who the bad guys are. We don’t want to hear about that.
It will get messy as things fail to work correctly in America, but that can always be blamed on illegal immigrants. This is not a country of immigrants. Just look around. Everyone is white. What? Well, they're white where it counts.
Ignoring China's dominance as the planetary leader will be more problematic, but most Americans and their associates will succeed. True Americans watch only Fox, so they haven't seen a fact beyond sports scores for years.
The most challenging problem for the delusional model of America will be mass migration from increasingly uninhabitable equatorial regions.
All of those people are not moving north because America is great. That illusion is already falling apart. Once we reach a billion refugees from climate change, the justification for blocking migrating masses will need to change and will become uglier.
That will initiate the final collapse of the American Empire. Reality cannot be stopped but can be mediated and camouflaged with proper narrative control until enough of the population becomes homeless themselves that it does not matter.
Keep them bamboozled until they are so busy struggling to find food and a place to live that they will not even notice the American Empire has collapsed.
Mike, you have provided some harsh clarity to the tangled web of collapse. It’s not a pretty picture. In a stabler time of global climate dynamics Humanity might muddle through. But our climate crisis is already a runaway train. The race to Hot House Earth is running the underlying dynamic of collapse as the CO2 numbers keep spiking.