What Comes After Obama, And America?

[It gives me no satisfaction to re-publish this column in Scoop from nearly 13 years ago (February 2010), which disturbingly predicated where America is today and why. Things have gotten so bad in the USA that I find myself unable to write about the socio-political level. The best we can hope for with the elections on Tuesday is that a moribund American citizenry doesn’t vote in enough liars and deniers that the crazy-dark Republican Party takes over both the House and Senate. In any case, the conclusion of this column still applies: Look beyond America and so-called American leadership.]

What Comes After Obama, and America?

The day before his annual State of the Union speech after two years in office, President Obama telegraphed his disillusionment with the job: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”

False choice Mr. President. You will either be a really good two-term president, guiding the United States through the end of empire, as a workable global polity emerges; or you will be the last gasp of reason before an even more extreme Rightwing absolutism comes back with a vengeance.

The Washington Consensus is dead. The bad news is that America is going downhill fast, and we’re not going to change course by our own lights, which have gone out. There is a dangerous vacuum of leadership in the world.

The good news is that the perilous international situation of America’s demise gives marginalized peoples the opportunity to take the lead in forming a new consensus.

Empires never die easily or well. That’s all the more true in America, where denial that we are an empire is a daily staple.

President Obama, who certainly knows better, says that America has no desire to dominate other nations. No one bats an eye in the USA at such a ridiculous conceit, while to utter it abroad raises howls of laughter.

Like the British with their crudely colonial empire before us, the American people continually ingest the attitudes of Empire, but never digest them, much less excrete the toxins. So the toxicity builds up, eventually producing the kinds of dangerous diseases and paralysis that the body politic is presently suffering from.

A new book, “Crazy Like Us,” has come out describing the perils to other peoples in following America’s ‘leadership.’ Ethan Watters well-documented thesis is that the United States is successfully exporting its ideas about mental illness to the rest of the world, including the developing world. It’s motivated in large part by the need for new markets for the huge pharmaceutical companies for anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs that have saturated the American market.

It isn’t just our ideas about mental illness and the drugs Western scientists have developed to treat it that we’re exporting however. It’s also the cultural toxins that go with the ideas, often spread by American tourists, expats, or do-gooders escaping their own country while refusing to examine it, and themselves.

Individualism is the core premise of American culture, and it is sweeping the world. This despite the fact that the vast majority of the world’s cultures aren’t based on a worldview of separate entities competing against each other in a dog eat dog world.

The mechanistic approach that still dominates science adds to the problem, by maintaining an utterly lopsided view of nature over nurture. Neuroscientists are obsessed with finding the genetic basis of mental and emotional illness, and coming up with new drugs to treat diseases of the mind. That’s easier than doing the arduous work of understanding the noxious cultural atmosphere that this culture has been generating.

In one sense, the history of humanity is the history of the decreasing significance of separate cultures, and the increasing importance of global civilization. Human civilization is still headed in the wrong direction, but the engines of political and economic empire are grinding to a halt, at least in America. Ideas and insights matter more than ever.

What is the main impediment to the emergence of a workable world civilization? The core obstacle in creating an effective global polity is not political, but psychological.

The biggest obstacle is the ancient habit of identifying with particular peoples and places. In short, a tribalistic mentality. Its modern form is nationalism, which is the religion of the Right, and seen as necessary by the Left.

In our indigenous past, when cultures were geographically distinct and whole, identification with kith and kin was a matter of survival. It enabled peoples to form the bonds necessary to obtain food and shelter, and to protect their lands from marauding bands of other humans.

But humankind can neither continue on its present course, nor go back to the old ways. The only way ahead is seeing the whole, and that’s only possible when one lets go of the notion of ‘my people.’

Martin LeFevre

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