Home International Affairs WHY NATIONS AND EMPIRES FALL

WHY NATIONS AND EMPIRES FALL

Ozodi Osuji Ph.dFebruary 8, 202620 Mins read0

Ozodi Osuji

There are many reasons why nations and empires decline and fail but this paper stresses only the psychological factors, specifically the pursuit of individual and collective power and superiority.

Nations and empires are composed of people; they reflect people’s behaviors. What makes people thrive makes empires and societies thrive, and what makes people fail makes empires fail. Therefore, if you understand individual psychology, you have understood national psychology and imperial psychology.

The three founders of modern Western psychology are Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung; Emile Kraepelin single-handedly defined psychiatry; his definition of the various pathologies, such as schizophrenia, mania, and depression, remains today.

Alfred Adler, in 1911, posited his proposition that the living conditions of children are impersonal and therefore they do whatever they can to adapt to them; those children who inherited organic and medical disorders find it extremely difficult to adapt to the physical and social difficulties of the environment. Such children may develop a feeling of inferiority and compensate with a drive for superiority.

They develop an attitude to life that says that they must win at all times; they have an all-or-nothing attitude. They strive to be first and best in everything that they do. They fear making mistakes and failing. Their whole life is engrossed in the struggle for superiority and the fear of inferiority. The result is that they have ongoing anxiety, fear of failing, and fear of not living up to their desired goal of success. Adler called such people neurotic.

Adler employed the term neurosis in 1911. Since then, psychology and psychiatry have grown, and what Adler and psychoanalysts call neurosis is now differentiated into many nosological categories, such as delusion disorder (and its five types), ten personality disorders, anxiety disorders, and dissociative disorders. Because of the all-inclusive term of neurosis, I choose to employ it in this paper; I know that I could use more contemporary terms, such as paranoid, delusional disorder, anxiety disorders, etc., but I will stick to the simple term, neurosis.

In Adlerian terms, the neurotic is a person who deeply feels powerless, inadequate, and inferior due to biological issues and seeks superiority and power and suffers from free-floating anxiety (fear of not being superior and powerful).

Karen Horney (1950) later expanded Adlerian psychology by adding the sociological causal angle to it. She said that the child wants to be loved and approved of by the parents and other significant others (siblings, peers, teachers, ministers). The child develops an ideal self that wants to succeed to seem acceptable to his significant others and fears being his real self because it may not be good enough to be accepted by the significant others who accept children on the condition that they are perfect.

Horney says that neurosis is found in a person who seeks to become his mentally constructed ideal self and fears being his real self because to be the real self is to risk being rejected by his significant others; neurotics, according to Horney, have basic anxiety; the neurotic is an anxious person; indeed, anxiety-neurosis was for some time the complete term for neurosis.

The neurotic person is driven to become successful, to be powerful, and better than other people. As a result, he has serious interpersonal issues because he is always comparing himself to other people, wishing to be better than them, and feeling resentful of those he perceives to be better than he is. He has enormous conflicts with other people; peace and happiness elude him.

The neurotic is at war with himself; one part of him, his ideal self, is at war with another part of him, his real self. As a result of these intra-psyche wars and conflicts, the neurotic does not know peace; he is also at war with other people.

What he does to himself, he does to other people; he expects himself to be ideal before he accepts himself and expects other people to be ideal before he accepts them. He does not accept himself and other human beings as they are but hopes to accept them only when they become perfect, as he defines perfection to be.

The problem is that when one conception of perfection is attained, its goal post changes, gets extended, and he continues seeking the new ideals so that he lives and dies without ever reaching a self he finds good enough to be accepted.

The neurotic does not know love. Love is the joining of people together to feel fellowship and community; if you keep judging people and finding them not good, you are pushing them away from you, and if you do not form an association and sense of oneness with them, you feel all alone in the world.

The neurotic feels alone in the world, and since aloneness is anxiety-making, he feels a compulsion to please other people so that he is accepted by them, but the more he pleases people and gives them gifts, the more they leave him out of their world because he judges them, and judgment makes people feel anxious.

The neurotic is actually attacking people by judging them as not good enough; he hates people’s real selves. Love is characterized by unconditional acceptance of oneself and other people’s real selves.

Love is the union of equal people; how can the neurotic love when he desires to become superior to his real self and to other people’s real selves?

Neurosis entails the splitting of oneself into a real self and an ideal self and efforts to separate from one’s real self.

No one can really separate from themselves, but one can make one’s life miserable by continually attacking oneself, trying to destroy one’s real self to become the ideal self. Acceptance of the real self, even if it is imperfect, is correlated with personal happiness and peace. Carl Rogers (1947) makes the unconditional positive acceptance of people the fulcrum of his psychotherapy.

The real self is equal in all people; the neurotic does not like that equality and wants to be superior to other people, hence the neurotic is at war with other people, war with love and union; he wants to separate from the union of all people as one equal community.

The neurotic lives the opposite of union, the opposite of love; he conflicts with his real self, with other people’s real selves; he is at war with reality and knows no peace.

Because the neurotic is at war with his real self, which he is ashamed of, he often reaches the top and then falls. Greeks had a term for it: tragic hero.

The tragic hero, due to character issues, is motivated to fight his way to the top, and when he gets there, he does what brings him down; he self-destructs! The ancient Greeks were employing the idea of the tragic hero to tell all of us that we seek success and, at the same time, impede our success; this is our human condition.

SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES LEAD TO THE DESTRUCTION OF EMPIRES

Society is composed of people; social psychology is the psychology of the masses of people.

Most people are normal in their psychological profiles, but some are abnormal. Many people are motivated to reject their real selves and seek to become ideal, superior, and powerful selves.

The people motivated to become superior and powerful invariably reach the top of societies and rule human societies.

Humble people do not become emperors, kings, presidents, and prime ministers; it is the power-motivated individuals who rule human societies and empires.

Just as individual neurotics exhibit fear, anxiety, and other psychopathological issues that make their lives unhappy and lacking in peace, nations ruled by neurotics are always seeking superiority and power and thus engender social anxieties (social pathologies, including delusional disorder, narcissistic personality disorder).

Like abnormal individuals, societies can be abnormal in their psychologies. Just as the abnormal personality can rise to the top of society because it is driven by the desire for superiority and power and eventually self-destruct, this also happens for societies. A society can conquer and be at the top of a heap of societies.

Greek Tragedy talks about how the hero’s personality drives him to success and also makes him fall and self-destroy.

Societies ruled by neurotic people rise to the top and rule other societies, but their inherent abnormalities make sure that they self-destroy and fall.

Human empires rise because of the drive of their neurotic leaders who later self-destroy. Rome self-destructed.

America, driven by its neurotic leaders, has risen to the top in the world and is now, like the tragic hero, self-destroying.

PSYCHOANALYSIS, ORIGIN, AND TYPES

Psychoanalysis originated in the 1890s Jewish community of Vienna, Austra and spread to Germany. It eventually found its way to the USA.

William James introduced psychology to American universities, such as Harvard. Americans, being practical people, immediately gravitated to Behaviorism as pioneered by Pavlov in Russia. Through classical and operant conditioning, you can reinforce preferred behaviors by rewarding them, and folks behave accordingly.

Watson, Bandura, and B. F. Skinner taught behaviorism that focused on teaching appropriate behavior and extinguishing negative behavior without worrying about what is inside people’s unconscious minds.

Nevertheless, rich Americans gravitated to Freudian psychology; folks went to be psychoanalyzed, lay on the psychoanalysts’ couches, and engaged in free association and transference relationship with their psychoanalysts; the analysts analyzed whatever came from the analysand’s supposed unconscious mind.

Freud had written that in the unconscious mind were the three forces that supposedly drive the individual’s behavior: the Id, his animal instincts, such as his desire to have sex with all people, including his parents; the superego or internalized social norms; and the ego that balances the structures of the Id and the Superego, acting as a kind of referee.

Religion-inclined Americans gravitated to Jungian spiritualized analytical psychology and benefited from what they could from it.

Alfred Adler’s psychoanalysis found reception mostly in schools of education; it was used by teachers to understand kids acting out behaviors; teenagers felt inferior and wanted to seem superior, hence disobeying whoever they believed had authority over them, such as parents, teachers, and police officers.

The general American adult population did not embrace Adlerian psychology. This is unfortunate because if they had, they would have realized that they, as adults, were feeling inferior and seeking neurotic, that is, false power and superiority, and that their leaders were feeling inferior and seeking false power and domination over them and other countries. If they had embraced Adlerian psychology, maybe they would have learned to relate to each other and other countries as equals, hence as friends, and not bent on subjugating them to second-class positions.

Those subjected to second-class treatment always revolt because they, too, seek power and superiority; hence, they fight their subjugators and oppressors, and the result is that powerful countries and empires invariably fall.

Empires do not need to oppress people, and they therefore need not be resented and pushed down; they could treat those they rule as friends and bring them up to par with them, and they become part of the empire, and no one feels humiliated and abused, hence resentful and defensive.

The USA could have treated non-Americans, people all over the world, as friends, equals, and thus people would not resent them, and the USA would not have to collapse, as it is currently doing.

Instead, Americans conceived themselves as superior to other people and fancied that other people should be kept out of America. They forget that the entire world belongs to all human beings.

BIRDS FLY TO ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD TO LIVE

Birds from the southern hemisphere fly to the northern hemisphere to escape winter; birds from the northern hemisphere, during their long winters, fly to the southern hemisphere to escape the cold. Birds do not recognize man-made artificial boundaries. Other animals roam the bushes seeking food wherever they may get it; they, too, do not recognize artificial boundaries, although more predatory animals like lions and tigers tend to chase out weaker ones from their marked territories.

Human beings traditionally migrated to all parts of the World because they understood that all parts of the old world belonged to all of them.

But with the artificial introduction of territoriality and sovereignty, people who are militarily powerful keep out the less powerful ones. They employ a massive military force to keep people out of their boundaries.

People, understanding that all parts of the world belong to all of them, keep coming. People accepting that the USA and other parts of the world belong to them keep trying to enter the USA despite the Americans’ efforts to keep them out. They will keep doing so, and America will keep trying to keep them out until it bankrupts itself trying to make the unnatural natural; have sole possession of any part of the world.

America is spending enormously on ICE, money it largely borrows, and in a few years will go bankrupt, and as in Rome, the Barbarians will pour in and claim the land that belongs to all human beings.

What happens in the USA happens in all countries and empires; if Russia is perceived to be able to feed itself and other people, folks from all parts of the world would also try to migrate there, as they are doing to the USA, Canada, and Western Europe.

AMERICA OUGHT TO BE SAVED

America has lots of good in it, and if we can get the people and its leaders to change and treat all people as the same and equal, we can prevent it from declining and falling. In fact, one of my goals is to prevent the American empire from collapsing by getting its leaders to shift from being neurotic leaders (deluded leaders, narcissistic personality disordered leaders) to seeing all human beings as the same and coequal with them, and treating all people as the same, and no one would be fighting against Americans, hence the USA lasting much longer.

Imagine if the USA treated its people and the rest of the world as Jesus Christ asked Christians to do unto other people as you want them to do to you, which means for you to love all people, care for all people, etc.

If Americans did so, who would fight them and want to destroy them? No one would. How can America do so? Because it has the power to redefine international relationships, it could go to the United Nations Organization and help abolish the artificial concept of sovereignty, eliminate borders, and have open borders all over the world.

People will be free to migrate to all countries in the world.

It does not take too much intelligence to realize that the poor folks in the Southern Hemisphere will pour into the Northern Hemisphere, as Central Americans are currently pouring into the USA. Good. Then, Americans will do to Central and Latin America the same, go in there and buy up the land and own it and develop it, and the net effect is that Latin America would be developed, brought to par with the USA and Canada, and folks would no longer leave their tropical lands seeking succor in the cold lands of the north.

By the same token, open borders would mean Africans and Arabs (minus Arabs’ violent political ideology masquerading as religion) would pour into Europe. Europeans would then pour into Africa and the Middle East and buy up the lands, develop them, and bring them up to the level of Europe. Thereafter, folks from the global South would no longer be attempting to migrate to the global North.

Actually, given the more pleasant climate of the global south, if it were developed with infrastructure at the same level as in the global north, many more people would like to live in the south than in the north. How many people would like to live in my home state, Alaska, USA, and endure six months of winter and subarctic temperatures?

MIXED ECONOMY

Whereas this may sound like utopian idealism, I believe that it is our collective responsibility to provide all children, everywhere in the world, with publicly paid education. I believe that all children should have publicly paid one year kindergarten, six years of elementary education, six years of secondary school education, four years of university education for the top 30 % of high school graduates and the rest provided with four years of vocational education, two years in class and two years on the job training; and ten percent of the top college graduates go to graduate school, primarily in the physical sciences and technology. Publicly paid education ends for all people at age twenty-six; thereafter, all people must be in the work world.

I also believe that society must provide all people with publicly paid health care, subsidize public transportation, and provide subsidized housing for the poor and elderly.

We must limit each couple, man and wife, to two children everywhere in the world. Thereafter, the free market is allowed to distribute goods and services in society.

Do these, and people from the global south will be operating at the same level as people in the global north.

There is only one human race; the idea of different races is nonsense, and the idea that different races have different intelligences is nonsensical.

ON THE CURRENT US POWER GRAB

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the USA and the USSR emerged as the two main powers in the world. Western Europeans, the hitherto major powers, had destroyed themselves in war, and two new powers emerged to rule the world, a world that Europe had ruled. The USA and USSR pretty much determined what happened in the world until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the USA became the unchallenged sole superpower in the world. There were no other military and economic powers that could challenge America’s supremacy; she became the world’s sole hegemon and could pretty much do whatever she wanted to do and get away with it.

What are you going to do to the USA? It has sufficient nuclear weapons to eviscerate the entire world, and economic power to literally dictate to all the countries of the world what to do. It is doubtful that there was a time in the past when one country had such immense power.

In the past, what happened was that when a country became powerful, its neighbors strove to be as powerful as it was to balance the power between them because they realized that if only one country were powerful, it could oppress the others; indeed, it could chase the people away and take over their lands; it could even decide to kill the people (as was done to Native Americans).

Traditionally, international relations and world politics, at least beginning with Austria’s Prince Von Metternich’s orchestrated European Concert, after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, are based on having many centers of power, a multipolar world, but here we are now with only one serious power in the world.

Europeans felt protected by the American military umbrella and apparently did not worry too much about their servile situation. But if the USA said jump, they jumped. For example, the USA went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and major European powers went with it regardless of whether their national interests were involved or not. The military boss is fighting, so you send in your boys to go fight and die for him.

American leaders, aware of their unique situation, gradually became proud and insufferable. But whereas most of them pretended to be equal to their European partners and looked down on Third World Countries, it was not until the second Presidency of Donald Trump that the world was shown the arrogance of American power. America’s President is now so proud that he robs it in the face of his European allies. He apparently believes that they are so dependent on his military that they cannot challenge his dictates.

He threatened to annex Greenland, a territory belonging to a NATO member, Denmark; he threatened to invade Canada and make it the fifty first state of the USA and Canada is a NATO member; he imposed stiff tariffs on his European allies (plus on non-allies such as China); he threatened to invade the ancient country called Iran; he sent his military into Venezuela to kidnap that country’s president, Maduro, and wants to take the oil in Venezuela; he lobs a few missiles into Nigeria and as we speak has landed some of his expeditionary troops in Nigeria and if he really wanted it could annex Nigeria, after all Nigeria, the corruption capital of the world, is a big for nothing country.

The US President apparently now sees himself and his country as so powerful that nobody can challenge them.

Domestically, he hired a bunch of his followers into what is called ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and unleashed them on American cities, particularly on cities and states where the people did not vote for him in the last presidential election. These new SS and Gestapo are going from house to house asking people for their immigration papers. If one is undocumented, they and their children are apprehended and sent to the concentration camps set up all over the country. After being abused for being in the country illegally, they are finally bundled into planes and sent to their home countries or to any country that would accept them.

If the ICE-occupied states show any kind of opposition to his authoritarian rule, he sends in the National Guard to slap the leaders around.

He has cut money that ordinarily goes to states because they opposed his policies; he cut research money to top universities until they agreed to become subservient to him; he is renaming national monuments with his name, such as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. He is proposing to build a triumphant Arch for himself in Washington DC. He has intimidated the media, especially the major newspapers and television broadcasting corporations, to the point that they now exist to sing his praises.

This man is now so powerful that he plays God. And this is despite a nefarious history of having all kinds of deviant sex with underage children, boys, and girls, as the newly released Epstein files show.

We now have a new power-drunk Adolf Hitler running around in our midst. The antichrist is now in the world browbeating people to serve his ginormous ego, his desire to replace the real Christ and his father, God, and rule the world; the man has intimidated the people into obeying his malignant narcissistic wishes. Now we know from experience about state terrorism.

Black and brown people are especially harassed and intimidated into silence, or else they are arrested and maltreated, even killed. To fascists, human life has no value; only the Führer’s life has value (as his body is decaying before our eyes).

Adolf Hitler was on so many drugs to heal his Parkinsonian disease that his limbs shook all the time, yet he could not see how weak he was and kept up the pretentious act of being a very powerful man; we all are going to die and our bodies eaten by worms, so we are not powerful.

Power is intoxicating, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; what we see in the USA is the use of absolute power, including using that power to enrich himself and his cronies.

How do you think that this madness will end? Adolf Hitler and his Nazis lasted twelve years; the entire world gathered to fight the most powerful anti-Christ, Hitler, and brought them to their knees.

One envisages the entire world ganging together and fighting the USA, and in the end, the country will be reduced to rubble as Hitler’s Germany was reduced. Exercise of absolute power humiliates people, and those humiliated try to rehabilitate their injured egos and pride and fight to the death to do so. One sees a fight to the death between the USA and other countries, perhaps led by China.

What is obvious to one is that lunacy must be cured, or else there will be no peace in the world. This man’s power drunkenness, and consequent lunacy are why great empires fall, and before our very eyes, the USA is destroying itself.

DISCUSSION

Adlerian psychology posits that the neurotic is trying to become a false, powerful, and superior self and does not really care for other people or his real self but cares only for his false, grandiose ego.

It says that the way to cure neurosis is for the neurotic to stop seeking to become a grandiose self; he must stop trying to become a powerful superior self; and in so far that he is a human being and is a part of the community, like all of us he ought to work for the good of the community, in Adler’s language, work for social interests.

The individual’s pursuit of a big, powerful self gives him fear and anxiety from anticipating not attaining it and makes him paranoid when he really believes that he is the imaginary big self he wants to be and defends that false self when it imagines that other people attacked it.

It is deluded to believe that you are who you wish to be, that you are not. Who you are is like all of us, an ordinary human being. Stop trying to be godlike in stature, for you are not and cannot ever come to be one.

A human being lives in a body, lives for about 100 years, dies, and his body decays, and that is all there is to his body. He may or may not contain spirit, as religions teach, but in the here and now, he is just a variety of animals and plants and is part of nature; what he thinks of himself, as godlike, is imaginary, although in trying to attain that desired but false self he causes himself anxiety, paranoia, delusions, depressions and so on.

Give up the desire for grandeur and accept our equality and work for our common good, and you will feel relaxed and less anxious.

Adlerian therapists are essentially teachers teaching the individual about what he does to make him neurotic and what to do to get rid of the pursuit of the false self that makes him neurotic and also ask him to work for our common good, that is, to love all humanity.

Given its emphasis on working for the public good, Adlerian psychology is in alignment with Christianity because, if you strip Christianity’s religious fluff, what you see is a call for love for all people and love for God.

History, anthropology, and other studies tell us that all human beings evolved in Africa. They reached their current evolutionary stage about 300, 000 years ago. Thereafter, they began migrating out of Africa; some settled in Europe, others in Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

The Africans living in South Africa, called Bantus, migrated from the confluence of the Rivers Niger and Benue about two thousand years ago.

Every group came to where they currently live from elsewhere. In Europe we know that those who live in Britain came from Anatolia (Celts), Germany, Scandinavia and Norman French; those living in France were celts, then Romans and Frankish Germans were added; those living in Spain were Celtic Iberians, Romans, Visigoth Germans; those living in India were Dravidians, and the Aryans that came from Iran about four thousand years ago.

Asians migrated to America through the Bering land Bridge thousands of years ago, and later Europeans joined them and used force to take over the land, importing African slaves who were used to develop the land.

No matter how you look at it, people came to where they are living today from elsewhere. The logical conclusion then is that all humanity belongs to all parts of the planet Earth; no human being is a stranger on this planet. It is only artificial boundaries of recent origin that claim certain territories and exclude others. Every human being should feel at home in every part of this planet.

CONCLUSION

Neurosis, psychosis, personality disorders, and all mental disorders derive from people feeling that they are not who they are. They are equal and the same creatures, but somehow, some of them would like to feel superior to others. As long as they identify with a superior self, they feel anxiety from fear of not attaining that imaginary superior self.

More importantly, from the standpoint of their imaginary powerful self, they treat those they construe as inferior to them in a brutal, oppressive manner.

Mental health lies in accepting one’s sameness and equality with all people and working for our common good. One must figure out what one is good at and do it with all of one’s abilities, and, hopefully, the product of one’s work helps all people.

One must try to get along with all human beings, live peacefully with them, and give up the delusional belief that one is superior to others; no one is superior to anyone else.

Just as the individual becomes neurotic when he pursues a grandiose self-concept and self-image, societies become neurotic when they want to be superior to other societies. Neurotic societies have sociopathy and psychopathy, and those maladies drive them to conquer and oppress other people.

Most human beings and their societies have done this in the past or present, so no one is an exception to the general human psychopathy. What we all can do is heal it in ourselves by giving up the desire for grandeur and healing our societies by no longer seeking superiority over other nations and working for all people and nations to live peacefully.

If we do so, empires no longer need to be resented and worked against, but since they now work for all of us, all of us cooperate with them, and they last longer.