There is clearly a sense of the ‘last days of empire’ with the US and with Britain. As far as I am concerned it can’t come too soon.
Empires, all empires, have to go and be replaced by human societies that begin to shift towards a cooperative model that does not favour the interests of one group over all others. All human societies need to be based on the principle of helping each individual within them to develop to their full potential and contribute in the best way they can. Globally, they should be based on a model of cooperation and coming together to solve problems that affect everyone everywhere.
Differences in culture, faith, regional challenges, or anything else are not really a problem provided we all agree on the basic principles: one, that all human beings have a right and a duty to develop to their full potential and that society’s duty is to facilitate that, and two, that no one individual or group are more valuable or important than any other.
At the moment our societies are very much organised to further the interests of the already privileged, or otherwise more aggressive. To a much lesser extent and very sporadically, there are programmes that help the rest.
95% of people are working in jobs/areas they are not passionate about and spend their best years doing things that don’t necessarily mean much to them, only to make ends meet. In a world where you are only two-three paycheques away from destitution and homelessness, what else can you do? The majority of people are expected to not complain and find some comfort in consumer goods, ‘escape’ holidays, escapist entertainment and their close relationships. Only a privileged minority (I’m one of them) are doing what they are passionate about. In a world organised like this there is no wonder that there is so much unhappiness and that relationships just crumble under the pressure to provide too much. We currently have societies based on waste not only in a material sense, but also on an appalling waste of human potential and ability.
To be passionate about something and to be able to engage with it for most of your life means living a more fulfilling and happy life that is well used. Most people’s lives are not necessarily that well used and could be used better.
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The analysis in this article (https://www.truthdig.com/articles/goodbye-to-the-dollar/) offers more detail compared with my otherwise uninformed ‘gut feeling’.
“The Trump administration has capriciously sabotaged the global institutions, including NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, which provide cover and lend legitimacy to American imperialism and global economic hegemony. The American empire, as McCoy points out, was always a hybrid of past empires. It developed, he writes, “a distinctive form of global governance that incorporated aspects of antecedent empires, ancient and modern. This unique U.S. imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions among allies; Roman in its reliance on legions that occupied military bases across most of the known world; and British in its aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system that covered the globe.”