The (Necessary) Empire and Synchronicity

John Michael Greer, of The Archdruid Report, referred to here a few weeks ago as one offering a critique to the classic "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations," continues his nine-part series on the collapse of the Empire. In it, you many learn something slightly surprising: that the Empire is in some sense, a necessary construct in the world we live in. Even so, the prognosis for such is not so good:
"No empire, even in its prime, can afford policies that estrange its allies, increase its overseas commitments, make its enemies forget their mutual quarrels and form alliances with one another, and destabilize the world political order, all at the same time. American foreign policy in recent years has accomplished every one of these things, at a time when America's effective ability to deal with the consequences is steadily declining as its resource base dwindles and the last of its industrial economy fizzles out. To call this a recipe for disaster understates the case considerably."

Now compare this with the comments of poster "expat" on The Oil Drum: (he apparently is actually an expat living in Germany):

"In my opinion, the U.S. has been more or less actively isolating itself for several decades, in ways and for reasons which I'll skip over for now - they are mainly my opinion, though the use of fear goes fairly far back to the 1970s (remember the hijacking 'wave' of often politically motivated terrorists, like the PLO? That led to the first wedge of Americans getting used to the idea that security is more important than the risks of freedom.)

At this point, I suspect America's 'leading' role is more a case of social inertia than anything concrete, as the rest of the world continues to respond to challenges which America seems unable to understand, much less handle. Again, what happened in New Orleans in full color cannot be overstated in terms of what the rest of the world saw - most people in other societies were astounded to see how utterly unprepared America was to handle a completely predictable chain of events. I won't even begin to talk about Bush, except to note that the rest of the world is unable to grasp why he was re-elected.

In part, after several generations of faith in America, the rest of the world is now dealing with the fact that their belief in America needs to be changed to reflect reality, the same way they are beginning to deal with the results of climate change and a future where liquid fossil fuels will be increasingly unavailable. And what America thinks about this, or whether America will be participating in any solutions is becoming less important to other societies, as the problems are real, and are not going away.

It is strange to think that America may be the first world spanning power which simply decided to abdicate, because it preferred to live its fantasies, instead of dealing with the world around it. And what makes this really surreal is that Americans still think that bragging about their power to kill and destroy with the world's most powerful military is something which causes them to be respected and admired for their goodness.

This is not to dismiss America, but to simply point out that billions of people have different concerns than whether ExxonMobil or GM can keep the American Dream alive. For many people, the American Dream is becoming to be seen as part of a looming nightmare. Fat and ignorant are not really that admirable, after all."

Chaos finds such concurrence, if you will, between disparate writers exceedingly odd. Perhaps more than coincidental?