Here’s a curious fact about the world today. Wherever across the globe you see English speaking societies, you’ll also see sudden, swift decline — maybe even ruinous collapse. There’s America, with a President installed by the Kremlin, LOL (that’s according to the Senate, folks, not me). The world’s first poor rich country, a place where people literally die for a lack of basic medicines, like insulin. Then there’s Britain — hell-bent on becoming the world’s second poor rich country, Brexiting its way into perma-catastrophe, despair, and ruin. There’s Ontario — where people elected a cartoon Trump after what they saw Trump do in America. There’s Australia, too — hurtling backwards, seemingly by the day.

Do you see how weird, funny, and strange this is? The only exception — the one which proves the rule — is gentle, wise New Zealand. So what’s the deal? Is it just one of history’s biggest coincidences that every English speaking society on planet earth seems to be in sharp decline, at precisely the same moment in history — or is there, as you might reasonably suspect, a common cause?

One way to think about it is that it’s due to institutions — particularly, political institutions. America and Britain both share winner-take-all binary voting systems, first-past-the-post, which produce all kinds of well-known maladies, from strategic voting to deadlock. America and Britain both have becameral legislatures where one house is of dubious democratic value — selected in Britain, and elected in proportion to land in America. Another way to think about Anglo decline and collapse is that it’s due to a foolish, failed, hilarious set of ideas — like America’s bizarre, Soviet notion trickle down economics, an idea which was a utopian faith, without reason or evidence to back it up, yet then spread across the English speaking world.

Now, you’d be correct to say — “but other cultures have problems, too!!” Very true. Take Europe. It’s many cultures have all kinds of problems. But these problems aren’t nearly on the scale, at the level, of Anglo decline. Nobody in Europe has pulled a Brexit. It’s not Europeans who beg strangers on the internet for insulin. This kind of epic, surreal, self-inflicted catastrophe is utterly unique to Anglo nations today, and it’s singular in the history of rich nations, too. (The only real parallel there is for it is Latin American nations, like Venezuela and Argentina, melting down — but even that’s a bad parallel, because those meltdowns were largely spurred on by Anglo decisions, like sanctions and debts and so on.)

Underneath all this lies — politics, economics, ideas — lies something deeper. Culture. The Anglo world really is different, culturally. That is the one thing it shares — and therefore, I’ve come to think, it is the spark of Anglo collapse, too. Anglo culture is simply out of steam now. It is weary, old, tired — and badly obsolete in this new century. How so?

What makes Anglo culture different? Anglo culture is still mired in the colonizers mindset that has always been its shadow and curse. Anglos still imagine they are rulers of the world — or need to. It’s a mindset composed of three elements. Dominance, violence, and supremacy. You don’t have to look very hard to see them in Anglo culture — whether comically, luridly visibly in Trumpism, or in softer, but often no less comical forms, in Brexit. For Anglo cultures, the world has always been something to plunder, pillage, acquire, loot, and possess, to own jealously like a veiled bride. Just take the simple example of America — from slavery and native genocide through segregation through endless wars to “free trade” deals that left poor nations something very much like the colonies of the once British Empire, America’s story has ironically been of freedom for a lucky few, taken through domination and exploitation. But is that freedom at all?

Anglo culture really is different. That is what this decade teaches us. It craves supremacy, its need is dominance, it legitimizes violence, it lionizes the individual not as a human being, but as a hypermasculine zero-sum conqueror of a passive, pliant earth, body, planet, society. The more you conquer —the less I have — the more you are worth. A kind of Social Darwinism is woven through its heart — only the strong should survive, and the weak should justly perish. So a kind of narrow utilitarianism pervades it, a brittle selfishness permeates it, a fragile superficiality defines it. Anglo cultures are the ones who have always been the most interested in acquisition and possession and power and supremacy, in superiority. As forms, I’d say, of shallow, ineffective security against mortality, time, grief, one’s very humanity. They need to feel that they are almighty — and because a culture is a hard thing to change, none of this really has. What are Trumpism and Brexit really about? Aren’t they just expressions of all that?

You might think that everyone’s like this, but they are not. Franco culture sneers at getting rich. It is marked by a kind of dark romanticism, a melancholy, which seeks the beauty even in tragedy. Scandinavian culture is individualistic, but egalitarianan, not hierarchical, like Anglo culture. German culture is communitarian first, and individualistic second, and aggressively self-interested a distant third. All these cultures, after the war, made a difficult peace with their dark sides. To a great extent, they let the ancient dream, which spanned tribe to empire, of owning the whole world go. The path of violence and domination which many of them had pursued had ended in utter disaster. Their better sides began to shine. All the various forms of humanism — from existentialism to social democracy — reshaped them. Only Anglos never had a humanistic reformation. To put it simply, they value things, money, power, and ownership more than people, life, happiness, and meaning. And that is why Anglo cultures are so uniquely, singularly obsolete today that they are simply imploding.

You see, a colonizers’ mindset, one of dominance and supremacy, is a poor fit for the 21st century. Why? Because there are no more easy frontiers left to conquer. There are no more desperate, shivering peoples left to enslave. There are no more promised lands left to plunder. Except unless you’re foolish enough to believe that Mars is next, maybe. The age of exploitation is ending — we have taken all there was to take.

The world is running out of things to exploit. So what is a culture based on exploitation — on dominance, on possession, on acquisition, on selfishness, on supremacy — going to end up doing? It is going to have to either change, and that is very hard — or it is going to have to turn on itself. Most likely, then, it is going to eat itself. When there is little left in the world that’s easily seized and snatched and taken — a culture of dominance and possession, which rewards and celebrates and admires the most violent and abusive and predatory, will end up having to feed its own to them.

And that is exactly what is happening in the Anglo world. Take the example of America. America is at the point of quite literally feeding its young, old, middle, and poor to its most predatory and abusive and acquisitive and power-hungry. But what else can it do? There’s nothing else left to give the predatory and power-hungry, after all. The earth has been plundered. The oceans are running dry. The poor of the world already work for a pittance. The government already throws money at them. What else is there left to feed the predators with but the lives of Americans themselves?

Do you see the problems cultures of exploitation and domination and fear have in the 21st century? To put it as simply as it can be put, they are now eating themselves, because there is nothing else left for them to voraciously consume, dominate, own, acquire, burn through. They do not understand that the problem is they are addicted to power, to possession, to consumption, by way of exploitation — and in the 21st century, that way no longer works, because there is nothing left to exploit, to take, to seize, to conquer, to pillage, to plunder, except one’s very own democracy, society, planet, future. They do not understand that the 21st century demands a sea change from them — a way of life, of thinking, of understanding, that is not based on voracious, insatiable consumption, dominance, a childish need for supremacy, but something like truer equality, freedom, and closeness.

That lesson, I think, is worth learning by us all.

Umair

December 2018