The End Of Empire

The Mongols. The Chinese. Persians. The Greeks. Rome. The Islamic Caliphates. Spain. England. The United States. Notice anything special about this list of historic Imperial powers? Such as the fact that Empire almost always appears to shift from East to West? And now, having circled the globe during the last 2500 years, it seems to be moving again toward the East, where Russia and China contest the dominance of the West.

Here in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco, where my wife and I live, some of the residents of our co-housing condo have been a bit dismayed at the slow sale of houses. But now they’re feeling optimistic again. Why? Because what many see in the recent US election as a sign of national regression, a possible pre-cursor to the decline of US power, may be accompanied by Liberals and Democrats fleeing the US and coming here. We’re about to have a housing boom. Or so some think.

In the ongoing analysis of ‘why Trump won,’ the one salient point that sticks out for me is that traditional ruling parties are toppling everywhere. Populism, whether right (US) or left (Mexico) is on the march. Why? I think it is very simple. In the last 100 years world population has quadrupled, from 2 billion to 8 billion. People are afraid. The world cannot support us. In the survival game of musical chairs, there aren’t enough chairs. So, find some tough charismatic leader, rally your tribe, and be one of the winners.

Astrologically, there are stark signs of dramatic change. The three outer or ‘spiritual’ planets all aligned together in the last degrees of a sign, transitioning together in a manner which has never happened before. In the US the return of Pluto to the same place in the sky as at the conception of the country may suggest that its original mission may have completed itself. Is it the beginning of the end, or time for a new mission?

What could that mission be? There is an interesting parallel on a one to ten basis between the lifetime of the US (248 years) and the circumnavigation of the globe by the principle of Empire (approximately 2500 years). While Empires have always fought each other, as they still appear to be doing now, the staging is a little different. For instance, in the shift to the Far East, not only are the imperial ambitions of Russia and China in play, but there are other strong players as well – Japan, India, the Koreas. The hopeful possibility is that the developmental purposes of empire may have spent themselves, leaving balanced alliances of forces, each strong enough to thwart the others such that a restless planet may finally realize there is no place left to expand to other than to share responsibility for survival of the planet as a whole. Within the microcosm of the United States, for instance, it could turn out that the shift of significant numbers of persons of color to the Republican Party may be just what we need to stir the stew of multi-ethnicity.

In any case, the storm is upon us. It could destroy everything. Or it may be, in the words of Ben Franklin, the reminder that we must all hang together, or all hang separately.