I was sent a link to this interesting presentation on “the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States” by Dimitry Orlov, a Russian ex-pat in the US.
The presentation is simply a comparison of political and economical factors shared between the Soviet Union before its collapse and the present-day United States, arguing that not only will the United States collapse under its own weight much like the Soviet Union did, but due to the way American capitalist society has been built, it will collapse in a much more spectacular fashion that the Soviet Union did.
It’s a fascinating read in the way that it deals with the cause and effects of the collapse of empires in a very general and “you-see-the-trends-I’m-hinting-at” kind of way, and uses no concrete example. This gives a bird’s eye comparison which is quite powerful in its simplicity. But that is of course also it’s weakness. Even though the USA is stretched thin in many ways at the moment, no one would expect that its collapse is imminent. The USA still appears as the leader with regards to military, economical and cultural strength, and with a lack of concrete evidence of this power crumbling Orlov’s theories still seem a tad apocalyptic.
But if there is one thing that this theory has going for it is exactly that the collapse of the USA sounds so unlikely. As he points out, so did the collapse of the Soviet Union to its citizens back in the day…
