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May 4, 2006

The King is naked

By: Silvio

Running an empire is a quite complicated task.

You have to keep happy your subjects, aligned your allies, submitted your enemies and, in empires who live on the religion of Perpetual Growth like ours, you need to constantly find new resources and produce new "wealth" to keep your people busy buying-producing-buying.

In order to make this task easier for whoever has the power, one useful and friendly force has always been used by all the emperors through history: fear.

You can use fear toward your own people, convincing them they'll suffer the biggest pains and eventually die the worst deaths of they don't surrender their power and freedom to you.
And you can use fear with your allies, rebuffing all of their attempts to gain a bit of liberty by constantly reminding them that they owe you much of their prosperity, security and power.
And, of course, you can use fear with your enemies, threatening them to erase their ugly faces from the planet by sending at their doors the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - if they don't do as you say and play the role you ask them to play (so that you can use fear with your people, by the way...)

Anyway, without fear you cannot run and empire. Period.

So I was a bit surprised when I read news like this one, from the LatinPetroleum Magazine:

President Evo Morales ordered soldiers to occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields Monday [May 1st] and threatened to evict foreign companies unless they give Bolivia control over the entire chain of production.
or like this one, from Common Dreams:
"It's a geopolitical nightmare," says William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and defense secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now chairman of the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consulting firm. Such nations as Iran, Russia and China "don't see us as the colossus that can cause them any harm, either by our economy or by our prestige."
What's going on?

As they say, probably the people who run the empire we live under bite off more than they chew: and even if they have huge mouths, they are now choking on what they thought was a quick'n'easy war (Iraq), on what they once thought was their own backyard (South America) and mainly on what they strongly believed would never finish and would feed their world forever (cheap access to oil and other resources)

Well, all this is happening right now and it looks like the walls of the Big City are just starting to come tumbling down - because if your friends and your enemies are not afraid of you anymore, your empire is doomed.

What will happen next is difficult to say: a new multi-polar world? A better and more fair world? Chaos?

We will all see in a few years: in the meantime, let's sit here for a little bit, contemplating the grandiose drama of yet another Empire who falls.

Posted by Silvio at May 4, 2006 8:01 AM Category: Peak Oil --- Social Implications