The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies
truthdig.com
truthdig.com
I kind of agree - but really let's say we listen to our inner doubts, we mutiny and throw Ahab overboard, we are still on a whaler in the middle of the ocean. Now what?
Our (global?) society is on course for destruction on the ocean - but that course is also sailing use closer to the promised land. Every innovation, every step closer to the singularity requires us to move faster, land more sure-footedly. Yes we could balls it all up, start a mindless war that tips the balance, refuse to cooperate in trade or keep the next Einstein in a poverty stricken barro to die of diseases we cure with a single needle.
but then we could not - we could survive on the knife edge - learn how to sail better, close to the wind.
Destruction is not inevitable - it is just somewhere between likely and probable. All the more reason not to give into dsspair - not let Ahabs obsessions distract him from the survival of the ship, but for us to watch and honestly discuss the ships course - and find a way for the whole world to choose together our next course.
(yeah a little too flowery language - sorry. it's late)
The assumption here is that moderation is what has prevented the course of Pequod (and decaying civilizations) from correcting their course. You question what happens when we throw Ahab overboard while ignoring the fact that each passing minute and hour you let Ahab run free, your security and well-being are threatened. Why fuss over what happens when you toss Ahab over when Ahab poses a nearly immediate threat to your well-being? That's just more of the moderation that silently rationalizes Ahab's actions.
Hedges brought up a number of revolutionary thinkers from all walks of the revolutionary left, yet proposed we follow no single system. The subtext being that we need to move away from capitalism, and generally need to move to the left. Whether that's straight up Marxism or more moderate forms of radical schools of thought are secondary or even tertiary. The point is we need to change the course of the ship immediately, or we'll just repeat history for the thousandth time.
> Capitalism can't be fixed with a few patches here and there, it must be abolished and trying to appear moderate makes you no different than the crew members of Pequod who played into Ahab's mania.
This may sound silly but is there a common definition of capitalism? It seems rather woolly compared to say, Marxism. Capitalism seems to me to be something we have been doing for tens of thousands of years. Saying "no capitalism is what Marx said it was so that he had something to be against" is kind of backwards. (that may not be what you are saying, but its what I got from the article)
To my mind the biggest difference between capitalism and communism (as practised) has been the use of price as a signalling mechanism (see the way China moved away from a centrally planned model).
Otherwise capitalism seems to have covered a vast vast range of practises over centuries, but perhaps can be boiled down to trade or trade with price as a signalling mechanism.
If this "definition" of capitalism is right, then it seems that it gets fixed often.
BTW, I am in favour of massive change, including the dunking of captains, the fundamentals of our society are creaking and there is a new approach needed. Its just that the next workable approach is not an approach anyone has so far tried, and probably not thought of, (although much more open transparent decision making and information is almost certainly going to be involved thanks to the Internet).
So chucking Ahab overboard when we do not know what course to set after is a bad idea, but chucking him overboard if he threatens to sink the ship is a good idea. We are just disagreeing on whether this current bout of mad behaviour (whatever it may be) is a threat to the ship or not.
Thank for the reply anyway.
We know what happens next, because it's already been tried. What happens when you mutiny and throw Ahab overboard: the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; the Soviet Union; the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Revolution doesn't work because you can't fight destruction with destruction, and that's what revolution is: destruction.
This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist.
I personally think that collapse is coming. If I had to guess I would say 20-30 years out but to be honest, that's a guess. It could be ten years and it could be a hundred. I don't think the system can reform itself. The fundamental question is how we, our children, or our children's children can plan to survive when nemesis follows hubris.
The things you have mentioned are the beginning but I will give you a few more.
1. Collapse isn't the end of the world. As Joseph Tainter pointed out, nutrition for many Romans improved after the fall of Rome. I would add that already nutrition among the poor in Indonesia (at least from what I have seen living here) is better than it is among the poor in the US, so we have already crossed the threshold where collapse makes sense to a large part of the population.
2. Trade locally. Build up local economic ties.
3. Plan on retiring with your kids. Raise them with this in mind. Part of this is inviting your parents or parents-in-law to retire with you so your kids grow up seeing this as normal.
Alternatively we could prepare for failure. The only way to do that is to make sure we have 150 new nuclear power plants built all around the country in the next 10-15 years though. That should be Obama's Manhattan project. Again, there's two outcomes : either we find something better and it's wasted money (that would be great !) or it saves our collective asses, and gives us another 100 years to come up with something better.
If the US army/govt does find a new energy source, it's likely to be a nuclear one (the only real solution to our needs), and our energy problems are over until our grandchildren die.
The first is smelting and materials. You can recycle steel with just electricity (that's a lossy process) but you can't produce it without burning coal. The same goes for copper and most other metals (aluminum is the only exception to my knowledge). If one wants to support exponentially increasing material consumption, that means, supporting exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption at this point, since we are already way beyond what we can support there by using biomass for reduction smelting.
The second problem is that no matter what you do, if you push for ever-increasing consumption this will have massive environmental costs. We saw what happened at Fukushima and frankly I think the real lesson there is that natural disasters will always have a significant chance to overwhelm human engineering. It's easy to say "well, if they had the newer designs" but I am not aware of any real experience there seeing more recent designs of nuclear power plants go through a massive earthquake and tsunami. At best we can say "well, if we didn't miss something..." but reality is always more complex than our models. So I don't see nuclear as the answer.
The only real way to prepare for failure is to reduce consumption, and if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure.
For exponentially increasing consumption of energy, even without greenhouse gas emissions you have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to a warming planet even with a constant atmosphere. Our path is not sustainable and no amount of technological intervention will make it so. The only breakthrough that could possibly matter in that regard would be the development of perpetual motion machines.
Which isn't necessary, because first, the population is no longer increasing exponentially; IIRC the current projection is that world population will level off by about 2050; and second, the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them. For example, the structure of cars used to be entirely steel; now much of it is composites, which contain less material and are less energetically expensive to make.
if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure
It depends on which macro-economists you listen to. Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.
The problem you run into there is that for a long time the elderly population will be increasing exponentially, and care for the elderly falls on the shoulders of a smaller portion of the population.
> the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them.
This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right? Is that borne out by numbers and evidence?
> Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.
Please define "wealth."
Not "for a long time"; for the length of one generation.
This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right?
No, because per capita energy consumption depends on how wealthy you are as well as how efficient your technology is. What it does suggest is that per capita energy consumption rises more slowly as a function of wealth than one would expect based on your assumptions about increasing use of resources, and that over time, the per capita energy consumption for some fixed level of wealth will get smaller.
Please define "wealth."
The best definition I know of is that wealth is choices: the more things you could choose to do with the resources available to you, the wealthier you are. One could also try to factor in some measure of the quality of the choices; for example, Bill Gates and I can both choose to fly somewhere, but he can choose to fly there on a private jet whereas I can only choose to fly on a commercial airliner. But the key is that nothing requires the resources needed to fly somewhere to be constant; as technology improves, the same goal--such as flying somewhere--can be accomplished with fewer and fewer resources. That means the same level of wealth--the same choices--can be achieved with fewer and fewer resources.
I am not sure that works in practice unless one has a lot of resources going to enforce property rights over intangible assets, and unless those rights are the only growth one expects in the economy. The fact is, I may download and play a computer game as a factor of what you call "wealth" (not my definition btw), but as soon as I want to do anything(like go to the store to buy groceries), I have to use energy and materials to do that.
Similarly for the video game developer, the FTC regulator, or anyone else possibly involved, to show up to work you have the same questions of materials and energy. What you end up with instead is greater demand for less and less useful products because good materials become more and more expensive. That sounds like inflation to me, not an increase in wealth. I think we are already heading down that spiral.
As for a definition of wealth, this may seem old fashioned, but I will paraphrase one of the more insightful definitions I have read:
Humans are dependent on material culture since we can't live without clothing or shelter, and tend to have to prepare food in some way. Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment. Wealth is created when we modify something to make it more useful.
0.025% annual growth is still exponential. You can't demand a constant rate of compounding rate of growth without the problem that this demands exhausting all natural resources.
The rate isn't constant; it's decreasing. That's the point. For example, you say it takes energy and materials to go to the store or go to work; but it takes less per person now than it used to. (One obvious example is that lots of people can telework now because we have the Internet, conference calling, etc.; I do that several times a week, saving a significant chunk of energy and materials.)
Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment.
Which is done for lots of reasons in addition to food, clothing, and shelter. Your definition of wealth is way too narrow. There are plenty of countries where people have food, clothing, and shelter and nothing else. We call those countries "poor" for a reason.
Frankly what happened at Fukushima is over-cautiousness with nuclear power. The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine. Of course, whoever took that decision would have been fired, and skinned alive, allowed to heal, and skinned alive again. I even read at one point that the operators knew this, but followed procedure.
I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances, and compares insanely favorable compared to fossil-fuel related deaths (some people actually died inspecting a refinery reactor when the wave knocked it over, most are from pipes exploding due to over-pressure. Total is several hundred). Total area rendered inaccessible due to Fukushima also compares favorably compared to area polluted to the point humans can't safely live there any more for fossil fuel plants and refineries.
Coal matters if one is concerned about CO2 emissions if nothing else.
> The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine.
Do we know for sure that containment wasn't lost due to structural damage from the earthquake?
> I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances...
Is death toll the only factor though? I don't know about you but I think the major impact of Chernobyl of Fukushima will not be, in a hundred years, the death toll but the fact that you have areas of land that are no longer useful for many purposes, like growing food.
All the items you give are good ones; I would add a few more:
* Be skeptical. Much of what passes for "common knowledge" because it is promulgated by the government or the mainstream media is false. Use your own independent judgment.
* Be knowledgeable. You can't use your own independent judgment if you don't understand how things work. Yes, that means you have to spend time and effort learning about things like science or economics on your own, rather than just accepting that whatever you were taught in school is true. (For why you can't just accept that, see "be skeptical" above.)
* When people who are in power make mistakes, particularly large and egregious mistakes, don't let them off the hook. People in power love to make excuses when they screw up. Don't let them. They also like to say that they didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they're human so they make mistakes. Don't let them get away with that either; if you're in a position of power, you should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary person, because your decisions have broader consequences. For an ordinary person, making a bad decision means you learn to do better next time. For a person in power, making a bad decision should very often mean they're no longer in power.
Most of all:
* Don't look at politics as a way of imposing your view of what is right on others. Look at politics as a last resort for people with fundamentally different values to use to figure out how to peacefully coexist without either side imposing its views on the other.
the author laments the hubris and arrogance present in all societies, as if these exaggerations were bugs, and not features.
the arrogance of the leaders and the peddling of hope are there because we are all afraid, and nobody wants to admit it. he talks about the chasm of human reality and how you get burned if you get closed to it, and i agree - it makes sense. i came out burned. i was mad at the world for a while and wanted to tear the whole thing down, but i went back for a closer look because i figured there must have been something i'm missing. there is beauty at the bottom of it, and we can get through it.
there is still new land to be explored - we just can't get there by walking or sailing. the ENTIRE GALAXY awaits us if we can just get off this damned rock. let's peddle all the hope we need and beat our chests all day long; let's spread the gospel to heathen civilizations on other planets if that's what it takes for us to move out of this place and into another one. maybe we're just delaying the inevitable and the end of the galactic civilization will be that much more spectacular when it comes, but it's not as if we can go back in time to change all the "best guesses" our world was built on and the gentle lies that sustain it.
we are now heathens living on easter island. we know our civilization is built on a lie. we can either stop telling that lie and kill each other out of anger over mistakes our ancestors made doing the best they could, or we could all keep telling the lie, keep playing our assigned parts with a wink and a nod, and put fewer resources into enforcing what everybody knows is a sham story, and devote all our efforts into finding the new land we think might be out there over the great waters.
the only way through is forward. the only way out is up.
There are many pitfalls that might cause this march into the future to end abruptly and miserably, even if the goal of a new technological era is physically and strategically possible given our current resource constraints. We would do well to avoid falling into a pit along the way, and a social dialogue about possible pitfalls is a necessary part of that.
But this itself has a long-term cost in terms of both consumption and complexity. Put another way, you can't solve the environmental problems, really, if you demand that consumption continues to rise exponentially over time.
What I think we are actually being sold with the green energy agenda is a way to continue to grow consumption because this is important to macroeconomists. The problem though is that this leads to permamently debt-ridden, destitute workers robbed of social context in order to make the wealthy even more rich.
The environmental damage could be contained by taxes to reduce consumption but that has very significant implications for our way of life. Reducing consumption though is the only way out.
Okay, well, this is what we have governments for. Polluting is outlawed, and both companies are prevented from defecting.
But there's more than one country in the world. And clean industry is expensive. So if country A pollutes, and country B doesn't...
My point is that it's not enough to just "decide" to tone it down, because societies that don't (although they carry the seeds of their own destruction) will dominate ones that do.
Either way we won't ever find out - so how we behave is really a matter of faith - not in God but in our descendants ability to keep going up.
I'm voting for optimisim :-)
/watch?v=zGmfiKowrYU
And that is going in the quote archive. Nice :)
> Make clear statements in plain English. Attempts to sound “intellectual” usually result in the sort of vague, stilted, polysyllabic confusion shown in the first two ... [1]
Also, my experiences indicate that the typical hacker is a better expositor than most.
> Learn to write your native language well. (A surprising number of hackers, including all the best ones I know of, are able writers.) [2]
The qualities that I personally look for in writing are clarity, conciseness, and impact.
The most important and least difficult is clarity. A lack of clarity might manifest as a reader's overt confusion. But it can also manifest in more subtle ways such as: false equivocation; poor diction; surface analogies; digression; lack of examples; lack of structure; etc. Without clarity, the article is worthless.
After clarity, conciseness is next important. Synonyms might include "efficiency" and "economy". Why say in 1,000 words what one can convey in 10? It's not about shortness per se, but density of information; it shows respect for a reader's time.
Impact is the least important and most difficult. Writing which has impact has an immediacy of experience. It makes for an easy and enjoyable read. The opposite is hiding behind a dense wall of flowery euphemisms.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=flowery+language&rlz=1C1GGGE...
[2] http://wwwu.edu.uni-klu.ac.at/epirker/unix/hacker-howto.html
Historically, power has been proportional to a willing population. Technology allows power to be decoupled from population, allowing a very tiny minority to exert massive global power. This is the real danger, whether it takes the form of government, corporation, elites or cults.
As power asymmetry becomes more and more pronounced due to technology, the average person becomes far more prone to subjugation. This is the reality we face. This enemy is far more challenging to fight than any historical precedent.
Only time will elucidate our fates.
If ever there were an example of "appeal to an irrelevant authority" as a mode of argument, this overlong and histrionic essay would be it. Does it really matter what Moby Dick is about? Arguments should stand on reasoning and evidence, not pretentious allusions.
And then, of course, we get to fascism.
The sad thing is, I pretty much agree with the writer's sentiments, but this essay isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
I'm a banker. I paid $10B for MBSes in 2007. Big mistake. In 2008, their valuation fell to $0. So I do a swap with the Federal Reserve. I give Ben Bernake my portfolio of MBSes. And he gives me $10B in US Treasury Bonds he's purchased.
I never would have made a dime off my MBSes. But now, the US tax payer is on the hook for paying me $10B in principal plus interest. Meanwhile, the Fed puts "$10B" of MBSes on its books. Doesn't matter that these debts are worth zero. They get to do it...
Right now, the Fed has "$1.5T" of MBSes on their books from doing these deals. Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/19/news/economy/federal-reserve...
I used to be VP of Mortgage Tax and Accounting at a Wall St. bank back in the 90s, and I try to stay up to date on this fiasco. I don't have a problem with what Chris Hedges said, just how he said it: he said it too fast, and it came out wrong. The main idea is still right.
Lawrence Hunter wrote an op-ed for Forbes back in 2012 saying the Fed's (at the time) "$1.3T" of MBSes were "worthless." http://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/10/29/are-fe...
My main job was pricing MBSes. The calculation is basically sum of discounted contingent cashflows. Even before the 2008 crisis, back in the mid 90s, I'd often see MBSes with a negative net income. Then I'd get frantic phone calls from upset clients, often accountants or CFOs or brokers, who couldn't understand how a valuation less than zero was even possible, and I'd have to explain how their expected expenditures were going to be greater than their revenues...
I tend to agree with Hunter and Hedges that the Fed's "$1.5T" of MBSes are mostly worthless.
That said, I also understand the reasons why the Fed is making these purchases: increase MBS prices, increase liquidity in the MBS market, and so forth. But the bigger reason still seems to me: bail out TBTF banks.
For the Fed's POV on this subject, they publish FAQs and data on their "MBS Purchase Program" several places:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_mbs.htm
Firstly, the Fed is purchasing agency MBSs at market rates. They are pushing prices up since they are bringing demand to the market, but they are otherwise bidding competitively. The idea that these MBSs are basically worthless doesn't make sense when there is a large market for them.
Secondly a lot of the MBSs (which are all government guaranteed) are newly issued, so it can hardly be said they are helping TBTF banks decant their toxic assets leftover from the financial crisis.
Thirdly, the Fed actually eventually made a profit on the toxic debt they acquired during the bailouts. The current MBS purchase programs are far less risky. Furthermore, the US Gov has guaranteed the future cashflows of all these MBSs... so I think TBTF banks are a sidenote on this whole issue.
The Fed made $90B in profits in 2012, but they were only able to do this by printing $85B per month in QE. In other words, they're printing profits...something you and I are not allowed to do legally. The bigger question is: If they're printing $1T/yr, why are they only making a measly $90B/yr in profits?
In what way are they "market rates" when the Fed printed $1.5T out of thin air to purchase them? Rather, The Fed is using its market power to set the prices of MBSs.
The word "guarantee" gets tossed around a lot, but it's misleading:
Fannie and Freddie's "implicit guarantee" only means that the government will lend these GSEs funds to ensure timely payments of principal and interest to mortgagees (not MBS investors!), at rates slightly above the government's own borrowing rate, up to the "conforming loan limit" which is $417,000 in most areas. So it doesn't entirely eliminate default risk. And it doesn't reduce servicer risk or interest rate risk at all.
Only in 2013 with QE3 did The Fed start buying Ginnie Mae MBSs with an "explicit guarantee" that entirely eliminates default risk. (These securities still have issuer/servicer risk.) But The Fed is still buying non-Ginnie MBSs as well.
It's not going to stop till the trillion or so it cost to stop the world economy collapsing is about as valuable as the outfitting for the Spanish-American war.
When the Cypriot government tried to take 6% of everyone's bank accounts there were riots in the streets. Our go ernments are doing the same thing, but we blame bankers.
I couldn't make it past the first page of this article...
The Matrix would have been a better allegory to use than Moby Dick, particularly for HNers. Moby Dick might appeal to Harvard-educated, Arabic-speaking, Vermont liberals like Hedges, but most of us haven't read it and don't want to.
It's not that I disagree with any of Hedges' major points, it's just that I find his presentation erudite, pretentious and snobbish.
Economist Kenneth Boulding summed this up more concisely: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
And if Capitalism is a "plague," what is the cure? Hedges talks about Marxist revolution, but stops short of calling for one, instead falling back on quotations from Shakespeare, and Kant, and Dante, and Black Elk, and Nazim Hikmet.
So, what is the cure?
1. War and revolutions aren't the answer: If they decimate the population, temporarily reducing resource consumption, decreasing the supply of labor so that wages might finally start rising again after 30 years of stagnation, then what? After all the misery and suffering that war brings, we've bought ourselves a few decades with a slightly more equitable wealth distribution, and put ecological disaster in check for a while, but it's only temporary, and our populations will soon grow themselves back into the same problems all over again.
2. Technology? Increased efficiency will only spur increased consumption. It's called Jevons paradox. Technology will only speed things up.
3. Accelerationism... Help the capitalists steal all the wealth and push us over the edge of ecological disaster. Evolution will make sure something else succeeds us.
4. Enlightenment: In the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 56, Jesus said, "Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse."
The world is already dead, and there's nothing Chris Hedges can do about it! Whenever something we love dies, we experience mourning. The stages of mourning are--
Denial - Most of the people in the world are stuck in this stage.
Anger - This is where we find revolutionary groups like the Tea Party and OWS.
Bargaining - I think this is where Hedges finds himself. He really thinks there's a way to resurrect the planet--Art, Poetry, Novels--but he doesn't seem sure.
Depression - Lot's of people struggling at this stage. About 800,000 to a million people commit suicide per year.
Acceptance - Doesn't mean you're ever going to be happy again. It just means you're awake to reality.
When the elite can no longer hold large, divided nations together via violence and or propaganda, the working class majority form smaller, more homogeneous, less divided nations, nations that can be more easily controlled by the workers, and less easily controlled by the elite.
Factions are the friend of the rich and the enemy of the masses.
How do the elite create factions so they can rule? Enlarge the nation; import foreigners, especially those of another race and culture; create propaganda that focuses on identity politics; etc etc.
Of course the centrally controlled dogma of the american edu-propaganda system has programmed us to feel bad about collapse of nations. Oh, it's so sad that such and such nation is breaking up.
But that is an elite-centric propaganda meme. It is always a good thing when nations collapse and fall apart--a good thing from the perspective of the working class majority. Of course the more "educated" you are, the more you take the perspective of the elite--in general.
When Rome fell, the result of the lack of central administration meant that the institution of Roman slavery began to evolve from proprietary rights over other people's actions to proprietary rights over land entrusted to other people. Over generations, the descendants of slaves became peasants with rights over the land they worked, with strong access to common resources. Nutrition improved in the lower classes. Laws were simplified.
Now this took some time. You don't see slavery turn into serfdom during the rein of Theodoric the Great, for example, but it's a general trend in history that during most of the Middle Ages, when power was not well concentrated in the hands of the King (which was the norm until relatively late) that the poor did relatively well.
Another good comparison might be between Indonesia today and the US today. Indonesia has a weak central government, with a very decentralized society. The result is that society runs, at least in the cities, in almost an inverted order to what we think of in the US: everyone but the obscenely wealthy live in gated communities, food production is widely distributed (and a substantial part of fruit and vegetable production happens in the cities). As a result, the diet of those in poverty in Jakarta tends to be rice, tempe, and fresh produce (though access to unpolluted drinking water is a problem, I suppose right now, the US has issues there too at least in some states).
Families are stronger and they become the primary form of support, instead of the government. This means that vertical transmission of wealth happens earlier in life (i.e. invest in your children's businesses because that's your retirement plan), and so forth.
On the whole, the elites in the US today use the power of the state to shape a culture where families are de-emphasized and undermined as a support structure, where we replace people with things as the necessary way out of poverty, and therefore where people are isolated from eachother in order to be made ready for the corporate workforce.
Corporations are creatures of the state. It is unthinkable that corporations could totally dominate the economy if there is no large, powerful state backing them. (BTW, one of the big issues with some strains of Libertarian thought is that if the government's role is reduced to that of enforcing contracts, then it becomes reduced to backing powerful corporations. What are the just limits of contracts cannot be purely found in the limit of a contract but has to be found from wider political controls.)
Also useful in preventing the majority from using the government against the minority of the opulent was the pseudo-democratic structure of the federal govt (strong checks and balances and separation of powers). This would hinder the ability of the majority to control the government. That would keep the wealth of madsison, jefferson, washington, morris et al., safe from that dirty, brutish mob (i.e., you and me).
The benefit to the elite of factions created by nation enlargement? The elite get to keep more of their wealth.
As the USA grows larger and more heterogeneous with mass immigration, we are less and less in control of our own govt.
Our cultural cousins in the rest of the western nations (canada, australia, UK, scandanavia, france, austria, germany etc) are all smaller and more homogeneous, and so the majority there therefore have more control of their own nations. However, as they elite cram more immigrants into those nations, factions grow and there is less majority control. And of course the elite created the EU along the lines of the USA so as to remove as much power as possible from the majority in those member nations.
Not that I think a collapse is particularly likely, but even if one happens, it is very plausible that it won't really be that bad.