(HYBRID) Multipolarity: How Can We Best Educate Our Ruling Class?

Adam Smith foresaw in 1776 that the situation where Europeans possessed tremendously more military power than other populations was temporary, and that the tendency would prevail for military power to become more evenly distributed among all peoples worldwide. The natural development of market capitalism, with Smith’s famous “invisible hand,” would automatically undermine the privileged position of a few superpowers, so that the power and influence of all countries would become more evenly correlated with population.

Smith did not say how long this would take, but nearly two and a half centuries later, we can see this inevitable process moving rapidly toward a kind of equilibrium. Military power is not perfectly correlated with output (GDP) but there necessarily is a strong association. Economic growth tends to be more rapid among less-developed countries, or at least, some of them. Thus, global economic growth automatically undermines the relative power of the few national powers which dominated the world a century or a half-century ago.

People in the US have become accustomed to US military pre-eminence, but US economic output, as a share of world output, has plummeted, and therefore US power and influence must decline. The Neocon ruling class considers it self-evident that the US can rule the world and ought to do so. The result is that the US constantly rushes into unnecessary military conflicts, which it always loses, if the objective is to create new pro-Western political entities, but often wins, if the objective is to maximize misery and destruction.

The challenge we face is to promote peace and international co-operation by educating our ruling class to accept America’s steadily declining power and influence in world affairs. In all probability, the US will remain one of the ten leading great powers for a century to come, but like its predecessors among world empires, it will have to adjust to living in a world of equals and near-equals.

Speaker: Dr. David Ramsay Steele
David Ramsay Steele, PhD, is Supreme Leader of the Chicago Libertarian Seminar, whose monthly discussions can now be viewed on YouTube. He is author of The Conquistador with His Pants Down: David Ramsay Steele’s Legendary Lost Lectures (2024), The Mystery of Fascism: David Ramsay Steele’s Greatest Hits (2019), Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab (2017), Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy (2008), and From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation (1992). He is co-author, with Michael R. Edelstein, PhD, of Therapy Breakthrough: Why Some Psychotherapies Work Better than Others (2013) and Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (1997, 2019).

To attend via Zoom
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