The Seeds of Empire: On the Demise of the Great American Experiment

Introduction: Before the Fall

As we witness the slow unraveling of the American Empire, many trace its decline through the familiar shadows of Rome. They point to overreach, decadence, political corruption, civic apathy. And yes, there are echoes. But what we are seeing now is older than Rome. Older than Athens. Older than kings and crowns and constitutions.

The crisis before us did not begin in 1776, or 1492, or even in the bloodied soil of colonized land. It began in the earliest stirrings of civilization, when the seeds of hierarchy were planted in the furrows of the first fields. When land became ownership. When women became vessels. When children became labor. When the story of power began to overwrite the truth of community.

This is not simply a history. It is a journey. Through time, through systems, through lies we have inherited and truths we have forgotten. And perhaps, if we are bold enough, a glimpse forward, into the world we might still choose to build.

These systems, hierarchy, exploitation, control, may feel ancient and inescapable. But they are not natural laws. They are inventions. And anything invented can be dismantled. Anything built can be rebuilt differently.

I. The First Commodity: Wombs, Labor, and Legacy

When humanity settled into agrarian life, it gained food security but lost something deeper. Land could now be possessed, hoarded, defended. And land needed labor. In the beginning, the most accessible labor force was one’s own children. The moment someone realized that controlling women meant controlling reproduction, the womb became the first commodity. More children meant more labor. More labor meant more production. But it also meant more mouths to feed, so strategies emerged to control both bodies and inheritance.

Primogeniture arose as a solution: one heir to rule, the rest to serve. Rather than divide land among many and weaken the hold, power was distilled into a single line. The labor force may have expanded, but power was funneled. Over time, this structure hardened into hierarchy, and that hierarchy became civilization.

The family became the state in miniature. The patriarch became the king. Women became vessels. Children became tools. And the systems march began.

II. Scarcity and Revolt: The Day the Serfs Said No”

“When the dead outnumbered the living, the lords remembered, they were never gods. Only leeches, fed fat on the backs of the many.”

In the wake of the Black Death, which wiped out anywhere from one-third to half of Europe’s population, something extraordinary happened. For the first time in recorded Western history, the labor base became scarce enough to shift the balance of power.

Serfs,once bound to the land, once utterly dependent on their lords, found themselves in a world where their work was suddenly worth more. Entire villages had been emptied. Crops rotted in fields. There were not enough hands to tend to them, nor enough backs to carry the burden of the elite’s expectations.

Wages began to rise. Mobility increased. A landowner who abused or underpaid might find no one to work his fields. In some places, laborers left in droves, seeking better terms elsewhere. Others demanded fairer treatment or revolted outright.

And the ruling classes, those who had grown fat and entitled under the system of inherited dominance, panicked.

New laws were passed to fix wages, criminalize movement, and bind peasants back to the land. In England, the Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels and punish anyone who refused to work for them. But it was too late. The myth of divine right had cracked. The illusion of control had been shaken. The labor force had glimpsed its own power.

For the first time, the system faltered not because of invasion or rebellion, but because the base of the pyramid, the people, was no longer guaranteed. The elites had always treated labor as endless and expendable. When it suddenly wasn’t, they were terrified.

What followed were peasant revolts, riots, and localized uprisings across Europe. The feudal order tried to reassert itself, but the tide had shifted. And though it would take centuries for those shifts to ripple forward into modern revolutions, the truth remained planted in the soil:

Those at the bottom had power, and they had always outnumbered those at the top.

Before Europe ever built feudalism, these systems of labor exploitation and stratified rule had already flourished, and calcified, in earlier civilizations:

In Mesopotamia, kings ruled by divine favor and demanded taxes in grain and labor. Enslaved people worked alongside tenant farmers to feed ziggurat temples and palaces.
In Egypt, the Pharaoh was not only king but god incarnate, justified in controlling labor, law, and death itself.
In the Shang Dynasty, power rested on the control of bronze, land, and ancestors—tied through a religious-political elite.
In India, the varna and caste systems divided people by spiritual worth and labor role, enshrining hereditary hierarchy.
In the Americas, Aztec, Incan, and Mayan societies had rigid class systems and temple economies. Tribute, sacrifice, and labor were tied to cosmology.

Across cultures, labor was not freely given. It was extracted. And when scarcity came, whether through war, drought, or plague, resistance followed.

History remembers the European peasant revolts because they fed into the modern Western world, but the pattern is global. Wherever labor was exploited, the people eventually rose. The question was never if. Only when.

This cycle has repeated across continents and millennia. But repetition is not fate. People have always resisted. They still do. And each resistance leaves cracks in the foundation of empire. The fact that we can name these systems means we can choose to break them.

III. The Gospel of Obedience: Religion as Reinforcement

Religion has always been more than belief. It has been a tool, for explanation, for cohesion, and for control.

Long before Christianity wielded the cross as empire, sacred power was used to sanctify hierarchy:

In Mesopotamia, rulers claimed kingship descended from heaven.
In Egypt, Pharaoh was the god.
In Hindu society, caste became spiritual duty.
Among the Maya, priest-kings tracked eclipses and blood cycles to justify tribute.
Incan rulers traced descent to the sun.

In every place where empire rose, so too did the myth that suffering was sacred, and obedience was divine.

Christianity, when adopted by Rome and later shaped into state religion, inherited this machinery. It did not invent it.

To keep people in place, you must give them a reason to stay. Religion became the balm and the brand. The message was simple: do not fight for this world. Endure. Suffer. Give your labor to Caesar and your soul to God.

In Christianity, obedience became holiness. The meek inherited promises, not land. Turning the other cheek became law. Poverty became virtue. Wealth became favor. And rebellion became sin.

The Church did not only preach these things, it enforced them. With swords. With fire. With inquisitions. The Knights Templar, the Crusaders, the witch trials, the inquisitors: all tools of empire dressed in sacred cloth. Heresy became a crime against God and crown. And it worked. For a time.

IV. America: The Inheritance of Empire

When Europeans arrived in the New World, they did not come to build something new. They came to extend what already was. Spain sought gold. England sent laborers, indentured to companies, such as the East India Company. The myth of the Pilgrims hides the truth: they were not just fleeing persecution. They were a bound workforce, indebted and tasked with producing wealth to repay their passage.

The land was not empty. It was taken. Natives were enslaved, displaced, slaughtered. Genocide masked as destiny. The theft was sanctified by the same story: chosen people, divine mission, rightful rule.

America was not a break from empire. It was its evolution.

V. Exploiting the Body, the Land, the Spirit

The Constitution enshrined freedom for the few and silence for the rest. Slavery was preserved. Voting was limited. Wealth equaled voice.

Labor continued to be extracted at every level:

African bodies enslaved for cotton and sugar
Irish and Italian immigrants worked to death in northern factories
Chinese workers built the railroads, then were excluded by law
Black Americans, post-emancipation, were chained again by sharecropping, convict leasing, and Jim Crow
Japanese Americans were imprisoned, their land seized during war hysteria
Native children were stolen, “civilized,” erased

Even today, America’s fields are worked by immigrant hands, many undocumented, many exploited, all kept voiceless. The plantation never disappeared. It just rebranded.

When labor grows scarce, the system tightens. When workers demand dignity, they are vilified. And when birthrates fall, the cry goes up, not for compassion, but for control. More white children, say the architects of empire. More obedient workers. Greater control of the womb to give us more bodies to feed the machine.

VI. The Myth That Binds: The Dream and the Cowboy

The greatest trick the empire ever pulled was convincing you that one day, you could own it.

In the 1950s, the American Dream reached its peak: work hard, obey, marry well, and you might climb out of the working class. The dream was never real for everyone. Black veterans were denied GI Bill benefits. Indigenous families were stripped of land. Women were forced back into domestic silence. Immigrants were invited in to work, but never to belong.

And yet, the story stuck. Because it gave people hope. Because it made exploitation feel like virtue.

Paired with this was the cowboy myth, the rugged individualist, the self-made man. Community became weakness. Unionization became suspect. Needing help was shameful.

You were taught to struggle alone. To blame yourself. To see your neighbor as competition, not ally.

This is not freedom. It is indoctrination.

VII. A Glimpse Beyond the Lie

Not all societies are the same. Some, like the Nordic democracies, offer more. Healthcare. Education. Security. These nations are not free of hierarchy, or systems but they redistribute power more equitably. They prove that exploitation is not necessary. That people thrive when they are seen, valued, supported.

This terrifies those who rely on scarcity. Because once you realize the system can be better, the question becomes: why isn’t it?

The truth is simple. The people have never feared work. They have feared being worked to death and discarded.

VIII. Dreaming the Future Forward

In our stories, our myths, our shows and books and films, we see the future we long for. The Federation in Star Trek. A world where labor is chosen, not coerced. Where purpose matters more than profit. Where education is universal, and no one is hungry. There is still order, still leadership but it is not built on suffering. It is built on belonging.

These stories are not childish fantasies. They are blueprints. They are hope made visible.

We do not dream of empires. We dream of wholeness.

IX. The Seed and the Choice

So let us circle back.

The seeds of the Great American Experiment’s demise were sown long before this country was ever discovered. They were planted in the early stratification of agrarian cultures, and carried forward for thousands of years. What we see today is not a new failure. It is the old foundation cracking under its own weight.

And while it may seem too big to tackle, remember this:

We made this. Which means we can unmake it.

We are strong enough. We are intelligent enough. We are creative enough to imagine and build something new.

So I ask you, not as a citizen, but as a co-creator of whatever comes next:

What kind of world will you choose to build?

The Seeds of Empire: On the Demise of the Great American Experiment