When on top of a mountain, you don't think straight. That's what makes climbing Mount Everest so hazardous. The depletion of oxygen impairs you to the point where climbers have been known to strip off their clothes or take a little walk off a 700-foot ledge.
"[It] is imperative to remember that lucid thought is all but impossible at 29,000 feet," writes Jon Krakauer when trying to explain the deaths of fellow climbers in a disastrous 1996 expedition. It took him months to piece together what exactly happened.
Lucid thought escapes us at the highest peaks. I can't help but draw a parallel to the state of American politics. When trade wars and nuclear annihilation could at any time be triggered by a Tweet, there's cause for concern. Something tells us they've been on top of the world for a little too long. The canisters of oxygen are running out.
Sure, it's easy to point a self-righteous finger at our neighbours to the south, dissecting every misstep they make. But my point is not to ridicule – it's more out of self-preservation. If they go down, we all go down; in today's interconnected world, we're all tied to the same rope.
Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air, reveals another interesting aspect of mountain climbing: the majority of deaths happen on the way down. Making it to the top of a mountain is often the easy part. During the descent, fatigue sets in and one tends to become careless. Mountaineers, a stubborn bunch, are easily blinded by a desire to reach the top. Only the most disciplined climbers understand their limits, resisting the temptation to summit when so close.
"Hubris probably had something to do with it," writes Krakauer about his team's guide, Rob Hall. "[He] had become so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down Everest that he got a little cocky." So cocky that he attempted to summit two hours after the appropriate turnaround time. They got caught up in a late storm that killed him and seven others.
The U.S. has been on top of the world for quite some time, but its descent, like any world power, is inevitable. It's already rivalled by China in pure economic terms. But how it descends is largely within its control. The Netherlands was once a superpower too, but is now a pleasant little nation with tulips. Nazi Germany on the other hand...
One can point to any number of foolish decisions made in the last couple decades that signal delusion: the invasion of Iraq, the financial market crash of 2008, the election of Hillary Clinton... er, I mean, Donald Trump.
But it's more than just the current president, although he is a big part of it. There seems to be a recklessness that pervades the nation. Take their lack of fiscal discipline, as an example. In a time of economic expansion, tax cuts and spending increases will balloon their annual deficit to over $1 trillion by 2020, higher than in 2009 when they were warding off the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Almost all developed nations, while still battling deficits, have a plan to bring their budgets in line. The U.S. does not. It's on a path to obscene credit card debt, where interest payments will soon be greater than their enormous military budget.
Canada has its own issues, growing debt being one of them. But in the grand scheme of things, we are but followers. Naïvely, we laugh at our team guide – the one we paid all our savings to bring us to new heights – as he stumbles over himself in a drunken-like stupor.
Only the ones who've been there before, the Sherpas of the world like Germany, know better. And they have fear in their eyes. They understand that while mountain climbers may be extraordinary in their courage and abilities, they have one glaring weakness.
They tend to believe they're immortal.
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