When an organism is facing internal collapse, the process can be studied in detailed level by looking at its internal parts. During a time when the Western economy is trying to bail itself out of debt, and the provocative powers in the East are uniting to become the next world dominators, smaller countries like Iceland suddenly display the death throes of a decaying system:

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country's three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.

Like many his age, Tomasson has only a vague memory of harder times, before the boom that brought Iceland the highest per capita wealth in the world. Older islanders call them the 'Krutt-kynslotin' - the cuddly generation. Eco-aware, earnest but pampered, they drift from organic café to bar, listening to the music of Björk and Sigur Rós, islanders who have made it big abroad. 'They will have to get their hands dirty now,' says chef Siggi Hall, Iceland's answer to Gordon Ramsay, with an effusive vocabulary to match.

'That's good though, they are the I-generation; iPods, iPhones, everything starts with I. Well, we will have to go back to the basics now. Icelanders are risk-takers, but hard working, they will have to downsize. We will have to eat haddock and Icelandic lamb and forget these imports of goose livers and Japanese soy sauce. When everyone was extremely rich in Iceland - you know, last month, it was with money that they never have earned. Now those who were extremely rich are just normally rich, but they think they are poor. They were spoilt, spending billions.'

Tomasson responds like most people from the older generations would do in his situation: by reducing dependencies on material welfare, we force people to live more individually and creatively. Welfare gave us a safe, comfortable and slick lifestyle, but it also killed our spirit, increased the number of parasites, and gave us the illusion that we as individuals are more important than the system as a whole. Individualism only "works" when there's an external force supporting people. This is why primitive tribes are hardcore collectivists: they know reality by hand and have already gained the wisdom that if you don't work together, you either starve or get eaten by wild animals.

Modern society thought it could build a wall around its citizens to fend off all dangers threatening their well-being. What it failed to comprehend is that when we lack external challenges in our lives, we become our own enemies by constructing internal dangers. Instead of wild animals we grow socially aggressive and exploit each other for the sake of self-interest. The entropic process Iceland is currently facing is a concentration of the problems the Western civilization has fought against the last 100 years or so. Correctly, Tomasson reacts by explaining how the process works like pure natural selection: the end of the credit boom means high-risk businesses lose their status, iPoders lose their importance, and the common people have to fight for things they previously took for granted, like food. The party's over.

[T]he point of great wealth is the ability to immunize oneself against the bacterial realities of the rest of the world.

Material welfare as the only goal in life shields us from the naked reality we are still, and always have been, dependent upon. Besides corrupting leaders to only focus on immediate self-reward (Wall Streeters, anyone?!), it breeds illusory crowd populism among the broad layers of society. Suddenly, the peasants believe they are kings:

SO WHAT, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.

Empowered by Web 2.0 technology, we can all become citizen journalists, citizen videographers, citizen musicians. Empowered by this technology, we will be able to write in the morning, direct movies in the afternoon, and make music in the evening.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

The welfare religion, replacing traditional hierarchies and functions within society, becomes the Me-cult, consisting of Nobodies who suddenly see an opportunity to become Somebodies. Their voices drown out logic and rationality with social slogans and emotions. Enter any blog from the list of millions of self-proclaimed writers--the repetition of media hype, emotion and populism is enough to make us back off from the Web 2.0 religion, which really is nothing other than an online manifestation of the collapse of leadership in the West. Just like in Iceland, the People resent their corrupt leaders and argue that they'll take the power in their own hands, effectively dooming themselves to failure even faster than any nutty dictator could ever hope for. The bail out-bloviation in America fits into the same scheme.

So Iceland indicates a decaying empire. Is that it? Far from it. Any time a super power secludes from its former place, a new power is quick to fill the void. We live in a world of constant struggle, both on an individual and world political level, and if you think the West is leaving its grand position in world peace, think again:

Near-bankrupt Iceland's €4bn ($5.43bn) loan from Russia is still not a done deal. Iceland's central bank Governor David Oddsson says that talks are still "ongoing" but that any aid from Russia would be "very much welcomed."

But what price will the Russians demand for their bailout? A highly-placed source in Reykjavik tells Coffee House that Iceland might look kindly on requests from Russia's military to use America's former military base in Iceland. America closed its Naval Air Station at Keflavik Airport two years ago, handing back the Nato facility to the Icelandic government.

Now the word in Reykjavik is that the Russians could have use of it in return for the loan. Not that Keflavik would become a Russian air base -- Iceland is a member of Nato, so that is out of the question -- but it would suit the Kremlin to be able to use it for, say, refuelling and maintenance. Having use of such a facility only a few hours flying time from North America would be a major Russian propaganda coup and cause consternation in Washington.

Analogy: when the piranhas enter dry season and the food gets scarce, they eventually start turning against each other. Any piranha showing a sign of weakness when swimming in the low-level waters, will immediately be attacked and eaten by its former friends. This is the brutal way of nature to weed out unfit patterns and reward fit patterns (natural selection). You see the same behavior among human beings; bullying is nothing other than socially dominant people attacking whom they see as physically weak or socially vulnerable. Nations also work the same way. The West is dying, not from global warming, terrorism or bird flues, but from internal dissolution. Internal dangers kill us off much faster, for while external threats often are obvious ("There's a tiger, kill him!"), internal dangers often go unnoticed but slowly make us weak and finally expose us to tiny challenges that may lead to death (think of HIV and how it eventually develops into cancer--when you've gone that far, any tiny little infection will make you tremble).

We're now learning from these mistakes. If we're fast enough to correct them, no one can say, but one thing is certain: if we don't change course immediately and fix our internal problems, we'll continue to fight external evils, thinking we've got it all under control, while our home is burning down to the ground. When the war on external terror is over, we will have nowhere to go. Iceland is the part of the Western organism that should send off a civilization-wide alarm that something is fundamentally wrong, not necessarily with the outside world, but first and foremost with us and the way we live. If we can recognize that, we've won half the strength to overcome our own weaknesses and yet again grow strong to face the future challenges ahead of us. We've done it before, and we can do it again. Life is joyful war--go for it!