Empires are very much like grand stories. In a sense, when you look into it, the end is written in the beginning. Total victory leads to prosperity and comfort and to the height of an empire, but this very situation paves the way for decadence.
Is there something that can be done to prevent this? I don't think so. A good solution would perhaps be a mandate of heaven much like the chinese empire as it would hasten the destruction of the old and decadent in order to give birth to something new. Here again we see the pattern of life & death, birth and rebirth.
Of course our modern situation brings great suffering because technology acts as a amplifier. We have to tolerate abject insults against nature and all things healthy, beautiful and noble because of that, but in the end the pattern is the same.
The parallels between then and now are uncanny. For me personally the 3 greatest issues we are experiencing in this late stage empire decline are social disenegration, resource scarcity (a result of overreliance on outsourcing our manufacturing) and military overextension which drains our resources at home and creates more enemies.
As the old saying goes, "buckle up because it's about to get bumpy".
Thanks again for the great article and the historical relevance of how Rome's decline matches our own.
Thanks Wheel, I agree those are big issues, there's also extreme currency debasement, intentional domestic population replacement, and an entrenched elite overclass that hates the population it rules over...
There is a silver lining because materialism and religiousness have a strong inverse correlation, so I think there will be a big increase in belief in the years to come in whatever form it takes. Ryan Burge argues that religious disbelief has already capped out: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-nones-have-hit-a-ceiling
Excellent! Have to admit I grind my teeth a little when confronted by opinions on this platform and elsewhere that we can turn our ship around, turn the clock back to normalcy, with the next candidate, the next election, etc. God only knows, but I consider that extremely far fetched. I feel the only remedy is extreme hardship. People need to sober up and learn what it means to be grateful, to remember the concept of having "enough". Not a stance that makes me many friends.
Thanks Prodigal, your comment is very true and accurate. It's going to get much worse (materially) before it gets better (spiritually) and to re-arrange one's life in light of that -- to live beneath one's means, to find an element of religion and community, to turn away from mass propaganda -- is really important...
As said above, Rome depended on a hostile outside force so they could ignore their own contradictions. Promising soldiers land, which usually came from conquered territory, was the only way they were able to last so long. Eventually you have to redistribute wealth from the predatory oligarchy. As mentioned above, that's why the Gracchi Brothers were killed.
Hi samoan, yes, exactly. Even though the Gracchi brothers died, there was a push for land reform, but ultimately the small farmer was pushed out anyway and the wealthy landed class absorbed their holdings. We have seen the same thing happen to the small farmer in the modern era...
A growing population of immigrants and slaves enabled the elite to ignore the farmers’ troubles. Many thinkers from the Greeks onward believe that the state must be kept at 10k to keep the neighbors invested in each other’s welfare. Professionalization of the militia into the army and police enabled the rich to disdain their poorer neighbors. But if the security of their person and property depended on their neighbors, they will behave better. That’s why small towns in the Old West tends to be more communal-spirited than big modern cities. Without airplanes or highways and the threat of Indians ever presented, everyone were both tougher, stronger, and more civil-spirited. Maybe a rule requiring the state to divide itself, (like mother cell into daughter cells) once it reached the cutoff mark of a million, might go some way to create solidarity.
The corruption of Jugurtha's time certainly led to the transition from republic to empire, but it was a long, long way from collapsing the empire or the civilization, which was still centuries away. So it is in this sense I kind of balk at "corruption = collapse" narratives. If there's an AINO comparison to be made, I'm afraid it might be that we are about to enter our own imperial phase more openly, without many more attempts to press on the fig leaf of "democracy." What with the coming CBDC and all.
While it's true that our "elites" are getting less elite, and less capable of ruling, simultaneously our people are also becoming more docile, infantilized, and easier to rule. (Plandemic as evidence). So those two dynamics kind of balance out.
Hi Martin, yes, I agree with you. I don't really see signs of a collapse; it's more of a managed transition to a neo-feudalism where there is/will be a small number of ultra wealthy and everyone else living in deep poverty, with the middle class disappeared. One could look at the Trump phenomenon as a failed populist revolt against this process; if Trump had succeeded as the "God Emperor" to transition from oligarchy to dictatorship, perhaps it could have significantly extended a more traditional ideal of what America stood for. That seems to be out the door at this point...
See Machiavelli’s theory of two humors, symbolizing the Great and the Plebs in John P. McCormick‘s Machiavellian Democracy. The elite tends to be spirited and willing to dominate while the plebs tends to be lawful and desiring to be not dominated. The plebe’s lawful attitude made them ideal as the Guard of Liberty, but they need both legal institutions to give them a voice and military training as the legions to give them the confidence and discipline to challenge the elite. Tribunate give them an independent leadership to speak for them.
The scenario depicted here is a perfect lesson behind why the abrahamic religions are structured in a fashion to advance moral relativism and oppression of the lay folk. Their embryonic state was made manifest in the crucible of an order utterly given order to the lowest, most primal drives-Rome.
The continued abrahamic obsession with temporal power, and bestial impulses is illustrated rather nakedly in modern abrahamic pedophilia , Christian "prosperity" speak, Judaic justification for genocide, Islamic lust for conversion conquest, amongst others.
I can't help but notice a clear ignorance, then and now of any spiritual understanding, a bleak landscape of confusion between the higher and the lower, a crass conflation of primitive pomp and pageantry with notions of divine sanction, and behind it all an unsettling madness from an inability to comprehend the cost of this behavior.
Rome layed the foundation for the crazed march of abrahamism.
Thanks Mike, yes, the exoteric, left-brain, hylic masses and their organized structures have always dominated the individualized, decentralized esoteric traditions. Perhaps things will change in the Age of Aquarius, but that's how it's always been since at least the advent of agriculture and human settlement ten thousand years ago...
I tend to think that complex, hierarchal civilization require some kind of pact, an understood decree to always return energy into the system. Yes, I know, there zero chance of this ever occuring, but isn't that really the primary factor of societal decline? When the subtractions overwhelm the additions.
Included here is an odd factor in this human existence, that development, improvement is both fleeting and ephemeral... conversely dilapidation, decay are very real, ever present, like rust always active.
What most consider improvement is, to my mind, mostly complexity. Adding complexity makes a society of primeval souls further enamoured with its own reflection, convinced to an even deeper level that its beliefs are divinely ordained, yet in that complexity is forever the seed that bring the entire opera to a close.
However, in contrast there can never be an organized anything to control the latent requirement towards, for lack of a better word, spirit. At best, organization can provide a home for the requirement, but this as rare is it is fleeting. For one, no organization can resist its own ability to control, for all that long.
Yet the spark passes, in the most surprising and perhaps existential ways, even as the civilization mobilizes all its forces to stop it again and again. And so the requirement is reborn, even as the civilization strangles and starves itself in a maniacal drive to stamp it out.
So now the Vatican is ready to lump your life, and mine into a footnote for their latest doctrine release. Dead awaereness. The blind groping for power. A society with no new tools, caught in a false image of the past, and a burning urge to spread the delusion.
Empires are very much like grand stories. In a sense, when you look into it, the end is written in the beginning. Total victory leads to prosperity and comfort and to the height of an empire, but this very situation paves the way for decadence.
Is there something that can be done to prevent this? I don't think so. A good solution would perhaps be a mandate of heaven much like the chinese empire as it would hasten the destruction of the old and decadent in order to give birth to something new. Here again we see the pattern of life & death, birth and rebirth.
Of course our modern situation brings great suffering because technology acts as a amplifier. We have to tolerate abject insults against nature and all things healthy, beautiful and noble because of that, but in the end the pattern is the same.
The parallels between then and now are uncanny. For me personally the 3 greatest issues we are experiencing in this late stage empire decline are social disenegration, resource scarcity (a result of overreliance on outsourcing our manufacturing) and military overextension which drains our resources at home and creates more enemies.
As the old saying goes, "buckle up because it's about to get bumpy".
Thanks again for the great article and the historical relevance of how Rome's decline matches our own.
Thanks Wheel, I agree those are big issues, there's also extreme currency debasement, intentional domestic population replacement, and an entrenched elite overclass that hates the population it rules over...
There is a silver lining because materialism and religiousness have a strong inverse correlation, so I think there will be a big increase in belief in the years to come in whatever form it takes. Ryan Burge argues that religious disbelief has already capped out: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-nones-have-hit-a-ceiling
Excellent! Have to admit I grind my teeth a little when confronted by opinions on this platform and elsewhere that we can turn our ship around, turn the clock back to normalcy, with the next candidate, the next election, etc. God only knows, but I consider that extremely far fetched. I feel the only remedy is extreme hardship. People need to sober up and learn what it means to be grateful, to remember the concept of having "enough". Not a stance that makes me many friends.
Thanks Prodigal, your comment is very true and accurate. It's going to get much worse (materially) before it gets better (spiritually) and to re-arrange one's life in light of that -- to live beneath one's means, to find an element of religion and community, to turn away from mass propaganda -- is really important...
As said above, Rome depended on a hostile outside force so they could ignore their own contradictions. Promising soldiers land, which usually came from conquered territory, was the only way they were able to last so long. Eventually you have to redistribute wealth from the predatory oligarchy. As mentioned above, that's why the Gracchi Brothers were killed.
Hi samoan, yes, exactly. Even though the Gracchi brothers died, there was a push for land reform, but ultimately the small farmer was pushed out anyway and the wealthy landed class absorbed their holdings. We have seen the same thing happen to the small farmer in the modern era...
A growing population of immigrants and slaves enabled the elite to ignore the farmers’ troubles. Many thinkers from the Greeks onward believe that the state must be kept at 10k to keep the neighbors invested in each other’s welfare. Professionalization of the militia into the army and police enabled the rich to disdain their poorer neighbors. But if the security of their person and property depended on their neighbors, they will behave better. That’s why small towns in the Old West tends to be more communal-spirited than big modern cities. Without airplanes or highways and the threat of Indians ever presented, everyone were both tougher, stronger, and more civil-spirited. Maybe a rule requiring the state to divide itself, (like mother cell into daughter cells) once it reached the cutoff mark of a million, might go some way to create solidarity.
The corruption of Jugurtha's time certainly led to the transition from republic to empire, but it was a long, long way from collapsing the empire or the civilization, which was still centuries away. So it is in this sense I kind of balk at "corruption = collapse" narratives. If there's an AINO comparison to be made, I'm afraid it might be that we are about to enter our own imperial phase more openly, without many more attempts to press on the fig leaf of "democracy." What with the coming CBDC and all.
While it's true that our "elites" are getting less elite, and less capable of ruling, simultaneously our people are also becoming more docile, infantilized, and easier to rule. (Plandemic as evidence). So those two dynamics kind of balance out.
Hi Martin, yes, I agree with you. I don't really see signs of a collapse; it's more of a managed transition to a neo-feudalism where there is/will be a small number of ultra wealthy and everyone else living in deep poverty, with the middle class disappeared. One could look at the Trump phenomenon as a failed populist revolt against this process; if Trump had succeeded as the "God Emperor" to transition from oligarchy to dictatorship, perhaps it could have significantly extended a more traditional ideal of what America stood for. That seems to be out the door at this point...
See Machiavelli’s theory of two humors, symbolizing the Great and the Plebs in John P. McCormick‘s Machiavellian Democracy. The elite tends to be spirited and willing to dominate while the plebs tends to be lawful and desiring to be not dominated. The plebe’s lawful attitude made them ideal as the Guard of Liberty, but they need both legal institutions to give them a voice and military training as the legions to give them the confidence and discipline to challenge the elite. Tribunate give them an independent leadership to speak for them.
The scenario depicted here is a perfect lesson behind why the abrahamic religions are structured in a fashion to advance moral relativism and oppression of the lay folk. Their embryonic state was made manifest in the crucible of an order utterly given order to the lowest, most primal drives-Rome.
The continued abrahamic obsession with temporal power, and bestial impulses is illustrated rather nakedly in modern abrahamic pedophilia , Christian "prosperity" speak, Judaic justification for genocide, Islamic lust for conversion conquest, amongst others.
I can't help but notice a clear ignorance, then and now of any spiritual understanding, a bleak landscape of confusion between the higher and the lower, a crass conflation of primitive pomp and pageantry with notions of divine sanction, and behind it all an unsettling madness from an inability to comprehend the cost of this behavior.
Rome layed the foundation for the crazed march of abrahamism.
Thanks guys.
Thanks Mike, yes, the exoteric, left-brain, hylic masses and their organized structures have always dominated the individualized, decentralized esoteric traditions. Perhaps things will change in the Age of Aquarius, but that's how it's always been since at least the advent of agriculture and human settlement ten thousand years ago...
Thanks NLF.
I tend to think that complex, hierarchal civilization require some kind of pact, an understood decree to always return energy into the system. Yes, I know, there zero chance of this ever occuring, but isn't that really the primary factor of societal decline? When the subtractions overwhelm the additions.
Included here is an odd factor in this human existence, that development, improvement is both fleeting and ephemeral... conversely dilapidation, decay are very real, ever present, like rust always active.
What most consider improvement is, to my mind, mostly complexity. Adding complexity makes a society of primeval souls further enamoured with its own reflection, convinced to an even deeper level that its beliefs are divinely ordained, yet in that complexity is forever the seed that bring the entire opera to a close.
However, in contrast there can never be an organized anything to control the latent requirement towards, for lack of a better word, spirit. At best, organization can provide a home for the requirement, but this as rare is it is fleeting. For one, no organization can resist its own ability to control, for all that long.
Yet the spark passes, in the most surprising and perhaps existential ways, even as the civilization mobilizes all its forces to stop it again and again. And so the requirement is reborn, even as the civilization strangles and starves itself in a maniacal drive to stamp it out.
So now the Vatican is ready to lump your life, and mine into a footnote for their latest doctrine release. Dead awaereness. The blind groping for power. A society with no new tools, caught in a false image of the past, and a burning urge to spread the delusion.