That's a great point. Creating infrastructure is relatively easy when times are good, but it creates an expense. As the collapse progresses, those costs tend to grow with regards to the available resources, thus start to become unbearable.
My personal favorite is to look at the original values that were used to build the empire. If those values degrade and are not sufficiently replaced/reinforced, this is a sure sign your empire is in decline.
It need not be theoretical connections to the ancient past. Consider a people who's beliefs get further and further from reality and who's society can't manage to maintain, let alone build, what it used to like roads and bridges. Such a place is in deep trouble almost by definition. And even more oddly, not due to lead pipes or barbarians but purely from social-political causes.
And if we're talking about the US, the world will continue on with it as a 3rd tier power just as it did outside of Rome. Either the Europeans will get their act together or China will dominate with a capital centered dictatorship as the standard.
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
>What it could not survive was the cutting of its grain supply, and the end of the administrative apparatus that ensured its regular delivery.
one of the most recent examples - USSR - the low oil prices of the 198x coupled with the peak cold in the 80 years cycle meant that the resulting low agricultural yield couldn't be supplanted by the required massive import of food, so that time the Russian Empire (USSR) cracked. 80 years before that the Russian Empire had revolution of 1905-06, and while that revolution failed it resulted in a lot of deep changes to the country, in particular agrarian reforms (including introducing peasants' private property on agrarian lands) and huge expansion of Russian agriculture into Siberian regions.
So, i think that one can estimate the probability of "How do you know if you’re living through the death of a specific government instance/structure/order." by looking at the basic Maslow layers - food and security. This is for example why China Communist Party is hell bent on delivering growth and prosperity and stomping out hard measure style any threats to stability, be it coronavirus or dissidents.
That is twisted I faced everyday these days. Instead of horror of china it is implicit a praise that it can maintain its control of the empire and suppress the virus etc. It is the very problem of suppression that give the problem of spreading. If there is a freedom of speech ... or it is Italy so we can get the message (by having people on the ground instead of no western / free media).
But instead of this China control, not just internal but also WHO. It not just kill its people which like cultural revolution and big leap forward, it killed outside. It even tried to blame the very country which has the index patient who fly out from wuhan the day before it was shut down. And that is great and ok. We should only talk about the collapse of past empire.
Let us accept even though I am not, what value it brings. Should we still do a few last stand.
yeah, or maybe there's more to a nation than some grade-school notion of "genetics". Russians have a shared language, cultural and religious traditions.
What does genetic similarity have to do with unity? This is the "race" farce packaged into a new and exciting flavour of wrongness, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.
The thesis of the piece is captured in this passage:
> The pull of the past is strong. The mental frameworks through which we understand the world are durable, far more so than its actual fabric. The new falls into the old, square pegs into round holes no matter how poor the fit, simply because the round holes are what we have available.
The point is that you may not notice your empire is dying all around you because it happens gradually and your mental framework for thinking about the world is less dynamic than the world itself. (Consider: how many tech people still think in terms of the 'open web' in contrast to walled gardens, when the web today is basically one browser engine accessing one or two CDNs fronting one of three cloud hosting providers)
The rest of the article is supporting evidence, using the historical example of Rome and drawing parallels with the United States.
It would help if you could substantiate what you are trying to say, particularly if that substantiation was somehow building on to the foundation that the post you respond to has laid.
Trump referred herein as a bullshit artist is certainly a problem in his own. However, the OP is right arguing he's but a convenient and simple example of the subtler, slower moving problems. Of the three Federal branches, Congress confers distinction as that branch with the smallest reputation of institutional credibility. On any of the largest issues,
- campaign finance reform
- self dealing
- gun control
- taxation policies
- fiscal control
- immigration policy
- increasing deferral to the Executive branch on war powers
- health care cost inflation
- partial rollback of Glass-Stiegel act
- outsized influence of lobbyists
the underlying theme is willful and actual helplessness.
The dominant political parties increasingly represented corporations and the upper one percent whether it was the Hollywood A-class or gecko like corporations for profit.
Why? Corporations have lobby money and it's easier to interact with fewer corporate contacts that tens of millions of dispersed Americans who lack a single contact point -- even though a House or Senate member has precisely that job.
Trump/Bannon saw their opportunity and took it.
Congress has no agency in the here and now. Politicians have succumbed to the outsized problem space increased by inaction in what has become an all too familiar trajectory:
- they try to position themselves as DC outsiders aligned with hardworking Americans and kitchen table issues whether by portraying us as spinless over anxious, over worked victims or heroic proletariat suckers who still manage the good fight
- They talk about what they will do in the always perpetual future
Once the campaign is over the realities of institutional incompetence cast a shadow so large it crushes pragmatic action.
And thus we become more disalusioned with Congress. In frustration and anger a sufficient number of people went Trump.
To use and abuse the Plato analogy, too much cheap symbolism of emotional issues has dominated our conversation about the shadows on the cave wall. We need but turn around and walk the 10 feet out of the cave entrance and do the practical things like clearing up our home camp. Yes, smart doing requires smart thinking -- the two are permanently entangled in the other -- so ideas matter. Dispositioning the shadows matters. But the Federal US government was never intended to be bully pulpit for the Christian right or inveigh on it. That's a problem for a father, mother, son, and daughter. The US government is about a human justice; it's about fighting structural and monied power that violate individual liberty.
Right now our cherished ideals are like the crushed and broken stained glass shards on the ground. So be it. Let's start the work of reassembling them an make anew meaning.
"Every state and society faces serious challenges. The difference lies in whether the underlying structures are healthy enough to effectively respond to those challenges. Successful states and societies are resilient when faced with even serious challenges. Falling empires are not."
"All empires think they’re special, but all empires eventually come to an end. The United States won’t be an exception.
The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial philanderer and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative. But it’s far more likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of sweetheart deals for the ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies. And that’s to say nothing of the decades of pointless, self-perpetuating, and almost undiscussed imperial wars that produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and treasure, and a great deal of justified ill will."
Thanks for distilling that down. I didn't read the article. I agree that the current POTUS is more a symptom than a cause.
I suspect that empires, much like organisms, are born, grow, mature and eventually succumb to senescence. Part of this is developing wealth and then spending more and more of the society's output to defend it from threats, real or imagined. It seems like at some point the defense becomes an end in itself and drains resources from things like keeping up infrastructure and taking care of citizens.
Business entities such as large corporations seem to see a similar life cycle, though defense is not what drains them. I suspect it is more related to layers of management.
dunno, I kinda think that the right actions at the right time can [could have] make a huge difference. I think that if the rest of the country shut down the way CA and NY did... we'd have a real chance at this thing being a month-long crisis. (Of course, the real test here is how bad it ends up getting in CA; California shut down earlier in it's spread than NY. If I'm right, that means the peak won't be as bad here... but that is yet to be seen.)
I also think the cuts to the county health department are... normally mitigated by an ample federal response.
What makes you think this could ever be a one month thing? A Belgian hospital did an experiment and tested everyone coming in with no COVID-19 symptoms (broken legs etc.). They found 8% of those were carrying and spreading the virus and were completely unaware of it.
Why are people praising NY when the city is totally fucked and they've already run out of beds? Chicago seems to be doing better than SF, LA, or NYC right now...
Feeling entitled to maintain a parasitic wealth siphoning system so destrctive to a society supposedly justified by a vague 'trickle down' pinky promise that eventually has sucked out so much that you can't but give away some crumbs to let the people literally survive because none were 'trickeling' down from your silver spooned buffets?
UBI is the Hail Mary of neoliberale market capitalism. Anything to keep the pointless consumption fueled 'growth' monster from keeling over.
The 'ultmate' entitlements can be found in the 'private' sector, where 'institutions too big to fail' can keep gambling and reap enormous profits, and the moment the odds turn feel entitled to not ask but demand bailouts by the public they have been fleecing all along, where 'entrepreneurs' feel not just entitled but expect adoration when their planet destroying externality dumping schemes 'make a profit' or even just get to suck at the tit of the VC ponzi scheme.
Do you think there's a correlation between the top comment, about erosion of values and the entitlements you refer to?
"My personal favorite is to look at the original values that were used to build the empire. If those values degrade and are not sufficiently replaced/reinforced, this is a sure sign your empire is in decline"
It simplifies it, all empires are build on hard work rewarded proportionally.
Something else struck me the other day..
Imagine a bar chart with the essential services on the left and entertainment on the right. We all know that the work needed to keep society going isn't paid so well. We also know that profit is huge in things no one needs. The new thing I noticed is that it works like that over the entire spectrum. The more we need something the smaller the investments. New hip things (that we've always done without) are flooded with money. Amazon is hip, the postal service is not.
I think it works like this: After a hard reset society rebuilds from scratch. At this point the market is interested in stuff people need. We want that hip new broomstick and we want it now. Eventually the sector stabilizes. Broomsticks continue to be made but the excitement is over. Margins go down and the market moves its attention to the right of the bar chart. Meanwhile the essential industries become more and more efficient but less and less resilient.
You could still call it "the original values of the empire" but I believe this public attention or market focus to be a more granular perspective.
Entitlements could extend the chart beyond producing stuff no one needs. (at least they are still making something even if it is just video games)
Since attention is something that can be controlled it becomes a puzzle that can be solved. We could plant enormous food-forests. They take 80 years to fully mature but I'm sure we can invent some futures market and some subsidies to make it into a truly hip thing.
If the USA goes then it all goes, i.e. Western Civilization. We will collapse into another Dark Age.
Rand identified the cause plus the solution and argued for it for 50 years before she died. The cause is epistemology or the branch of Philosophy that studies "How Do You Know...". The status & respect for reason has been under assault by bad philosophers for 200 years now and this is the culmination.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. A large open internet forum isn't able to host a deep discussion about such questions. It inevitably devolves into repeating the same predictable things, and predictable things are tedious and therefore off-topic here.
If you really want to go into something like this, a better medium would be to write a book. Alternatively, write a journal article, or a letter to the editor of a journal. Those messages are long enough, and infrequent enough, to support conversations which are more than just shallow repetitions of what has been said before. They're also filtered in ways that, while they no doubt exclude outliers of originality, also exclude dreck. The open internet doesn't have that, so quantity dominates quality.
The problem with this is that evidence suggests that Rand was a meatbag. Indeed, evidence suggests that all humans are meatbags, without exception, and further, that humans have been meatbags for at least several centuries. Rand's philosophical criticism cannot get off the ground unless humans are ensouled, inspired, or otherwise special compared to other animals.
“ Let’s say you were a woman born in a thriving market town in Roman Britain in the year 360. If you survived to age 60, that market town would no longer exist, along with every other urban settlement of any significant size. You lived in a small village instead of a genuine town. You had grown up using money, but now you bartered—grain for metalwork, beer for pottery, hides for fodder. You no longer saw the once-ubiquitous Roman army or the battalions of officials who administered the Roman state. Increasing numbers of migrants from the North Sea coast of continental Europe—pagans who didn’t speak a word of Latin or the local British language, certainly not wage-earning servants of the Roman state—were already in the process of transforming lowland Britain into England. That 60-year-old woman had been born into a place as fundamentally Roman as anywhere in the Empire. She died in a place that was barely recognizable.” very striking.
Should we all speak communist chinese? I am afraid you all might, just like us forced to now. Good luck. You need it.
Infrastructure decays slowly, but costs a lot to fix. It's generally the first thing that gets sacrificed when things get tough.
"Surely that bridge will last another ten years, so let's put off renovating it it till we have to."
"We don't have the money now to fix that bridge with the weak beams. We'll wait till we get some extra cash and then fix it properly."
"Never mind, we can work around that bridge that's collapsed. We'll just use that smaller bridge over there."