by theluckycountry » Mon 23 May 2022, 03:10:55
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'W')hen the Western Roman Empire collapsed it was not an overnight event. It was much more a case of people who were alive at the fall of Rome the city looking around and saying "Things are bad now, but they are sure to get better soon". This became a cultural meme and the following generations continued to look back at the "Glory that was Rome" and expect someone higher up the elite chain to be working on returning to that past glory.
Precisely, though I would call that lead up to ultimate collapse, the Decline, as in the Decline and Fall, as Gibbons declared it in his seminal work. Others, like Marc Widdowson, have similarly divided the collapse of empires into these two stages. Widdowson's research showed than an empire takes on average 200 years to decline, but the ultimate collapse happens very quickly, in about 10 years. This he defines as a culture transitioning from a functioning government to no government at all, total anarchy essentially.
If we look around we see that 90% or more of the population slavishly rely on government to protect them, feed them, keep order, these people have no concept of life without a structured political system and when I goes, and they are left to their own resources, I imagine many just give up and die, probably of starvation. To me the collapse of the Western Christian Empire, which is a discussion in itself, has been going on for quite some time, 100 years or longer perhaps? Very similar to the decline of Rome, that although it was still functioning and even conquering new territories, was in a moral and economic decline where all the wealth was flowing to the top and the masses were getting poorer. The actual culture itself, the agrarian based "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" was turning into something very perverse.
No it seems to me that when these final collapses occur there is simply no will to restart the empire and whoever survives goes their own separate way to build a more simplistic life, one full of freedom. Very easy to envisage when you are young I imagine, but for a group of old men and women like the inhabitants of peakoil.com, an impossibility. That's why older people today simply won't countenance the idea that the whole system could fail. It a death warrant to them.
There are no wheelie-walkers in the apocalypse.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', ' ')This habit of thought was after a few hundred years taken up by Charlemagne (aka Charles the Magnificent) who actually succeeded in the broad sense of uniting France, Italy and what came to be called the Holy Roman Empire.
Yes, a real achievement. It never fails to amaze me what can be done by a single man once he gets a few devout followers and then the masses behind him. But that was a different land, different people, not Romans, a different empire altogether. It's not uncommon for new empires to take from the achievements of older ones. When people bitch on about religion and how nothing good ever came of it I remind them that our courts and the laws that protect us in the West, trace a path back to Christianity and the law of the old testament.
Fascinating topic Empires.
