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Second Thought: Are We Living Through The End Of An Empire?
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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I remember learning about the end of Rome and seeing allegory there for stuff that was happening in the US in High School. Wondering if I'd live to see the end of the decline.
Edit: I'm in my later 30s
I really didn't think the empire would unravel this fast.
It really puts things into a sort of perspective, tbh. I don't think I'd have been able to believe the sheer imperial hubris, arrogance, and the nigh inability to change course or reform the rot within the system even in the slightest measure, if I weren't seeing it and living within it myself.
I'm an atheist, but it brings up a sort of biblical sense of awe, an almost predetermined end of empire as part of nature, and sweet, horrible, but entirely deserved and self-inflicted karmic retribution. I just hope the death spiral of the white supremacist brotherhood of nations can be managed and contained..
For sure, and it's really fascinating to see how there's a dialectic playing out in all this. The systemic pressures of the collapse drive behaviors which in turn feed back into the evolution of the system as a whole. There's a feedback cycle between the large and small scale driving the whole system towards an inexorable outcome.
Maany people no longer have any optimism towards the future, and that in turn results in them prioritizing short term goals over long term planning. This in turn creates further systemic problems which lead to even more people losing faith in the future. A great concrete example of this is the doom spending trend where people just max out their credit knowing that they're never going to be able to pay it off.
Yeah! The interplay of technology and history is specifically key here. Back in Roman times, they did not have means of instant communication and access to information. Because that is available today, word of events like the Palestine genocide spreads faster, groups of people shift their attitudes faster, and benefits of trade with countries like China are realized more quickly at a material level which also changes groups of people.
It could absolutely take literal ages - Rome split itself in two and persisted as the Byzantine empire until the 1400s. But with the technological factor here, I think it will indeed be a quicker descent at least to a point where America can no longer assert itself as an imperial force. And when I say technological factor, I don't mean just communication and information, but also including that socialist countries have historically advanced far more rapidly in terms of scientific/tech progress than capitalist ones (USSR, China), and socialist technology is certainly advancing at a far more rapid pace than technology did at the end of antiquity into medieval times.
I agree, the speed of communication and transportation definitely plays a role here. And economies of scale are now at unprecedented level as well. As we saw during the pandemic, the whole distribution system is incredibly fragile. Any disruptions in the supply chain have a potential to turn into economic disasters.
I distinctly remember asking this community when the US would collapse somewhere in early 2022, and we got a variety of answers. Your (and most peoples) response was somewhere along the line of "could be 10 years, could be 100." Which was adequate for the time.
Now I think we are all seeing this crumble far quicker than we expected and would revise our predictions to be closer to the former. This shit is falling, and I'm so here for it. I'm also scared
I also think that the 10 year timeline for a major crash is now starting to look highly probable, and it is a scary thing to live through without a question. I got to experience USSR collapse first hand, and that was pretty wild. I suspect that US collapse could be worse because US lacks a lot of social support structures that were present in USSR. A couple of specific things that could make US collapse worse are lack of public transit and the fact that a lot of people don't own their homes. The society is very divided as well, which could lead to a lot of violence as things continue to unravel. At this point I really don't know what to expect, but I can guarantee it's not going to be good.
I forgot about that, your living through the USSR dissolution! I'm glad you're okay, that was a very wild time.
Here we are, on the brink of experiencing a similar situation. It's not going to be good, you're right. But long term it could be a huge catalyst for the major liberation of the world
Indeed, I tend to remain optimistic on the whole. As bad as things are gonna get, at least there will be a path towards better things after. And the sooner the nightmare that is the US empire ends, the better off the whole world will be.
Ngl yogthos i thought you were like mid 20’s or something you’re old enough to remember the ussr collapsing!?!?!
I get jumpscared by people's ages over here sometimes, like you see someone shitposting then their next post is about their wife and kids going to the park.
Real lmao