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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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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.