
How do you know if you’re living through the death of an empire? - havella
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/03/how-do-you-know-if-youre-living-through-the-death-of-an-empire/
======
simonblack
The best pointer to collapse, in my opinion, is the state of the
infrastructure.

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."

~~~
rumanator
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.

~~~
sebazzz
You might call it technical debt.

------
lmilcin
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.

~~~
goto11
So if for example an empire is built on slavery, it will collapse if slavery
is abolished?

~~~
majewsky
Read your parent carefully.

> If those values degrade _and are not sufficiently replaced /reinforced_,
> this is a sure sign your empire is in decline.

So in your situation, the empire would collapse if slavery is abolished and
also the value system that allowed for it not sufficiently replaced.

~~~
goto11
But that is so vague as to be useless.

------
TomMckenny
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.

------
atesti
This is also the idea of Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the Collapse of
Civilization" talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-
SOdj4Kkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk)

------
foxyv
“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.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

------
trhway
>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.

~~~
blackrock
I am rather surprised by how Russia is able to maintain their large hold on
territory across Siberia.

Surely, the people on the Eastern front, is highly genetically different, than
from those on the western side, which is closer to being European.

I assume it’s because of the threat of nukes, which kept the size of the
Russian Federation the way that it is.

~~~
ForHackernews
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.

~~~
bushin
no we have not

------
blackrock
The situation is rather interesting.

If individual states begins to shut down their borders, and alienate citizens
from other states, then what is the purpose of the Federal government?

According to the constitution, the Federal role is to provide for the national
defense. And to allow for free interstate trade and commerce.

------
drdgvhbh
This article, for its length, ended up saying absolutely nothing

------
ngcc_hk
Also foundation series.

------
7532yahoogmail
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.

------
PeterStuer
TLDR

"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."

~~~
6510
If anyone remembers who wrote it plz say:

First people work hard and barely survive

Second people work hard and have enough

3rd people just work and have enough

4th people barely work and have more than enough

5th Earning things is replaced with entitlements and some have to work hard to
make it so.

6th the entitled class grows beyond support then everything caves in.

And everything starts over again.

In short: To find the end, look for the entitlements.

~~~
gullyfur
> In short: To find the end, look for the entitlements.

Would UBI be considered the ultimate form of entitlements, or is there
something past UBI?

~~~
_curious_
It's interesting to ponder what could be past UBI in terms of entitlements?

~~~
PeterStuer
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?

------
dmfdmf
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.

~~~
dang
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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
ngcc_hk
“ 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.

