It's interesting you know, some of us here focusing on the collectivization across the globe, the standardization, the obvious push to a one world government/currency/ "set of over arching laws". Many of the laws to control the populations, end war etc are all codified now in the UN treaties and can be implemented overnight!
We see all this as the be all end all but it's really just the recurrence of the age old pattern, albeit on a large scale. But there are other patterns that interest me, far more reaching ones, like the recurrent Dark ages that have plagued civilization since it's beginnings 5000 years ago. Consider that all the old empire city states collapsed, and their cities abandoned, after a relatively short time-span. Typically on the order of 400 years. To put this in perspective our current Western mercantile Christian civilization, for that was it's basis, it's unifying elements, is now, 400 years old.
We ask ourselves, what caused the collapse of these former great empires? Well many reasons have been cited and all were at play. Currency destruction, over irrigation leading to to unproductive croplands, food deprivation. Bloated militaries that became ineffective, and a not so obvious reason, the people of the empire themselves just grew tired. Tired of the excesses, tired of the daily grind, tired of bread and circuses and tired of being overtaxed to support a minority elite that ruled over them. All these elements seemed to coalesce at the same point and the people just downed tools and walked away, abandoning the cities or dying in them.
Behind many of these factors is the concept of the depletion of the abundant energy that allowed the Empire to rise in the first place. In the old days this amounted to excess food and slave power, booty stolen from other lands. In our era the energy abundance has been coal, oil, and gas. When the depletion of these become widespread I see the wheels really falling off our civilization, regardless of who is in control. Every people in every empire in all ages thought "their" civilization was the be all end all. That their technologies put them apart and would guarantee them a place in the sun, forever. But each in turn collapsed, and surprisingly, the collapse itself took on average, a mere Decade. That's right, there was a long long period of decline, but at a certain point they went from functioning government to total collapse of the entire system basically overnight. There were still people and houses but no longer did food come in regularly on ox cart, water infrastructure was allowed to fail, no police protection, every man for himself. After 10 years or so of this the cities became untenable, were literally abandoned by the majority.
Where did they go? It wasn't pretty cabins in the woods.
Marc Widdowson (British military analyst and educator) wrote the book on it, here it is as a Pdf file. If you read it all you're doing well, I haven't as yet. The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age (418 pages)
We see all this as the be all end all but it's really just the recurrence of the age old pattern, albeit on a large scale. But there are other patterns that interest me, far more reaching ones, like the recurrent Dark ages that have plagued civilization since it's beginnings 5000 years ago. Consider that all the old empire city states collapsed, and their cities abandoned, after a relatively short time-span. Typically on the order of 400 years. To put this in perspective our current Western mercantile Christian civilization, for that was it's basis, it's unifying elements, is now, 400 years old.
We ask ourselves, what caused the collapse of these former great empires? Well many reasons have been cited and all were at play. Currency destruction, over irrigation leading to to unproductive croplands, food deprivation. Bloated militaries that became ineffective, and a not so obvious reason, the people of the empire themselves just grew tired. Tired of the excesses, tired of the daily grind, tired of bread and circuses and tired of being overtaxed to support a minority elite that ruled over them. All these elements seemed to coalesce at the same point and the people just downed tools and walked away, abandoning the cities or dying in them.
Behind many of these factors is the concept of the depletion of the abundant energy that allowed the Empire to rise in the first place. In the old days this amounted to excess food and slave power, booty stolen from other lands. In our era the energy abundance has been coal, oil, and gas. When the depletion of these become widespread I see the wheels really falling off our civilization, regardless of who is in control. Every people in every empire in all ages thought "their" civilization was the be all end all. That their technologies put them apart and would guarantee them a place in the sun, forever. But each in turn collapsed, and surprisingly, the collapse itself took on average, a mere Decade. That's right, there was a long long period of decline, but at a certain point they went from functioning government to total collapse of the entire system basically overnight. There were still people and houses but no longer did food come in regularly on ox cart, water infrastructure was allowed to fail, no police protection, every man for himself. After 10 years or so of this the cities became untenable, were literally abandoned by the majority.
Where did they go? It wasn't pretty cabins in the woods.
Marc Widdowson (British military analyst and educator) wrote the book on it, here it is as a Pdf file. If you read it all you're doing well, I haven't as yet. The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age (418 pages)
