Nowadays with mass media and the internet, we get aware of much more of the stupid shit happening all over than a common person would in the Western Roman Empire because stupid shit anywhere can be brought to people’s attention everywhere quickly, and since stupid stands out it does get brought to people’s attention.
Also real power is more centralized nowadays, also because of the speed with which information and people can travel enabling more centralised Command & Control systems.
So I would say that a fall due to internal social and political degenrence will happen faster and look a lot more stupid to bystanders, than back in Roman Empire days. Also the density of stupid timewise is probably higher now since everything is happening faster and in a lot more places at the same time.
That said, what’s happening in the US has been developing since at least Clinton’s time, maybe even Reagan’s, maybe longer than that - it’s just that the earlier stages which made the structural changes and created the conditions for what’s happening now, weren’t obvious to anybody but a handful of experts in some domains who of course weren’t given airtime on mass media or were deemed kooks by the rest of people when they did get airtime: any system’s eventual doom is guaranteed as soon as criticism of the structurs system itself is repressed or even de facto suppressed, though it generally takes time for it go through the stagnancy and then the internal-pillaging stages that lead to it cracking and collapsing due to becoming unable to serve most people in it.
Yeah probably. Successive emperors selfishly fighting among themselves for power, weakening their Nation, destroying the Foundation of their state, making alliances with people that cannot be trusted, all that’s a Hallmark of the fall of Rome. Both Falls actually.
Just as an aside I don’t know why my voice to text is capitalizing certain words in that paragraph but I’m too lazy to fix it.
Thanks for the explanatory postscript, I was gonna ask…
Not sure what you mean by ‘this stupid’, but in general: no. It was a complex process that unfolded over centuries and in different places in different ways and at different speeds. The reasons were economic, political, climatic, cultural and military.
For a really well done deep-dive, I can recommend the Fall of Rome podcast: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/gkvb5-433d2/The-Fall-of-Rome-Podcast
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”
An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
First of all, it’s beautiful you want to remember your late historian friend by learning more history. Kudos!
The fall of Rome is a deeply fascinating topic and it doesn’t disappoint in scale, complexity and nuance. Even the house-in-disrepair analogy doesn’t necessarily work, because in many places no one ever even realised something had fallen - though in other places they surely did. In 476 CE, typically the date we use for the fall of the western empire, no one at the time thought anything was more substantially wrong than anything that had happened over the preceding 200 or so years.
This podcast, also by an historian with a PhD on the topic of the fall, delves into all of it. The literature, the archeology, from the large political structures to the lives of individuals. Highly recommended, again.
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I mean… I’m not going to argue the fall of the US isn’t stupider than the fall of Rome…
But I will argue the fall of the US started back when Reconstruction was stopped. Just took a while for the confederates to win.
No, trump has got till the midterms or he’s gonna lose a significant amount of power, so he’s trying to speedrun the fascist dictatorship takeover. rome took hundreds of years to crumble and fall.
This collapse didn’t start in January.
Nobody’s got that kind of time any more.
Yes. Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob. A military class they eventually spit on and denied access to anything “Roman” which wasn’t a great incentive for you know, defending them from their own disgruntled citizens or enemies at their door. They cared more about their money and orgies and pedophelia than they did at maintaining the cogs of Empire of which their lifestyle depended. Bread and circuses and a whole lot of arrogant prejudice.
I would also assume that over time, a lot of the idiotic day-to-day shit probably gets forgotten about and as successive historians retell the events they naturally focus on the bigger, more important sounding stuff because it makes for a better read, so things probably get puffed up to sound loftier than they actually were.
They cared more about their money and orgies and pedophelia than they did at maintaining the cogs of Empire of which their lifestyle depended.
Well, the US was greatly inspired by Rome so why not follow the fall?
Money, orgies, and pedoohelia? Why does that sound familiar?
Embattled Republican leader Matt Gaetz who will become the attorney general if cleared by the Senate, which is unlikely, has now been accused of attending at least 10 sex parties between 2017 and 2018 when he was serving his first term in Congress.
…
Lawyer Joel Leppard representing two women who already testified before the House Ethics Committee said his clients informed the probe panel that drugs were consumed at those sex parties. One of the women claimed to have seen Gaetz having sex with an underage friend up against a games table.
“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
Incitatus was more competent than most of Trump’s cabinet.
After the murder of Pertinax on 28 March 193, the Praetorian guard announced that the throne was to be sold to the man who would pay the highest price. Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, prefect of Rome and Pertinax’s father-in-law, who was in the Praetorian camp ostensibly to calm the troops, began making offers for the throne. Meanwhile, Julianus also arrived at the camp, and since his entrance was barred, shouted out offers to the guard. After hours of bidding, Sulpicianus promised 20,000 sesterces to every soldier; Julianus, fearing that Sulpicianus would gain the throne, then offered 25,000. The guards closed with the offer of Julianus, threw open the gates, and proclaimed him emperor. Threatened by the military, the Senate also declared him emperor. His wife and his daughter both received the title Augusta.
Strange women in ponds handing out swords sounds like a preferable system.
Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.
We really did shape western society after Rome, didn’t we?
I mean, America is specifically patterned on the Roman Republic.
Which is part of the reason there’s a fasces in the House of Representatives.
Well...
The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:
- The end of the Republic
- The Crisis of the Third Century
- The fall of the western empire
- The fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade
- The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire
The best-known is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.
(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)
This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.
The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
Yes.
Edit: Oh, also… It just kept getting more stupid.
Yes
Which one?
From what I’ve heard from friends who have Rome as their special interest: yes.
Absolutely. The circus is the biggest tell of an empire crumbling.
What the fuck, what even is real anymore lol
The circus is where all the outcasts of society go to form family. It’s often satirical, aggressively leftist, and deeply connected to the arts.
Signed, a circus performer
Some pop philosophy for you:
https://youtu.be/XHqHhoi6ErU https://youtu.be/A4YK3oioThc https://youtu.be/WXpw0SURjaQ
The decline and fall of the Roman empire was something that took place over the course of centuries, involved events largely out of the control of individuals and affected very large areas and very diverse and different cultures.
I simply may not know enough about it, but I wouldn’t call it “stupid”. It’s just not a word that I can see applying here. It wasn’t a historical event, more like some kind of plate tectonics process.
history happens slowly then suddenly.
the political class of the western empire had been pulling itself apart for centuries.
history happens slowly then suddenly
With how fast we are able to communicate, I’d say it’s likely to happen faster this time around. When the emperor does something that fucks over the populace, they can hear about it within minutes. During Roman times it could have taken months.
i agree, but its peaks and valleys i suppose. the fall of US empire is still in the ‘slow’ stage i suspect.
That’s how it always goes when the decadence sinks in.
I agree with your conceptualization of the process, but if there was a single underlying theme of the entire process besides ‘decadence’, it would likely be ‘stupidity’. At least on a collective scale.
