Studying the demise of historic civilisations

And it went from the largest colonial empire / power in the world to an island voting to get out of the EU in a few decades.

Sure they're still Britain but it changed a lot. (it also apply to France, Germany, Belgium, and probably a lot more)

They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe.

There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures.

And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium.

Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.

You should check out Raoul Vaneigem, he develops similar ideas, but focusing on the middle class stuck in their "everyday life" and routines. Whatever you do at work, 8 hours a day, leaves you with just enough energy to consume entertainment and wait for the next day. The cycle doesn't end until you're 65 and are allowed to retire, by the time you don't have any kind of energy (physical and/or mental), most people don't even have money to live the dream they've been forced to believe in all their life.

I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves.

I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones.

> Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives

Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part.

---

"It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real"

"The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology."

"No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze."

"While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever."

"People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them."

"And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."

> The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages.

Yes

> religion (which was more unquestionable

No - America was founded as a country on freedom of religion, which is why it ended up with thousands of little groups from a state of polyamorists to some guys who really liked making furniture.

> than say, global warming is today)

Trolling

> extreme version of the modern liberal

Trolling. Also please choose whether Jefferson was an extreme liberal or a conservative prisoner of the prejudices of his time.

> they deserve some credit for their heroic bravery and ideas on liberty

Yes. There was also the question, even at the time, of how well they were going to live up to what they meant on liberty. They wrote "all men are created equal" into the declaration of independence then immediately spent the next 200 years arguing that meant "not all men". Some of the co-signatories were there at the time arguing against slavery, it's just that Jefferson was on the other side of this particular issue.

That's not the full story, though. The legitimacy of our social structures is based in large part on claims of meritocracy and (imperfectly, but relatively) equal opportunity. Vast inequalities in hereditary wealth make this a very obvious fiction.

People might be happy to overlook this when things are going well for them personally, or when they feel hopeful about the future. When that is no longer the case for a majority, though, the status quo could be just as 'anti-civilization' as extreme redistribution.