The Fall of Empires

This is another article that has been sitting in my queue for a while. Certainly the political landscape has been a factor in writing it, but additionally there is the question of viewing empires (in their various myriad forms) as societal systems with distinct systemic characteristics. What does this have to do with AI? Not a huge amount, though if, as I believe, you view the current form of AI is essentially encapsulated corporate intelligence, then you can see its threads interweaving in the dialog.

In 2003, I wrote that I expected the US to fall apart within 25 years. This was after we had invaded Iraq, but before we'd used it to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. At that time, DJT had not even done The Apprentice yet and was just another nameless real estate developer out of New York. Before Citizens United meant that money became "free speech", making political contests too expensive for any but the wealthiest to win.

What I saw at the time was that the Internet was beginning to break down into self-contained echo chambers, and that, as a consequence, people would naturally gravitate towards the echo chambers that mostly represented their worldview. It was at that time I looked at the logical consequence of that shift, which was that these fracture lines as different regions went in different direction would ultimately tear the United States apart.

With Trump, we now have an authoritarian president who is determined to wrest control from the other two branches of government to reign as a strongman, aided by a cabal of corporate interest groups who are looking at protecting dying monopolies at all costs. I doubt whether we will have free and fair elections again (note, even Russia has elections, but whether they are fair is a whole different question).

Empires as Systems

The US is an empire. We who live here don't often perceive it as such. Still, the country was formed by winning territorial wars against indigenous nations and foreign powers and purchasing land in which other countries couldn't maintain footholds. It peaked as an empire around 1968, halving established military bases worldwide. In the intervening sixty years, we have watched that empire, built as much by manufacturing-based mercantilism, creative financing after World War II, and the control of oil as anything, erode.

This is typical of empires. Empires typically use their peripheral states as colonies, extracting resources while generally providing some benefit (not always) to keep entrenched. At some point, colonies see the relationship sour (the costs and damage of being a colony outweighs the advantages), and they began extricating themselves from these relationships, often by force. This results in a decline in wealth by the center of the empire, and an increase in unrest locally as standards decline (most especially at the bottom of the economic pyramid).

Colin Woodard wrote American Nations in 2011, where he detailed his view that North America was essentially not three countries but eleven or more. I think, even fifteen years late, that his analysis was pretty much spot on. You can think of those eleven countries as themselves being older (and more tightly bound) colonies. In the 1980s, the GDP of the United States topped $3.9 trillion dollars. The state of California today has a GDP of $3.9 trillion dollars, which means that California is economically as large as the entire country was less than forty years. Texas, New York, and Florida are only a little bit smaller. California also has the smallest per capita representation in Congress of any state, something to keep in mind.

Power dynamics between colonies and imperial states are very seldom as cut and dried as people generally believe, especially when the emperor is comparatively weak, as Trump is. This may seem counterintuitive, especially for an authoritarian president, but the reality is that his active base of support is only about 25% of the country, located primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. Yes, the Plains and Mountain States are conservative, but they are also very, very empty.

Trump does not have the connections in the military that he did near the end of his first term, and the danger of naming someone who is vastly unqualified for the position of Secretary of Defence is that their ability to effect change in the organisation has so far proven non-existent. The House of Representatives is teetering on a knife's edge (just as the Senate was under Biden), and the courts, after taking his measure, are beginning to fight back in earnest. Given that Congressional Representatives face an attrition rate of about eight a year, this means that there is at least a twenty percent chance that the House could change hands between now and Nov 2026, and about a sixty percent chance that the House will switch to Democratic control.

This means that he is attempting to bluff with a very weak hand against opponents who have a pretty good idea what his hand actually looks like. Now, that does not mean that it will stop him - the Democrats occasionally are brilliant, but all too often, they are also known to shoot themselves in the foot, but it does mean that the seeming trifecta he has exists primarily on a few technicalities.

However, one of the questions that historians have long wondered about is whether individual leaders change the course of history or whether in any historical context, whatever that may be, the times tend to shape the leader into the role. Author Terry Pratchett explored that theme in a number of ways, as did Harry Harrison, one of the masters of Alternative Histories. (Note, I have written time travel stories before, and this particular question is one of the great ones for a science fiction author to explore).

Nonetheless, what we are seeing in the United States now is an eroding empire. American vassal states have become increasingly independent (cf. Israel), the US has chalked up a series of rather disastrous losses and expulsions, and now you have a strongly isolationist President trying to project political and economic power via tariffs in an environment where the primary beneficiary of those tariffs is China. The United States makes up only 12% of the total global customer base of China, which means that, as with political power at home, Trump has a very weak hand in international trade, much weaker than I suspect even he anticipated.

Note: this erosion is not a product of some kind of moral failing on the part of the US. The United States grew primarily because there was a power vacuum: lands that may have been claimed by several colonial powers over the years - the English, the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Russians, and so forth - but that for the most part were sparsely occupied by the last remnants of late bronze age Native American indigenous peoples.

Even now, five hundred years after the occupation began in earnest, the US is still mostly empty West of the Mississippi River, with the exception of the Western Coast. The reason is obvious if you've ever taken a cross-country flight: the Rocky Mountains occupy about 1/3 of the country, and they are both difficult to navigate and comparatively arid. Even the four states that make up the West Coast - California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and (technically) Hawaii - are heavily populated only along the I5 corridor that follows the coastline, and that primarily because this is the region that was accessible via ships for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Getting outside of the jingoist perceptions of the contemporary MAGA movement (perceptions that have been with the country from its inception, by the way, for good and bad), what becomes visible are fault lines along population and economic divides. Let's consider the islands first. Hawaii and Alaska are both islands.

Hawaii is a mix of Polynesians (which is a portmanteau for Many Asians), mostly from Southeast Asia over the course of about five thousand years, as well as contemporary Chinese, Japanese, Philippino, and Thai, with a stock of Europeans primarily there because Hawaii is a natural way point between North America and Asia, and as such is a critical sea- and air- port. US Warships basically keep it in American hands (it was made a US State primarily to strengthen that claim, at the height of the American Empire). However, that hold is tenuous, and at some point, it will likely become a neutral country (with strong ties to Asia) when the US no longer has the resources to defend it.

That Alaska is an island seems like a strange statement for the second, which is manifestly not surrounded by water on all sides, but both are, in fact, disconnected territories that became a part of the union only about seventy years ago. There are people living today who remember when the US only had forty eight states. Alaska is mostly mountainous, with the vast majority of its population occupying a fairly thin strip from Juneau to Anchorage. Of that population, most are ethnically Chinese or Indigenous Aleut (who themselves migrated from East Asia over the last 20,000 years). Note also that this is reflected on the other side of the Pacific: the population of Pacific Rim Russia is primarily of Chinese or Mongolian origin, with very little in the way of actual ethnic Russians. Siberia is effectively an ocean that is navigable, but not easily, and the chance that the Russian Far East Federal District will break away from Russia within the next forty to fifty years and become a vassal state of China is pretty high, especially given falling birth rates in Russia. Again, from a population distribution standpoint, this means that the Pacific Rim Oblasts in particular - Kamchatka (5), Magadan(6), Khabaravosk(7), the Sakhalan islands(9), Chukotka (11) and Primorski(7) - could very well become a quasi-independent nation.

Canada faces the same issue the US does - the Rocky Mountains divide the country East and West. Most of British Columbia and the Northwest Territories are empty, with 95% of the population existing within two hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean. The same holds for Washington (once Canadian) and Oregon. Indeed, Cascadia, which is the region consisting of the broader Pacific Northwest watershed, has been "mapped" since the early 1970s, extending as far north as Anchorage, as far south as Mt. Shasta in California, and East as far as Idaho along the Columbia River.

During the Gold Rush era in the 1850s in California, the population shifted from primarily Spanish-infused Aztec Mestizo towards Eastern Anglo-Europeans, again at the height of the American Empire in the 1960s, but that dominant trend has since reversed, with the balance made up of East and South Asian immigrants (along with many from the Middle East). Political polarization since the 1990s has also exacerbated that trend.

People seldom move primarily for political reasons (economic factors play a much bigger role there), but in population demographics, even small biases add up over a large enough time frame. When polarization is low, the political beliefs of one's neighbors don't factor into making significant relocations, but when polarization is high, people may pass on taking up certain opportunities because of the concerns that they won't fit in well with the dominant culture in the region they are moving to (often with perceived safety issues in mind).

Uncivil Wars and Secessionist Movements

Historically, when empires expand, they often have a major influence on culture and language. Still, as they contract and give up territory, those influences fade as new (or more usually, very old) migration patterns reassert themselves. For instance, the Seattle International District frequently had signage in both English and Chinese, which tends to be the case with specialised enclaves. However, in the last few years, the Puget Sound East Side (East of Lake Washington) has seen a significant uptick in mixed signage, to the extent that it is no longer unusual to see either Hanzi (Chinese script) or Sanscrit signs in addition to English (or sometimes exclusively) on restaurants and shops. This is echoed in Richmond, just south of Vancouver, BC, where Chinese is the dominant language, even over English.

Mexican Spanish is reasserting itself in California throughout Los Angeles and San Diego, even as Mandarin and Hindu are becoming much more dominant in San Francisco. It should be noted that while written Mexican Spanish is grammatically still similar to European Spanish, both in terms of idiomatic expressions and pronunciation, it has diverged enough that native speakers of either have trouble understanding the other (I've heard from native Chinese speakers that also know English that American Chinese is also beginning to drift away from its Asian pronunciation).

How does this relate to the American Empire? This natural evolutionary process, where (Southern) California and the Cascadia region are shifting back to their "native" cultural roots, coupled with the island-like divide of the Rockies and Cascade mountains, and the significant GDPS of these regions, means that they are becoming more and more autonomous, politically, economically and linguistically. At this stage, California and Cascadia (including Alaska and, somewhat, Hawaii) are also allied.

Does this mean that they will formally secede? That's a harder question to answer, for a few reasons:

• Both regions still have a fairly strong allegience to, and benefit from their association with, the United States. Many Washingtonians have worked at one point or another in their career for "The Other Washington", Washington, DC, despite being 2500 miles away.

• They tend to be law-abiding, rather than overtly patriotic. To the extent that this region feels that laws that were supposed to be neutral are instead being weaponised against them, I suspect it will drive separatist fervour one way or another.

• Formal secession raises a lot of questions about who controls military assets, from military installations to aircraft to nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly, most of the Pacific Naval Fleet (including nuclear missile submarines) are ported from the West Coast, mainly San Diego and the Puget Sound.

Much more likely is that these regions will declare themselves semi-autonomous, less subject to US federal laws (and more likely to ignore those that they feel are unfair), and more likely to be hostile to unfriendly actions (posting of federal troops, the deputizing of local law enforcement), ignoring trade restrictions, and so forth. Certainly, they are already beginning to mobilize against potential reprisals, and planning for contingencies in case attacks against them become more overt.

This may very well change if some of several things happen, however:

• A formal attack causing significant loss of life by the current administration will harden political opinions quickly.

• De-representation in Congress (the President does not have the authority to do this, but that has not stopped him thus far). This could include replacing legally voted senators or representatives with hand-picked ones, refusing to recognise specific delegations, arresting elected officials or judges on spurious charges, or other similar actions.

• Trade sanctions against these states or the seizure of assets.

• Declaration of a martial state or seizure of power as president for life

• Destruction of a major city

• Annulment of the Constitution (which is much the same thing).

Put another way (and again this is true of empires in general), the extent to which a given Imperial state can subjugate a vassal state is primarily a function of the ability of that empire to apply effective sanctions against that vassal - military control, financial or economic leverage - coupled with the loyalty of both the military and the people to the imperial state itself. In other words, how well can the imperial state project power?

There is a tendency, when talking about alternate history hypotheses, to look back at the American Civil War of 1861-1865 as an indication of what any future civil war may look like. There are some parallels - the Southern states had a somewhat different culture than the North, both because of slaves and because they were primarily an agrarian region competing against a more strongly manufacturing-oriented one. Still, at the same time, they were not dissimilar culturally (Connecticut had abolished slavery in 1848, only about 15 years before). The Federal government, while stronger than at its inception, was still comparatively weak in terms of its ability to project power. Finally, military doctrine at the time was largely an adaptation on both sides of the Napoleonic battles earlier in the century. Militia-based, primarily land-based, with the use of cavalry and cannons. Even given that, it was also a war of attrition, with Lee surrendering after General Sherman had wreaked havoc upon their military production capabilities on his march to the Sea.

A civil war today would be vastly different and hinge primarily upon the degree to which the military chain of command had broken down. This ultimately also comes down to the degree to which military commanders of installations interpret their responsibilities as defending the President vs defending the Constitution. This is one of the two nightmare scenarios that every officer faces (the other, of course, being the person responsible for launching a nuclear attack).

IF that happened (and this is a big IF) several things may happen.

• A military coup replaces the existing President (if the command structure is unified against the president, this is actually a higher possibility than an attack). This may not necessarily be a better scenario. If the command structure is fractured, this will likely end up causing fractures all throughout the country, as individual commanders align with state governors or create ad-hoc alliances. If the military is solidly behind the President, then it is likely that the President will order them to quell the rebellion. This was the Civil War Scenario.

• The West Coast, in particular, has a technological and military industrial base that is on par with or better than most larger countries. This includes satellite production and drones, which have dramatically changed the nature of warfare. This is also likely to put the West Coast on a collision course with Texas, putting companies with operations in both regions at risk of being forced to split. However, this is also likely to pit certain other regions against one another.

• The war would extend very quickly to the rest of the world. An independent West Coast would likely gain considerable support from China, which would put them at odds with Russia (which is likely to support the current administration) and it may put the US at odds with NATO, which would, ironically, end up supporting the US West Coast (and potentially the MidAtlantic states up through Massachusettes. Mexico becomes a wild card here, as it could very well support California, in particular, over Texas, and Canada would get drawn in. Canada reclaiming Cascadia could happen (or Cascadia petitioning to join Canada) , though it also opens up the specter of reprisals against Ottowa or Quebec. A rapidly remilitarizing Europe also becomes a possibility here.

• This also raises the possibility that the US Naval Fleet is forced to withdraw from the Indian Ocean, the international waters of the South China Sea, and other strategic waters to blockade the West Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii.

These are different scenarios, but the upshot of all of this is that, with less internal support, losing a critical amount of military production infrastructure, and international condemnation, the possibility that now (or in the next few decades), critical parts of the US could "dis-integrate" either partially or fully.

How quickly could it happen?

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1987 is perhaps more instructive than what happened in the US Civil War. The Soviet Union was an overextended empire. It was facing a weakened economy, poor internal markets, and was spending far more propping up its vassal states and on nuclear armaments than it could afford. It was also dealing with a low demand for its principal exports of oil and wheat. Eventually, it began cutting payments to both Warsaw pact countries and its own military, which in turn touched off large protests as, one by one the Warsaw pact countries broke free (the death of Tito in Yugoslavia in 1980 also contributed to this, as the country was, while not Warsaw Pact, more aligned with the Soviet Union than NATO.

The Soviet Union with the Warsaw pact had a total population of 483 million people in 1989. Today, Russia has only 144 million people, and that is declining. President Vladimir Putin has managed to develop an uneasy alliance with Belarus. He has been engaged in a war with Ukraine (a former core state) that it started that has only managed to regain Sebastopol and about 15% of the rest of the country along its eastern edge.

Should Putin die or be overthrown, the country will likely shatter (leading to the scenario described above with the Far East Federal District.

What Did the Romans Ever Do For Us?

The key point in all of this is that empires are both dynamic and ultimately transient systems. They grow primarily by acquiring resources through trade or conquest, reach a temporary steady state where inputs and outputs balance out, then begin to contract as the cost of maintaining the more loosely coupled vassal states while trying to extract value from them exceeds the value being extracted. This usually happens in the context of external competitive empires, which are also trying to capture the more valuable vassal states.

There are ways that the global system can reach quasi-stable points - trade agreements, joint projects, sharing resources, working towards common solutions, improving the efficiencies of internal processes, establishing a consistent rule of law (and enforcing it), increasing interdependency. Strengthening the networks. When a potential competitor gains a significant advantage, ask not whether they are attempting to game the system (of course they are, so are you!) but whether you have ceded that advantage due to a fear of innovating or funding research and development, and seeking short-term gains at long-term costs.

These systems are only quasi-stable, however. In a changing environment, there is no such thing as a truly stable state, because there are too many variables that are not under any one country's (or company's) control.

An empire is a particular strategy, and it is often one that is driven by many considerations. The US built an empire because it had an easily defensible region. These neighbours also had room to expand rather than compete for resources, and a wealth of resources under its control that could be readily exploited. It was also able, at various points, to bring other empire builders (and even non-empire builders) to the table to establish those networks, which benefited many of them up to a point.

Where things started breaking down was a loss of perspective, the rise of arrogance and entitlement that perceived the world as theirs by right. It fueled the rise of a parasitic investment class that provided no value but used speculation to enrich themselves, often at the cost of further destabilising the system. More and more people found that despite working harder, they were making less and less, until it began to seep into their heads that they were being exploited without sufficient remuneration for their efforts to even provide the requested value. This is the nature of colonialism, and it hits closer and closer to the core of the Imperial state as that state collapses.

So, what exactly is meant by collapse? Typically, it means dis-integration - vassal or colonized states become autonomous, sue for recognition, form separate governments, repudiate not only the previous leadership but the very precepts under which they are governed. It's a very unstable state for those vassal states, as authority needs to be re-established, and as the polity has to replace what had been produced by the empire with internal resources. This can often be sizeable:

Moreover, there are always going to be those who have regrets, second-guess themselves, work to return the country to the way that it was before. Putin came to power primarily by appealing to the communists that had watched the system collapse under previous administrations, playing upon his credentials as a former KGB head, and who were dealing with the chaos involved with any such process.

For the imperial state, there are challenges as well. The state loses the resources the vassal provided, frequently being forced to negotiate at less favourable terms (diminishing its own resources even more). Its sphere of influence has diminished, and it has lost trust. A former vassal state may turn to other alliances, essentially what happened with Ukraine. Finally, with each vassal state that it loses, the likelihood that the empire can retain its other vassal states drops as well. In 1890, the British Empire extended completely around the globe. By 1950, most of its vassal states had declared their independence, and financially, it struggled in the aftermath of World War II (though discovery of oil in the 1980s helped to revive the economy somewhat) before Brexit did a number on it.

A former empire, though, is not a black hole, though there are those who seem to feel it should be. Often times, the natural impulse is to put a county on some form of austerity diet. This usually just makes things worse, because the problem is generally not that the country is living beyond its means, but rather that the means themselves are diminishing, and austerity regimes only cripple a country's ability to recover.

What is usually needed is a very frank reassessment of what the true strengths and weaknesses the country has, and from that learning how to better adapt the focus of the country to doing what it is best at.

For the United States, there are actually several areas as a country that it excels at. We are natural storytellers, when we're not trying desperately to kill off our writers and artists. We frequently bring multiple diverse perspectives towards solving problems. If we could figure out how to get the toxic overinvestment out of the system, the country can be both innovative and entrepreneurial to a degree that most others can't.

We are very good at synthesizing and integrating from multiple directions, and we are reasonably content in the development of standards (the Canadians are better there, but Americans ain't too shabby). Because the country is so large, the US has become very good at logistics. They are (or were) not that long ago, at the forefront of aerospace systems. The country still has many ample resources, and we are getting better at conserving the ones that we can't renew. Our education system, which the current regime is trying to dismantle, does need work, but a lot of that really comes down to spending some more time, energy, and yes, money, to figure out how to educate in the twenty-first century.

However, that's not going to happen when the only incentive is making far more money than anyone can ever spend. Perhaps the greatest strength that this country has is the fact that it can serve as a laboratory for governance as well as innovation. We CAN try different approaches to governance - it's the value of having fifty states that are at least semi-autonomous.

Jeckyl and Hyde

What we cannot continue doing is this oscillation between two diametrically opposed states of authoritarian laissez-faire capitalism and identity-politics driven social democracy (regardless of the identities in question). This is in part because culturally we are becoming too different from one another for one-sized fits-all politics.

In software, there's a principle called scaling. The idea, at its core, is that sometimes a particular architecture works very well in a particular set of conditions (number of processors, users, businesses, and so forth) but that it doesn't work at others. For a lot of business people, this should be intuitive but it often does not seem to translate well when dealing with social networks rather than physical or software ones.

This is not just a numbers game, it's a context game. A rural, conservative town in the Midwest is actually a pretty good scale for a socially-conservative theocratically-oriented government that values well-articulated moral codes and traditionalism, but the same kind of government is hideously unsuited for a progressive, highly-educated pluralistic society. The fear on both sides is that a change in a centralized government could force the wrong kind of governance structures on people, and this in turn leads to a flip-flop in administrations every four to eight years that becomes untenable for a significant percentage of the population.

This, by the way is another characteristic of failing empires. As resources become tighter (because vassal states are becoming autonomous, you get wild swings between autocratic rulership and social democracy that makes it difficult for trading partners to trust them. You really want to deal with Dr. Jeckyl, but are afraid that he'll turn into Mr. Hyde in the next election cycle. Moreover, long-term investments (spanning decades) cannot be made when, within a few years, the next administration will cancel the program.

We are reaching a stage in terms of population that we've never really dealt with before in the history of the world. Political structures that may work for 40 million people may not necessarily be appropriate for 400 million people. The larger the population, the more you need to decentralise that power and then place a generally less restrictive superstructure on it. The UN, for instance, has a very large scope, but has comparatively little actual power or enforcement mechanisms. The EU follows a similar structure.

Put another way, when the Constitution was first created, the country was small enough (in terms of both geography and population) that a decentralized confederation was insufficient - you needed a more federated, consolidated system. Today, the government is too centralized, when perhaps it's time to scale back the scope of the government while at the same time giving more authority and autonomy at a state or regional level.

For those of you who know me as a fairly progressive person politically, this concept of saying that the Federal Government is too powerful may seem surprising, but I see it as a matter of necessity: for the country to survive (and shift into a more healthy role) it needs to decentralize and devolve authority to intermediate structures that reflect different cultural imperatives.

Do I see that happening deliberately? Probably not. I think it's far more likely that eventually we will reach a stage where these proto-nations "opt out" one at a time, leaving a core that becomes increasingly irrelevant. These proto-nations in turn form new alliances and relationships, creating a more loosely constrained confederation. Businesses will then adapt, seeking some neo-countries for stability, others for lack of restrictions and higher risk, even as people migrate towards those regions that most closely match their cultural orientation.

Catastrophes and Collapse

There's an entire mathematical discipline devoted to understanding the phenomenon of catastrophic collapse. Catastrophe comes from the Greek strophe (to turn) and kata (down) and by the 16th century it had made its way into English as an alternative form of the word denouement (which interestingly enough, means "unknot"). Writers know the term as the period after the crisis or climax in a story, which is the point of maximum tension. We call this period the denouement, the time of tying up loose ends, unraveling knots, resolving the story.

Mathematically, collapse is treated as a topological concept in which a complex network gets replaced by a simpler one, and is a core principle involved in phase transitions. Networks are "computable" - the more complex a network, the more sophisticated the types of computations that can be performed on it. Conversely, when a system collapses to a simpler state, it also loses some ability to perform calculations. This is true of computers, but it is also true of economies, civilizations, organisms, and ecosystems. A collapsed economy has less capacity to grow, not just in a linear fashion but in a fundamentally non-linear one.

Last winter, a windstorm came through Seattle that knocked out power in the region for anywhere from two to six days. We don't get these very often - the Puget Sound is essentially a bay sitting between two mountain ranges, so when the Pacific winds come from the West or even the East, the region is fairly well shielded. However, when winds come from the south (which they usually day when we get Pineapple Express storms from Japan) winds can get up to 90 mph. This is about at the level of a tropical storm, and would be otherwise all right except for the fact that we have lots and lots, and lots, of trees. Winds + Rains + Trees = power outages.

When power is out for an hour, it's an inconvenience. When it is out for a day, you become very dependent upon a diminishing supply of batteries or diesel for a generator, and your connectivity with the rest of the world becomes far more tenuous. When power is out for nearly a week, people's food supplies are getting perilously low, anything frozen has long since thawed out and gone bad, very little business gets done, and people become very dependent upon linemen who are often working in dangerous condition during bad weather to get the the power back on.

Within two weeks, the system has collapsed to the point that people are forced to leave the area, crime starts to rise, and diseases due to sanitation systems not working begin to crop up - cholera, tetanus, and dysentery. The risk of fire becomes much higher as people rely upon fires to stay warm at night. Much beyond that period, civilization has devolved by more than two hundred years, not just because there is no electricity but because there are few appliances that are capable of running without electricity. In 1925, most stoves were wood or coal burning. Today, most aren't.

We become reliant upon technology from outside to help us rejoin the 21st century. What happens in the event of a major Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) as that the power grids across several regions go out. What happens when an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) bomb goes off, frying most electronics, shorting out generators, and rendering most vehicles glorified statues. This is what is meant by high complexity in a society.

That is the problem with collapse. When a complex society collapses, it falls hard, because there is no older infrastructure remaining that can provide an area of stability to re-establish things. One of the biggest challenges that archivists face is how to ensure that if society collapses, their particular domain will not disappear because it was all online on computers that are no longer functional.

Disruption and Resilience

This is part of the reason why resilience is (or at least was prior to the Trump era) such a topic of interest. A resilient society is one that can adapt readily to disruption.

In the West (and especially in tech), disruption is considered a virtue. The mantra of every startup is to disrupt the status quo, to the point that it has taken on the weight of orthodoxy. In other words, to disrupt has BECOME the status quo and INNOVATION the equivalent of the Lord's Prayer. Innovation is important to avoid stagnation, but when it becomes an end by itself, innovation can become destructive.

Yet any society that is built on the principle of disruption is also very brittle, because there's no safety net if something goes wrong. You can fire 95% of your employees and still run your company ... for as long as your existing infrastructure can remain standing. In other words, you are burning through your technical capital without replenishing it, and one day the power is going to go out and when it comes back on, your business won't. (This should sound very familiar to business leaders who invested heavily in AI early on, and now have to hire back all of the employees that it fired to keep the AIs running).

Growing empires tend to squander energy because the acquisition costs are comparatively low (due to exploitative labour practices and theft of existing natural resources from the vassal states, usually under threat of arms) compared to their utility. Declining empires, on the other hand, are dealing with resources that are dear and formal vassal states that have axes to grind with the imperial state. Existing networks are collapsing, meaning the former empire needs to expend more resources to rebuild its infrastructure while simultaneously trying to hold onto its more tightly bound vassal states.

Ironically, those vassal states that do break away focus more on resilience because they don't have the cooperative resources of the empire any more. They can afford to be more innovative because they have comparatively little technical or social debt locked up in existing social institutions, and the cost of failure is comparatively low. You see this a lot in Africa - places like Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia jumped from essentially agrarian societies to information age ones without the necessity of going through an industrial evolutionary stage. For a few generations, anyway, they also have enough cultural understanding that if something does go wrong, they're not challenged by having to rebuild infrastructure.

On the other hand, the citizens of dying empires have a hard time letting go. An empire at its peak spawns incredible arrogance and privilege, with classes becoming very stratified. Stratification is a goal, because the more that you stratify, the more that you harden the boundaries between classes, the harder it is for someone else to challenge you. As an empire hits the peak of its arc, everyone tends to benefit, but as the empire begins its decline, those benefits erode for everyone. Only those at the upper end of the pyramid have the resources to stave off this erosion. However, this can go on for only so long. The farther down you are, the more quickly things become unstable, the more that you are forced either into the parameters established by those at the top or are forced into the gray market where there are fewer rules but more arbitrariness and far fewer protections. Political power is curtailed for those who are not part of the apex of the pyramid, and society crumbles from within.

There's an important point in all of this. The rules are changing. Those who cling to the notion that the rules will protect them will discover this is no longer true. Some cling to the authoritarians who are imposing their idea of what the rules should be, increasingly moving from meaningful contribution to parasite. Some fight back, pushing alternative viewpoints, establishing new boundaries (geographical, psychological, economic), and gaining consensus and common ground. Civilization is built on networks, and networks ultimately reroute around obstacles. That has always been true.

The New Palaegians

I've mentioned Palaegius before in my writings. A Christian mystic in the church of the 5th and 6th centuries, he argued against the doctrine of original sin, and by extension, the ability of the clergy to provide dispensation to members. At the time, this was not all that controversial, and was largely due to Palaegius' upbringing in Britain, where this was considered the norm (this was a central tenet of the original Celtic Christian churches until St. Patrick and his Augustinian doctrine rewrote much of the orthodoxy of these churches. He and Augustine were originally on relatively friendly terms, but as the church became more doctrinaire (and more heavily politicized from the Western Roman and Carthaginian states) this view fell out of favor by those in control. In time, Palaegius was forced to take to the road as the Church excommunicated him and condemned his writing as heretical.

Ironically, his views were actually pretty much in accord with the earliest teachings, which reflected an Eastern viewpoint (Both Gautama Buddha and Lao Tze, or their protogenitors, were active around 350-450 BC, but dissemination of their ideas westward took a few more centuries, and there is indications that much of this philosophy permeated Middle Eastern (Turkey, Greece, and the Levant) thought during this era, including pre-Augustinian thinking.

There were a few key points that defined this system, and that got lost as the corporatization of Christianity occurred in the 5th and 6th century AD:

• Free Will. People's actions were not dominated by a single divine plan, but were the results of their own free will. The notion of determinism, that one's actions were dictated by others and could not be challenged, was more characteristic of the rising role that Roman elites had and that were essential to the maintenance of Empire as a cohesive machine.

• No Original Sin. One consequence of this is that there was no such thing as original sin. The church, seeking to replace the Roman Empire with a Ecclessiastical one, worked upon the assumption that all people were born into sin and only through absolution by the Church could then be excused (not freed of, simply excused) of that sin. It was the ultimate opt-out clause - you were assumed to have signed the contract upon your birth, and could only opt out by paying regular tithes. Today, those contracts are increasingly with the technocorporate world, the rentier economy, but the principle is the same.

• Actions Have Consequences. This was a particular sticking point in Christian theology of the era that has persisted over the next eighteen hundred years. Good deeds were not chits to be earned for salvation, but something intrinsic to one's behaviour, and evil deeds that hurt others had consequences not in the weighing of one's soul, but in how those consequences reached out and hurt you in return. The church became a corporation that sold a product (redemption), and it profited heavily by encouraging bad behaviour that could then be assuaged through generous donations.

• The Importance of the Earthly Life. As a corollary, the church put all of its emphasis on the afterlife (most of the theology pertaining to heaven emerges from this period, by the way, including the Holy Trinity, the hosts of heaven, etc.) Heaven in the 5th century looked a great deal like Byzantium without all the messy bits. Pelaegius, on the other hand, stressed that it is the life you live today that is more important. If you follow a lot of the TRANSCREAList ideation, one thing that sticks out is how much it emphasizes unity with some godlike intelligence as the embodiment of perfection after the Singularity, which is just another form of Rapture.

• Compassion. This was critical in the Palaegian viewpoint, but much less so with Augustine. Wikipedia actually have a very nice breakdown on this point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism#Sin_and_virtue). The two dominant themes of Christianity have always been the degree to which the Elect are privileged. This plays in the split between Dominicans and Franciscans in the Catholic Church, between Calvinists and Lutherans in early Protestantism and so forth, and even today plays a role in the difference between Fundamental Dominists and the Liberal Church. The core comes down to whether the Elect are superior (privileged) relative to those who are not, or put another way, does God reward those who are saved with earthly riches and condemn those who are the Great Unwashed with poverty and sickness, or not? This is playing out today, and in effect separates the corporatist from the socialist viewpoints. The church needed converts, and to do that, it had to sell the message that if they believed, they would become rich and powerful, if not in this world then the next. In time, Pelaegius would reject this doctrine, recognising it for what it was - a corporate marketing ploy.

• The Importance of Knowledge. By the sixth and seventh centuries, the Roman Empire was rapidly collapsing, feudalism was on the rise, and the Church had positioned itself o support it. Ironically, one of the things that Pelaegius encouraged was the collection of knowledge, not just official teachings, but all knowledge. Especially in the less closely bound colonias of Northwest Europe, monasteries arose where librarians, encouraged by Paleasius, began to secret away books, scrolls, and loose manuscripts from raided libraries and individual collectors, even if (or especially if) they were not doctrinaire. Much of what is known about the Dark Ages (roughly 600-900 AD) came from these books that were kept hidden away from those trying to wipe out heresy. Today, that analogy may be seen in the frantic attempt by curators trying to keep original thought alive in the face of the bombardment of disinformation.

The upshot here is that this was happening in the context of a collapsing empire and the rise of another one (Augustinian Catholicism). The Roman Empire did not fall to external warlords. It fell due to overreach, when it could no longer sustain itself through colonisation, and it fell because of mismanagement due to dogmatic corporate thinking over a long period, which made the society too brittle in the face of insult and environmental fallout.

We may be the New Palaegians, recognising that we must live (and protect our heritage) in this world, not in some imagined cybernetic heaven. It is not an easy road to take - such Palaegians will be reviled by those who see you as standing in the way of their progress, will be mocked by those who see you as not hewing to doctrine, will be persecuted by the powerful who fear that your beliefs could threaten the edifice upon which they have built their fortunes and power bases. Oddly enough, it is this belief that helps build civilisations after the collapse. Something to think about.

In Media Res,

Kurt Cagle

Editor, The Cagle Report

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