Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Entropy, Existentialism
The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, Sir John Glubb, Abe Books
In these inspiring essays, Sir John Glubb examines the human race over 4,000 years and finds the same patterns of rise and fall of national greatness on the same timescale.
I. Pioneers - In the video, these are the explorers. They used the technology of their time, usually sailing ships to traverse vast distances to new lands.
II. Conquests—Colonization in Western culture typically involves subjugation of the land and its people, sometimes to the point of depopulation or extinction.
III. Commerce - Global trade in the Americas started with the first genocidal assaults, and kidnapping of Africans to subjugate the land because past the conquering stage, the colonizers remote control their commerce with the crack of whips and brutality.
IV. Affluence - With great wealth from commerce/slave trading and breeding, one can build castles, plantations with wraparound porches and mint julip tea.
V. Intellect—The video alludes to the building of Ivy League institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Public colleges emulate this model. Everyone becomes credentialed.
VI. Decadence - "Internal division, an influx of foreigners, materialism, and frivolity. A welfare state, weakening religion, and a defensive mindset." Sounds eerily familiar.
Entropy (noun): a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
"the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time"
Empires last about 250 years. Ours is now 248.
This land’s semi-quincentennial is 2026.
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