The Romans don't take over Europe again -- it's the barbarians who stayed close to the earth, kept their feet nailed to the ground who inherited the continent.
After the fall of the Roman empire, even the eastern Roman empire only for a short time retakes Rome before being batted back by the new civilization that forms. The Eastern roman empire is almost a new civilization in how differently it developed from the western roman empire. The art and architecture are different (and iconoclasm unfortunately destroyed many examples of that). The philosophy was fundamentally different, deeply diving into Christianity and using it as a lodestone to find its way out of the decadence of the Western Roman empire, while also facing new threats since it was so much closer to Asia and constantly faced existential threats keeping it vigilant much longer. I think that's why scholars give it a different name than Rome, because the Byzantine empire was a new thing in a different region that never was quite the same thing as its predecessor.
When looking back through the 20th century and 21st century, I consider there to be two distinct eras. After the enlightenment period came the modern period (you can consider the French Revolution to be the beginning of the modern period for the purposes I'm talking about), which culminated in the horrors of the world wars. The world wars took a world that was vibrant and confident and excited about the future (All the bloody napoleonic wars came about because men were excited to go out and die for their country because they believed in their country) and broke it, leading to the postmodern period we live in today whose defining factor is the destruction of everything that came before. The world wars proved that we are just as barbaric as we ever were and the so-called modern man was a myth. Thus a period of destruction followed because people were tearing everything due to the PTSD of the horrors we created. As a result, the postmodern period has been about the destruction of values and replacing them with either nothing or with a minimally thought out emotional replacement that has no practical use. I expect the postmodern period to end with the pending global population collapse that's already started but will get really bad in the next 30 years or so.
The population collapse I'm talking about isn't something caused by a lack of resources or anything dramatic, it's a further manifestation of the suicidal impulse of postmodern society. The greatest generation came home from the world wars and procreated like mad. Their kids went out and procreated quite a lot creating the millennials which have been called the "echo boom". The millennials largely chose not to have kids and so the largest generation in history, the boomers, are starting to die off and they aren't being replaced by anything like the same amount of people, which will has created a virtually inescapable demographic cliff in most countries on earth. We won't be talking about the risks of overpopulation in the future, we're going to be facing the single largest population contraction in the history of planet earth.
In my view, there's no reason to be too concerned with the fall of postmodern civilization, that's inevitable as the moment the world wars ended and postmodernism started to become the modern paradigm, the failure of this civilization in its current form was inevitable. What we should be concerned with is protecting ourselves as best as we can from the wrath of the empire as it falls, and making sure we stay true to ourselves and stay grounded and anchored to reality.
One very positive thing is that whereas we've seen the greatest drop in the power of the non-elite individual ever in the past 50 years, as would be predicted by secular cycle theory, what comes afterwards is a golden age because the shrinking population gives individuals more bargaining power and individuals are better able to negotiate for their time and effort. We could even see entire dynasties replaced in many parts of the world, and there's no saying for sure what that looks like or what we replace the current order with.
Unfortunately, it is indeed true that just because there is upheaval it won't necessarily be good. Some secular cycles saw massive improvements in the lot of the people such as in 9th century europe where we saw many of the foundations laid for constitutional monarchies, but we saw the french revolution just became a bloody massacre that had everyone walking on eggshells for a long time and was so bad that some Frenchmen (the ones that were left after the purges) were actually considering putting the aristocracy back in charge (and did until they remembered that the aristocrats were decadent and parasitic)
The way to stay grounded in reality is to remember something important: Failure is an option. You CAN die, you CAN fail to procreate, and the spark of life that you represent that goes all the way back to the first single celled organism will be snuffed out. There are stakes, the physical world exists and you are not God, reality has the final say over what happens. Also, you need to find meaning in life. It's so easy once you see it, the world is beautiful and terrible and there's so many things besides the current moment in culture we can soak in to become something different than just the water we were born in.
After the fall of the Roman empire, even the eastern Roman empire only for a short time retakes Rome before being batted back by the new civilization that forms. The Eastern roman empire is almost a new civilization in how differently it developed from the western roman empire. The art and architecture are different (and iconoclasm unfortunately destroyed many examples of that). The philosophy was fundamentally different, deeply diving into Christianity and using it as a lodestone to find its way out of the decadence of the Western Roman empire, while also facing new threats since it was so much closer to Asia and constantly faced existential threats keeping it vigilant much longer. I think that's why scholars give it a different name than Rome, because the Byzantine empire was a new thing in a different region that never was quite the same thing as its predecessor.
When looking back through the 20th century and 21st century, I consider there to be two distinct eras. After the enlightenment period came the modern period (you can consider the French Revolution to be the beginning of the modern period for the purposes I'm talking about), which culminated in the horrors of the world wars. The world wars took a world that was vibrant and confident and excited about the future (All the bloody napoleonic wars came about because men were excited to go out and die for their country because they believed in their country) and broke it, leading to the postmodern period we live in today whose defining factor is the destruction of everything that came before. The world wars proved that we are just as barbaric as we ever were and the so-called modern man was a myth. Thus a period of destruction followed because people were tearing everything due to the PTSD of the horrors we created. As a result, the postmodern period has been about the destruction of values and replacing them with either nothing or with a minimally thought out emotional replacement that has no practical use. I expect the postmodern period to end with the pending global population collapse that's already started but will get really bad in the next 30 years or so.
The population collapse I'm talking about isn't something caused by a lack of resources or anything dramatic, it's a further manifestation of the suicidal impulse of postmodern society. The greatest generation came home from the world wars and procreated like mad. Their kids went out and procreated quite a lot creating the millennials which have been called the "echo boom". The millennials largely chose not to have kids and so the largest generation in history, the boomers, are starting to die off and they aren't being replaced by anything like the same amount of people, which will has created a virtually inescapable demographic cliff in most countries on earth. We won't be talking about the risks of overpopulation in the future, we're going to be facing the single largest population contraction in the history of planet earth.
In my view, there's no reason to be too concerned with the fall of postmodern civilization, that's inevitable as the moment the world wars ended and postmodernism started to become the modern paradigm, the failure of this civilization in its current form was inevitable. What we should be concerned with is protecting ourselves as best as we can from the wrath of the empire as it falls, and making sure we stay true to ourselves and stay grounded and anchored to reality.
One very positive thing is that whereas we've seen the greatest drop in the power of the non-elite individual ever in the past 50 years, as would be predicted by secular cycle theory, what comes afterwards is a golden age because the shrinking population gives individuals more bargaining power and individuals are better able to negotiate for their time and effort. We could even see entire dynasties replaced in many parts of the world, and there's no saying for sure what that looks like or what we replace the current order with.
Unfortunately, it is indeed true that just because there is upheaval it won't necessarily be good. Some secular cycles saw massive improvements in the lot of the people such as in 9th century europe where we saw many of the foundations laid for constitutional monarchies, but we saw the french revolution just became a bloody massacre that had everyone walking on eggshells for a long time and was so bad that some Frenchmen (the ones that were left after the purges) were actually considering putting the aristocracy back in charge (and did until they remembered that the aristocrats were decadent and parasitic)
The way to stay grounded in reality is to remember something important: Failure is an option. You CAN die, you CAN fail to procreate, and the spark of life that you represent that goes all the way back to the first single celled organism will be snuffed out. There are stakes, the physical world exists and you are not God, reality has the final say over what happens. Also, you need to find meaning in life. It's so easy once you see it, the world is beautiful and terrible and there's so many things besides the current moment in culture we can soak in to become something different than just the water we were born in.
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