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Comment by chanakya | Hacker News Reader

I think those looking for deep causes for the decline of the Roman Empire are looking for the wrong thing. Like entropy, the presence of dynamism, coordinated energy and cohesion in societies is the exception, and the natural state is a sort of mediocre Malthusian sameness that the Empire declined into.

Civilization is sustained by bursts of energy and confidence which generally comes from new ideas and a vision of themselves and the world which galvanizes people and has them build empires, institutions and cultural creations and structures.

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So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place, and one that lasted so many centuries before it got tired and lost its ability to energize people?

A related question: how much longer can the ideas of the Enlightenment drive the current global civilization (created in the West), and are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?

"So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place,"

Taxes.

I would conjecture pre-Roman when groups would sack a town they would kill all males and enslave the rest. Taxes changed the game. This created a concept of managing states. Instead of killing everyone in a village - you wanted them to work hard and pay taxes. This also had an unforeseen side affect: if you were a good tax payer you were protected. People wanted to be a Roman citizen. The Romans would destroy anyone taking their tax money. You could safely produce a crop or raise cattle. Other cultures pre-Roman had taxes but were always caught up in ethnic cleansing - thus destroying their tax base. Romans could care less: Spaniard, Syrian, Egyptian, didn't matter: just pay taxes.

If you inflate currencies to the point taxes mean nothing: doom.

I may be wrong, but don't taxes at large scale predate Rome by millennia? We have thousands of examples of Babylon's detailed record keeping for taxes, for instance.

> are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?

Plenty of those around. I won't get into them because it gets treated as "doing politics" and usually attracts angry replies, even though the signs of degeneration can be seen uniformly on either side of the mainstream political debate.

You can read a previous series by the same author about that :

https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...

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