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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire and it was fascinating how eerily similar it was to the current state of the US. Overwhelmed by corruption and wars they make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales, ever more frequently. And the population grows ever more cynical, eventually opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself.

Funnily enough, the most striking part was the pure stupidity of a lot of it - seems so strange, but every day it seems I hear another really stupid story and think ... huh, maybe it really can be like that.

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Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest. It sure looks stupid when you look at America or the Roman Empire as a whole. But when you look at the specific individuals doing these "stupid" things, and the individuals enabling them, it is perfectly aligned with their own best interests.

and your point?

perhaps their point is 'cui bono'

It's almost as if acting solely in one's own self-interest is stupid.

More like acting without a sense of civic duty is stupid. Or acting without a basis in evidence is stupid.

Those that acted in their own self-interest thrived, and others died.

It’s the lack of coherent leadership at the top, the lawyers, junk bond, equity bankers, oil-men, and the military have had their chance, it’s time for the engineers, science, medical, builders, local bankers and internal infrastructure people to run things. And when I say run things I mean, stop accepting their word as the truth.

You're not going to build a long-term stable system that doesn't limit wealth accumulation, because it doesn't take long until all the power is back with everyone you mentioned.

Only if it hurts you long-term.

Does our evolutionary fitness function count as self-interest? Climate change is on a runaway trajectory. We're in line for Darwin's top honour, but no one will be around to receive the award.

Yes, but as a nation, we are stupid to go along with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control

What is a nation but the people?

It’s going to be very hard to turn around over 60 years of behavior, particularly the part of interfering and spending money like a drunken sailor on special interests oil and military, the complex is coming to an end and the piggy bank is running out of money. Without useful internal infrastructure building within the country and I don’t mean data-centers, a restructure, a rethink, the decline will just accelerate.

> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

Interesting. Sounds like a counter-point to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

I use Hanlon's quite a bit to explain nonsense I see day to day, but this is a better one in some ways. It shift the conclusion of "but if only they were shown the right way" to "they know what they are doing and are looking out for number 1".

I enjoy your thinking! Reflecting further...

Hanlons razor is about motive and "size of mental models". Stupidly small, or comprehensively large.

This other thing you note seems to be about scale being low or high. Individually fine-grained, or collectively coarse-grained.

I suspect mistaking either dimension can result in grossly misinterpreting a situation.

The lowest, most fine-grained level of individual self-interest looks a lot collective stupidity and failure to meet the collective's interests.

Democracy supposely recalibrates from these mismatches. But so do more drastic and unruly options, when democracy has failed.

Interesting. I had not considered how scale affects these mental model.

Now I wonder if depending on the scale, one model is better suited. Or maybe they both can be modified based on the scale.

Maybe self-interest is easier to reason about than the interests of a group. Conflicting self-interests can lead to compromises that result in what looks stupid in the end.

The current administration has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor. Now I prefer saying "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

My comment was indeed inspired by Hanlon's razor. And I generally do agree with Hanlon's razor. I just think there's a distinction between malice and selfishness.

- Someone harming you because they expressly desire to harm you? Unlikely

- Someone harming you because they are stupid and don't realize what they are doing? Maybe.

- Someone harming you as a side-effect of pursuing their own selfish interests? Most likely.

Ultimately the strings are being pulled by someone who stands to gain, but it's not like Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, &co are playing 5D chess here. There are a lot of stupid blundering narcissists running things right now. The actual string-pullers know that, and as long as the stupid blundering narcissism doesn't get in the way of the string-pulling then it doesn't matter to the string-pullers, because stupid blundering narcissists are ultimately the right people for the job (easily manipulated themselves, and effective manipulators of the public). But that doesn't make them or their decisions or their statements less stupid.

Not to mention this all rides on the stupidity and emotional fragility of literally tens or hundreds of millions of voters; anything less and the project would never be possible. That's one reason debilitating the education system at all levels has become a top priority of the current administration (the other being suppression of the free thinking and often liberal or left-wing politics that historically exist at universities).

Any worldview that calls destroying your own civilization self-interest deserves to fall

So we're dying to selfishness?

Much of the stupidity stems from the impulse to coddle Trump’s ego. Both from Trump himself and anyone who interacts with him.

It becomes self-interest only because this man with a terrifically fragile holds so much power, so there is a strong incentive to appease him.

But the root problem is a powerful man beholden to a very fragile ego.

If an empire is subject to the whim of individuals acting in their own self interest, which causes damage and destruction to the empire, I think this is the definition of dying? It has no recourse against the looters so it gets looted to death.

> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

Sure, but in cases like the new Navy battleships... it's just plain dumb, no two ways about it. Aside from the new ship class name, I see no way that it could be attributed to self-interest.

Wait, it is all about the name and that it's big, isn't it. That is self-interest I suppose, but it's just vanity, which is the stupid form of self-interest.

I like these comparison with Roman Empire but it seems too simplsitic and Ive learned that usually means "its not so right actually".

Meaning for example, what about empires that actually survived or adapted? What did they do that we know exactly didnt the Roman Empire do that saved them? How does zeitgeist impact this in the sense that what ruined Roman Empire might save a nation today?

Not trying to be negative, Im jsut geniunley curios because then if I was in government, Id be "yeah I see the same. I mscared as fuck were messing it up, but then what should we do?" because you see, everybody is giving at advice with very diverse and extreme ideas on what should happen. Probably with most of them you and I wouldnt be OK with (do Dictatorships work? ...).

Or simpler, we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know theyre the correct ones? Thats what Im thinking about the last years.

"what about empires that actually survived or adapted" — which ones exactly?

Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.

Didn't the Roman Empire last nearly 1,500 years in one form or another?

If you count the eastern empire, but most people only think of the western empire.

Well, the Holy Roman Empire inherited the name but, as Voltaire said, "was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire"...

And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years. Most of its life it was more like a Greek nation that sometimes managed to expand to control parts of the old empire.

> the Holy Roman Empire inherited the name

Eh, inheritance implies the predecessor willed it to you upon death. In the case of the "Holy Roman Empire" the predecessor died 334 years earlier with no successor. This isn't a case of inheritance, it's a case of just making shit up.

The "byzantine" empire did inherit the name though. They continuously used and claimed the name "roman" from when the roman empire split (and called both halves roman) right up until 1453, even their language was called romaic. That we don't refer to them as roman to this day is really a strange success of propaganda.

> And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years.

Which by itself sort of contradicts the claim that empires historically fall quickly? The roman empire began in 27 and in 565 it controlled almost the entire Mediterranean. Sure a few hundred years after the split (which itself is a few hundred years after the beginning of being an empire) it shrank but that's a long time.

The Byzantine Empire was Greek. Heraclius changed the official language to Greek already in the 7th century because that’s what everyone spoke.

They kept calling themselves Romans, but they spoke, wrote, and governed in Greek.

This is like saying that all the countries in the world that speak English are England, that's not how it works. Countries are not defined by the language they speak, and the language they speak most definitely varies over time.

Moreover you're picking a date hundreds of years into the eastern empire's existence and declaring "because they switched official languages hundreds of years later, they were always Greek". Time doesn't flow like that.

Moreover the roman empire, pre-split, spoke quite a bit of this language (well, Koine Greek, the predecessor to Romaic). Including in official communications (particularly in the east), and at least one emperor's private diaries [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

As if the Romans didn't worship rebranded Greek gods, pray in bootleg Greek temples and had educated Greek slaves be their teachers…

No 27 BC – AD 476 the Roman Empire the one that everyone thinks about at maximum strength lasted 503 years basically Augustus Caesar to AD 476. The eastern empire was but a shadow of the Roman empire ruled from Rome.

"Empire" is really just a large hereditary monarchy with the ability to subordinate nearby ethnic groups into a unified political/military command. They can be remarkably stable. China managed two to three thousand years, depending on whether you want to count Zhou (pre-Qin unification) or not. I suspect in another millenium the Chinese empire historians will gloss over the discontinuous period of the 20th century ("nuclear glass layer era") and claim four thousand years.

> what about empires that actually survived or adapted?

Really the Roman Empire did very well on this one, depending on when you date its final end to. But the pattern is there, especially if you look at the more rapid and more recent collapse of the Chinese empire, with the result of the Imperial line extinct and the successor state stuck on a relatively small island.

All administration exists on a spectrum from bureaucracy to personal intervention. You can break out Max Weber here, but it is generally agreed that a state needs a bureaucracy to be effective on a large scale. This machine "works" when it is functioning uniformly and according to process in order to achieve goals, and it breaks down when it is disrupted by a system of personal grift, favor, corruption and favouritism.

So the collapse of China runs roughly: poor leader (dowager Empress Cixi) -> ineffective state -> pushed over by foreign powers (European states vs Boxer rebellion) -> even worse leader (Puyi, last Emperor of China, took the throne at age 2) -> pushed over by foreign powers again (Japan) -> internal collapse of remaining China (Maoist rebellion).

Edit: forgot the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion, which belongs on the front of that list at about 1850, which is yet another civil war that killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of China!

It would be a fun alternative history to swap the Japanese and Chinese leadership of the 1850-1950 era, such that Japan remains a feudal agricultural state and China got the Meiji restoration. How many carriers do they arrive at Pearl Harbor with?

> we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know they're the correct ones?

That is not at all how the last few years have worked, because an astonishing amount of lying about everything from basic facts to obvious outcomes is polluting the discourse.

Older generation has lead poisoning from all the leaded gasoline burned

I hate this theory. It is extremely condescending, offers nothing, has no proof, but sounds plausible enough that many people believe it.

It is much more likely that our economic system rewards hostile behavior and that money has outsized influence in politics and a criminal justice system which lets rich people get away with crimes. That money correlates more with hostile behavior then lead, Instead of blaming lead, blame capitalism.

Just think about all the people who put lead in the gasoline in the first place, did they go to prison for their crimes, or did they make a bunch of money and retire in luxury.

It's spelled lead, and it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to cause brain damage. There is no safe level of lead exposure, it causes neurological damage at any level of exposure and it stays in your body permanently.

You're wrong on every count and simply spreading disinformation. Please don't do that.

I never claimed lead does not cause damage, it does. I dispute it is the primary fault in bad politics, and I offered an alternative theory.

It's probably more than one thing but it would be shocking if the lead had no impact.

Seeing how much influence money has, I think that impact is negligible.

Perhaps you just dislike facts then

I think we all understood the comment implied it’s been a factor, not THE driver. I’d be a little more generous in your interpretation of their comment, even if it is a bit flippant.

Wow I never knew about this theory! But I like your comment because ... idk, if its true at least its as simple as "Lets avoid that, and we ensure each Empire of today exists forever." I wish that was true! So how can we be sure, as somewhat smart people, that this is true and responsibly communicate it? Because everything else is dishonest and hurts our society.

Im no history expert but I know there were other Empires thru different times and sizes and places, and since now they're not the same, they "Failed"? Did they fail exactly due to the same problem or others? Are we treating those too? What is our method and how strong did we criticize it and see and understand it flaws?

At a time with fake news, AI slop and whatever the Internet has become today, its our job to treat every statement with the highest from of critical thinking at our disposal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_lead_poisoning_theory

Funny you should say that

The concerning part is that peak lead exposure was with Gen X. We're still being led by boomers and silent generation. So any contribution from lead stands to get worse before it gets better.

The younger generation is way less cognitively developed, to use a bland term. What we find find next, that lead was actually good?

It's entirely possible that things don't get better (or continue to get worse) for reasons unrelated to lead. The addition of the internet is way too big of a confounding factor to say that lead was actually good though, IMO it's more likely that we haven't learned how to parent children in the modern world yet (though arguably that has always been true).

And "cognitively [un]developed" is a weird way to say it; I wouldn't call that a "bland" term at all.

> The younger generation is way less cognitively developed

Interesting premise, do you have a source to back it up?

Edit: or is this a creative way to say "younger" that sailed over my head on first read

It seems like checks and balances are collapsing so the corruption gets worse, just selling out nature, our health more and more for personal gain until something breaks.

It feels like the rate of stupid we have achieved in the last (checks watch) ~18 months has surely eclipsed anything that may have occurred during the roman empire. By sheer volume alone?

Also, two other characteristics of the fall of roman empire:

1. It struggled to remain "solvent" because it lost taxable provinces relative to the costs of wars, administration, etc.

2. It took years for it to eventually "fall". It didn't just magically disappear overnight.

I mean no disrespect, but if you're seeing a deep parallel between the Roman Empire's final days and what's going on in the US today, I would say you need to study Roman history more. It was in deep chaos that most people in the world today can't even imagine.

The Empire was relentlessly invaded by tribes like the Visigoths and the Vandals, and they even sacked Rome multiple times in the 400s CE. There was a huge amount of political corruption, and no, I don't mean anything like what's going on in the US. Military leaders and royal guards fought each other for power, leading to frequent civil wars and leaders who didn't last long. No one wanted to join the military and so it had to hire foreign mercenaries who didn't really have any loyalty. The Roman Empire eventually split right in half because a single ruler could not project power over the entire territory. The Western Roman Empire spoke an entirely different language from the Eastern Roman Empire (Latin vs Greek)!

I'm sorry, but I keep hearing these comparisons from people who seem to have a very shallow understanding of history and are looking for patterns because they read online that the US is crumbling. Maybe, maybe not, but it is not the same thing or even similar. The differences are far more than the similarities.

A better parallel is the fall of the republic with the rise of strong men using populism and power to dismantle its form of democracy in favor of authoritarianism.

The Romans pretty much had their way (peak) for 300 years. Yes decline was not instantaneous, but no one can complain about having 300 years of relative success/dominance, which they did once they defeated the Carthaginians all the way to about 200 A.D.

The Romans pretty much had their way. Their decline happened pretty much in the same way all civilizations end the elite’s participation in defending the empire or their civilization became less and less in short decadence sound familiar? Arguably the Civil War was probably the last war where the largest percentage of the elite actually participated in fighting the war and that percentage has gone down in every war since.

The United States from its founding until about 1990 had its way but now the shine appears to be coming off slowly. The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.

> The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.

I'm sure 2050 will already have a new number 1. Which will probably be China, all things considered.

Whatever America is doing to perpetuate its hold on the world e.g. the petrodollar is only making it slip away faster, because it is based in a world that no longer exists.

If America would embrace the future it actually could change. But the ruling conservatives only look towards the past.

The idea about conservatism is all wrong though. They look at a changed world and the time that came before. And they think that if they recreate some of the conditions from that time, the whole world will rewind somehow. That's obviously false, the world has moved on.

Also, they look at that time with rose-coloured glasses. Like with MAGA, America never really was great. The time that MAGA seems to idolise had devastating wars for zero reason like Vietnam, despicable leaders like Nixon, and a population that was constantly afraid of a nuclear attack. But it's the time when boomers were young and had their entire future ahead of them.

If anything the 90s were pretty much the peak of the Western world in my opinion. The Soviet threat was suddenly gone, economy was booming, global warming wasn't really recognised yet and 9/11 hadn't happened.

Your comment is shockingly low in the rankings. Anyone who upvoted the parent is being absolutely ravished by confirmation bias. Yes the US has big problems, but that doesn't mean anyone should unthinkingly approve of any thought that's critical of it.

HS history is more than enough dispel any notion that this is anything like the Roman Empire.

Very dissapointed in the HN community in this moment.

The US sure seems to be speedrunning the collapse though.

The collapse did take about 1,000 years.

That's what I was thinking.

>Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos? Really seems to speed up the process more so than I've seen since the Nixon malfeasance.

definitely

But then it's also true the real arc of these things is only properly visible in retrospect. For example I'm sure historians looking back would include the Iraq war as one of the data points on stupidity even though in the moment, people would feel it is totally disconnected from current circumstances. So we are still talking decades.

Also the Roman culture towards the end was increasingly concerned with recycling old works and turning them into ever more ridiculous and derivative new works. Sound familiar?

> opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself

It all depends on what you define as the collapse of the Roman Empire, but the earliest sensible candidate date would be about four and a half centuries after the population 'opted' for authoritarianism (which wasn't much of a choice for anyone btw).

People need to stop making senseless historical comparisons.

> I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire

> eventually opting for authoritarianism

The Roman Empire was always authoritarian. You might be interested in the collapse of the Roman Republic, where the abuse of slaves and farmers for the indulgence of the middle class and elites led to a popular clamoring for the strongman general Julius Caesar to impose justice (through dictatorship) on their "republic" by force, because their republic had never represented the demos.

I'm reading two books right now: Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday and Ulrich Gutmair's First Days of Berlin. The similarities to the current state of US are eerie as hell.

Yes, Britain pretty much went the same way after World War I, and went into acceleration downward after World War II. The final cap may have been Brexit.

The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want parallels to the present.

Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

That redux of "Rise and Fall of Roman Empire" suggests a policy shift, and a media shift, for USA and globally.

* Smart Decisions can be celebrated

* Stupid Decisions can be "5-whys" root-cause analyzed

Shaming, and all that, can be left aside. And instead focusing on the possible Wins.

A success-oriented approach, of applauding and ranking The Most Smart Policies, could be a way forward. It's innately motivating.

Democratic Decline is real. Voter apathy is real. Gaslighting by power-focused politicians is real, and lack of a "service" mindset by those politicians, too. This is compelling stuff, obsessing over doom, and it's demotivating.

Celebrating The Most Smart policies is something I enjoy. E.g. on YouTube there is a Good News channel which lists "top 10 good pro-environmental / pro-social actions":

- https://www.youtube.com/@itsSamBentley

I think you are over centering on recency rather than reality. The stuff that killed the roman empire went on for centuries.

> make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales

They found the right man for it. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Was it a book you read? In interested.

Not OP but the book ”The storm before the storm” covers what sets in motion the fall of the republic. I think the foreword or opening chapter notes the similarities with the state of the US (Trumps first presidency at the time of writing).

The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.

He's also the podcast host and narrator of Revolutions, a deep dive into major revolutions starting in Britain with Charles Stuart and ending with Stalin (well, technically ending with a science fiction revolution on Mars), with stops in Haiti, Mexico, France, Germany. It ran weekly from 2013 to 2025. Absolutely recommend.

I started with the Lex Fridman podcast [0] and then I went from there exploring further with reading mostly online material interweaved with discussions with ChatGPT. It is actually a fascinating way to read about history. Admittedly, it is hardly a way to gain a proper comprehensive understanding.

I didn't think this comment would get so many replies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv1TUJSEM2k

This is the endgame of encouraging everyone to vote. The theory was representatives would be motivated to address the interests of everyone as a whole. The reality is politicians are motivated to take advantage of the stupid and the fearful in order to gain and exploit power.

Republicans are in a personality cult and establishment democrats are stuck in the midpoint between expoliting people the same way and expecting to win because they're "right" and "deserve" victory without the real consent of the people, equally as self interested but worse at it. The quiet racism of establishment democrats might save us by marginalizing muslim democrats -- there are a few of them like Mamdani who aren't allowed in the club and are thus actually thinking for themselves beyond self-interest and the corruption of the establishment. They as a group might save us.

If you want someone to blame, target the DNC. In a time of dangerous foolishness they utterly failed to and are continuing to fail to provide an attractive alternative.

If you want to help, give money to David Hogg.

Blaming the people who aren't quite as good at politics for the actions of the people who actually won the last election and are fucking this country seems... Insane?

Yes. Their whole job is defending the republic and in the easiest to win election they succumbed to the ego of a bumbling old man and failed to lead on anything at all. Those fools couldn't sell bottled water in a desert.

You absolutely can blame the goalie for failing to defend the goal.

Sounds like blaming the abolitionists for slavery. Or blaming the police for murder since they didn't prevent it.

Every terrible thing Trump does is really somebody else's fault.

Yes if firefighters sit watching a fire burn whining about it, they are indeed to blame for not putting out the fire.

I'm tired of people in power whining about being victims.

which book was that ?

Where did you read up on it? Any good sources you can recommend?

Not OP. The Storm before the Storm, Mike Duncan.

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