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Comment by 1dontknow_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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