the glory that was rome

THE GLORY THAT WAS ROME

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note: I noticed I get YouTube on our TV, so it is a lot nicer watching a longer video from my recliner as opposed to at the desk from a PC.  As I was playing around I noticed that the movie "DefCon 4" was on said web site.  For me, along with Road Warrior, one of the Top 5 post-apocalypse movies.  Really the only great low budget one ever made.  Check it out.
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Today, I promise I won’t dwell on the cause of the Roman Imperial collapse, nor the timeline.  You know where I stand-energy deficit and Waterfall Collapse.  I can’t convince anyone otherwise who has already made up their mind that their collapse as well as our own will take 300 years.  And similarly ( because I’d be a fool to not grant the possibility that there is always a small chance I might be wrong ), no one can tell me anything to convince me that empires don’t see a Seneca Collapse ( the last 500 years seeing Economic Collapse rather than Ecological, mainly due to a Central Banker parasitic paradigm co-opting colonialism -but all empires previous always saw ecological  complete collapse ).   Rather, today I’d like to focus on looking at Rome and its aftermath as a guidepost.  Rather than arguing over WHAT causes collapse, or how LONG it takes to complete, how about a before and after snapshot so we know our destination.  Folks always tend to skip over the Dark Ages ( or discount them as Not As Dark As You Racist Honkey Mo-Fo’s make it out to be and here are a bunch of “inventions” to prove the point ) or skip over the social/cultural changes by once again adding American Exceptionalism ( ie, “we know better now and will treat feminism and diversity, or other compassionate ideas, as currently ), or Hubris as it is known at the end of every single swinging cheese dingus empire throughout all time since the implementation of the Agricultural Age.

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Rome, in all its glory, for its time closely compatible with the American Empire now living off oil wealth, insofar as the energy surplus it was able to steal for themselves, had a handful of very important advantages.  It was able to turn the coastal North African strip into a breadbasket ( as well as other areas ).  All parts of the empire where networked with very well constructed roads, so well constructed they easily outlast our modern asphalt ones by centuries.  This allowed military movement, but also trade-theirs was akin to our navy securing sea lanes for globalization and centralization.  They also had a centralized state-which seems obvious to us, living in our nation states, but is important to keep in mind as to what followed.  Lastly ( for our purposes of discussion here, anyway ), they had a lot of slaves.

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And what was there in the aftermath of the Roman Empire ( I discount the Eastern Empire as economically and culturally they are not even close to the same entity )?  You had decentralization of governments, down to such a level that principalities, city-states, dukedoms and all the rest were the norm.  As in, as far as you could see was sometimes as far as the government got.  Very small.  Why?  Because there was no more surplus energy, and a surplus is what grows centralization.  Nothing is free, and certainly not lunch, and it takes excess energy to build roads and armies and bureaucracies.  On the ascent, there is more energy being brought in than is needed to grow the infrastructure of centralization and on the descent there isn’t enough to keep it together.  The Dark Ages saw zero surplus energy and hence localized political units only.  With small governments came small armies.  There was no longer the surplus to equip and feed them.  In effect, the political ruling class also acted as the army.  That is how bad the energy deficit became.

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Without the energy to upkeep roads and provision an army, no trade was possible.  Trade depends on a monopoly of violence for its functionality.  With so many small “counties”, trade was nearly impossible.  Without trade, not even slavery was possible ( nor was neighbor raiding even all that successful without the excess energy to field a superior military ).  Serfdom was the logical answer.  You can’t import slaves, you just assign slavery to the peasants at birth.  This is an important point to keep in mind.  The Survivalist Ideal is a large nation of Yeoman farmers, ready to join together in a militia to guarantee their freedoms.  Yet without enough surplus energy to keep a firearms industry functioning ( both the steel working and the powder manufacture with excess nitrates ), I would imagine your odds of becoming a peasant to be relatively high.  If you believe your single plastic poodle shooter will overcome an army of melee weapons, I would urge you to consider the foolishness of going up against a column of archers who are on the other side of the treeline firing over the treetops with flaming arrows into your home, or poisoning the stream you depend on in your fireproof bunker.

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Without trade, the local food is the only source of your calories and hence any adverse weather or pest infestation is disastrous.  You no longer have imported grain to act as an emergency buffer.  Even when crops were grown without disaster you still had the problem of malnourishment as few areas are as bountiful as the population needs.  That leads to regular disease outbreaks.  Today, even with all the issues of global trade such as widespread unemployment and inflation, any trade is still better than no trade.  The Agriculture Age really cannot function properly without trade.  It is almost impossible for any area to be self-sufficient ( I chuckle at the Back-To-Landers in their quest for that elusive concept as they pay off a banker for thirty years, buy solar panels from China and gasoline from Saudi Arabia ).  Something has always been used to facilitate that need, be it conquest, colonialism, nation building or what have you.  You have no idea how crappy life will be like without it.

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When energy input shrinks, you end up in a Dark Age.  That is where we are headed.  There is no other destination.  We will contract to the point where we live off the available energy.  This is all very well understood and written about.  But nobody takes that to its logical conclusion, always insisting on leftover technology to smooth out the bumpy road.  Ask yourself, how much Rome Tech survived their collapse?  Welcome to your future.

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