Political Memes

It was dumber than you think. There was an emperor who reacted to 'rome falling' with thinking his pet pigeon, whom he called Rome, had died. When he learned the city had fallen he was actually relieved and didn't give a fuck.

The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.

Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?

The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn't even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.

But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.

I’m sure it did they just didn’t have social media and cell phones to document the fall in 4k.

In fact Nero's reign was this stupid. All the John's revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.

King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.

It's both sad and funny how even in our own downfall, we're still comparing ourselves to fucking Rome. An empire that 1) Was actually nothing like ours 2) No nation state should ever be emulating because it was awful 3) Lasted a thousand+ years and 4) Literally murdered the god and prophet of our primary religion.

We are not the heirs of that ancient Mediterranean hierarchy, nothing existing today is or will be. The god damn Rome mind virus. Let go of it.

It absolutely was. Just greedy oligarchs squabbling over power and stealing as much as they could. No parallels to current events, of course.

Yea, yes it was. The fall of western Rome was marked with lots of stupid, including xenophobia and racism and rich idiots in charge who should have never been anywhere near government.

I'm pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.

Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what's going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it's heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).

Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.

I imagine so, just much of it likely didn't get recorded since hard drives were much smaller back then.

Just gotta swap lead poisoning drinking water with checks notes Lead poisoning in drinking water, the air in the form of emissions and microplastics!

(I know lead was dropped from most gasoline in the 90s, but the effects linger. Also in some places there’s exemptions where small planes can use leaded gas to this day)

Except the fall of time was a gradual things that occurred over hundreds of years, with no clear delimitation. Not one specific tiping point that occurred within two months of a specific leader taking over.

The late empire was a pretty silly place. That's what happens when the elite has to pretend a failing system works.

I was promised that the end of civilization was hedonism and there would be orgies.

I think we're just gonna get cleanup detail now. This isn't what i signed up for.

/s

I saw the documentary Gladiator 2 and can confirm, the fall of Rome was this stupid.

What with all the leaded water and wine, it was likely even more stupid.

One of those humorous questions I'd love a serious answer to.

For one, Rome didn't just keel over, it was a long and drawn out process over centuries, and even after the accepted date 476, there were still splinters calling itself "Roman Empire"...

And I truly hope that history will look back on the USA in the same way, and see how the decline didn't start (but certainly accelarated) in 2016.