History does seem to prove that empire has a 100% failure rate. But I also think Philip K. Dick’s reminder that “The empire never ended” is also valid. Can these two apparently diametrical ideas both be true?
It is clear that individual empires come and go, but the human urge to make empires persists. So some people make empires, and some people overthrow them. Is this the inevitable cycle of history? It might be. In answer to Fermi’s Paradox (Where are all the aliens?), some have postulated the idea of a Great Filter, which is that fatal flaw in every species that prevents it from spreading its brutality (aka “civilization”) to other worlds. Maybe this urge to empire is our Great Filter.
Or, perhaps it will turn out that all those human forager societies we like to denigrate as “primitive” and “savage” and whose lives we like to claim were “nasty, brutish, and short” were, in fact, the most ingenious of us all, since they generally figured out how to devise societies that could persist over centuries and millennia without empire, without large scale war, that lived within the carrying capacities of their ecosystems, and, perhaps most importantly, that almost universally allowed, supported, and even encouraged the fundamental right of people to disobey authority. David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s book, “The Dawn of Everything,” is quite persuasive about this possibility.
The primitive lifestyle is something Christopher Ryan also discussed in his book, "Civilized to Death". It flips the accustomed narrative we currently use as a "me" society instead of a "we" society as the hunter-gatherers were.
History does seem to prove that empire has a 100% failure rate. But I also think Philip K. Dick’s reminder that “The empire never ended” is also valid. Can these two apparently diametrical ideas both be true?
It is clear that individual empires come and go, but the human urge to make empires persists. So some people make empires, and some people overthrow them. Is this the inevitable cycle of history? It might be. In answer to Fermi’s Paradox (Where are all the aliens?), some have postulated the idea of a Great Filter, which is that fatal flaw in every species that prevents it from spreading its brutality (aka “civilization”) to other worlds. Maybe this urge to empire is our Great Filter.
Or, perhaps it will turn out that all those human forager societies we like to denigrate as “primitive” and “savage” and whose lives we like to claim were “nasty, brutish, and short” were, in fact, the most ingenious of us all, since they generally figured out how to devise societies that could persist over centuries and millennia without empire, without large scale war, that lived within the carrying capacities of their ecosystems, and, perhaps most importantly, that almost universally allowed, supported, and even encouraged the fundamental right of people to disobey authority. David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s book, “The Dawn of Everything,” is quite persuasive about this possibility.
The primitive lifestyle is something Christopher Ryan also discussed in his book, "Civilized to Death". It flips the accustomed narrative we currently use as a "me" society instead of a "we" society as the hunter-gatherers were.