Excerpt:
The researchers also examined a common factor in the collapse of societies with good governance: leaders who abandoned the society’s founding principles and ignored their roles as moral guides for their people.
What does that remind you of?
Our big red boy Matt did a cushvlog series on a book called First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship. It's an examination on the interaction of elite politics and the decline of great powers since the Thirty Years' War which I'd recommended for a more materialist analysis