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?
societies collapse after the marginal return on investment in societal complexity goes negative. not necessarily immediately after, there's usually some desatbilizing incident that catalyzes the process once that point has been reached.
I recommend The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
Other way around
Societies start to collapse -> leaders start exploiting their people harder to try and keep them disciplined and contain unrest
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
Bread and Circuses! That's all they really need! Just enough to distract them from the constant misery! We've known this for 2000 years now, why do they keep fucking it up?
